CHAPTER II.
SENT TO CHINA.
Importance of appointment—New position created by Treaty of Nanking—Exceptional responsibility of the new consuls—The evolution and scope of foreign intercourse—Pioneer traders—Mutual experiences of Chinese and foreigners—Results—English inheritors of the record—An intolerable state of things—Drastic remedy—Where it failed—Chasm between Eastern and Western ideas—Commerce alone supplied a safe medium of intercourse—Its healing qualities—But social and political concomitants created friction—Arbitrary interferences of Chinese Government—Their traditional mode of treating barbarians—Denial of human rights—Absence of law in their intercourse—Spasmodic resistance to Chinese tyranny aggravated the evils—East India Company submitted for the sake of gain—Close of the Company's charter—Followed by endeavour of British Government to establish official intercourse—Determined resistance of Chinese—Lord Napier, first British envoy, not received—Loaded with insults—Contradictory instructions given by British Government—To conciliate Chinese as in days of Company, and at same time to open diplomatic relations—Lord Napier's appeal to experience—His death at Macao—Captain Ellis, a third envoy, reverts to the policy of submission—Has no success.
When thus thrown upon his beam-ends in 1844, an appointment was conferred on Mr Alcock which was not only honourable to him but creditable to the Government which selected him. He was among the five chosen to fill the office of consul in China under the treaty of Nanking, which had been concluded in 1842. And if any event in human life be deserving of such distinction, the opening thus provided for the talents of Mr Alcock is on many grounds entitled to rank as providential. To the end of his days he himself recognised that his previous training had not been thrown away, but "had been unconsciously preparing him for the great work of his life." The Minister responsible for the appointment may be excused if, while selecting a man of proved capacity for a post of unknown requirements, he did not realise the full value of the service he was rendering to his country. Governments are not always so perspicacious in gauging the merits of the uncovenanted, and other nominations made under circumstances not dissimilar have shown how easily the efficiency of the candidate may be subordinated to considerations extraneous to the public weal.
The China consulates were a new creation, a venture into the unknown, a voyage without landmarks or chart, where success depended on the personal qualities of the pioneer navigators—their judgment, resourcefulness, and faculty of initiative. Great issues hung upon the opening of the new world of the Far East, the success of which was largely in the hands of the agents who were employed, for they were practically beyond the reach of instructions. There was no telegraph, and the so-called Overland Route to India was just beginning to be exploited for the conveyance of mails and passengers. Nor was it possible for even the wisest Government to frame general instructions providing for eventualities out of the range of common experience. The conditions of service were therefore such as to constitute an ordeal under which a bureaucratic official would shrivel into uselessness or worse, while to a strong man they were a powerful stimulant, the very breath of life.
It was therefore a matter of serious consequence who should be intrusted with the actual inauguration of the new relations with China; and in the course of the present narrative it will probably appear that it was a happy accident by which the country lost one distinguished surgeon among many and gained in exchange a political representative whose services must be considered unique.
FOREIGN RELATIONS WITH CHINA.
To understand fully the state of our relations with China created by the treaty of Nanking, the whole history not only of our own commercial intercourse, but of that of the nations who were our forerunners in the Far East, would have to be kept in mind. For much as we tried and hoped then, and ever since, to confine the international question to a few bald propositions respecting trade, personal protection, and so forth, it is impossible to eliminate the historical, the human, and the general political elements from the problem. For both good and evil we are the necessary outcome of our own antecedents, as are the Chinese of theirs, and if we had acquired a stock of experience of the Chinese, no less had they of us; indeed, if we fairly consider the matter, theirs was the more comprehensive. For to the Chinese we represented not ourselves alone, nor the East India Company, nor a generation or two of timid traders, but Christendom as a whole—our Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch precursors, the Romish propaganda, and all the abortive missions to Peking.
For three centuries and more what may be called the foreign education of the Chinese had been proceeding: their habits were being formed in so far as their dealings with strangers were concerned, and their judgment was being trained by the authentic data with which they had been plentifully supplied. European intercourse, in short, had been one long lesson to the Chinese in the art of managing men from the West. Without meaning it, we had been teaching them how to treat us, just as we train animals to perform tricks; and the worst we can say of the Chinese is that they have bettered the instruction, to their loss perhaps as well as ours.