The self-organised, self-trained bands of Canton were by no means disposed to submit tamely to the new order of things, in the settlement of which they had had no voice. They had bettered their official instruction in the storing up and practising of hatred and contempt for foreigners, and they did not choose suddenly to recant merely because their Government had been coerced into making a treaty in a distant province. Consequently, within three short months of its signature notices were placarded inciting the people to violence; very soon an organised attack on the British factories was made, and the buildings were burned down.
So far from attempting to repress such outrages, the governor of Canton, "while the ruins were still smoking," reported to the throne that the people "in their natural indignation had committed some excesses against the grasping barbarians," and a very gracious answer was vouchsafed to an offer of the people of certain outlying villages to join the armed bands of the city. The Imperial Government as well as the provincial government was thus identified with the popular hostility to foreigners, and opposition to the fulfilment of the treaty. "The excesses of the Canton mob," writes Sir John Davis, "were perpetually and annually resumed, up to the public decapitation of the four murderers of the Englishmen in 1847, with the subsequent punishment of eleven more."
But this is surely remarkable testimony from the Minister of Great Britain who was charged with the protection of his nationals[13] from wrong? With British garrisons in occupation of Kulangsu and Chusan, a military and naval force in Hongkong, and a Chinese commissioner professedly willing to afford protection and redress to foreigners, the acquiescence of the British authorities in these recurrent outrages seems to stand in need of explanation. The native authorities, it was clear, would not, even if they dared, coerce the Canton populace. Kiying himself, though meaning to be just, and ready to enforce redress against individual culprits, recoiled before the mob. So it would appear did the British representative, who, though vigilant in requiring compliance with the treaty in minor respects, seemed to be paralysed whenever the Cantonese were in question. He had been too long accustomed to their practices not to be aware of the cumulative quality of these outrages, and he was too practical a philosopher not to know the wisdom of arresting the virulent stream at its fountain-head. Yet "the miserable policy of the Chinese Government ... had permitted the populace of Canton ... to reach the culminating-point of organised misrule in 1846," British merchants being the sufferers. Why was nothing done to protect them at least from the consequences of this misrule?
The intricacies of the relation between the criminal rabble of Canton and the authorities there it would be hopeless to unravel, just as it would be vain to make such an attempt with regard to analogous cases which are to this day of constant recurrence. But no special penetration is needed to discover the falsity of a policy of allowing an organised government to plead its inability to control its own populace. Once admit such a plea and the security of the stranger is gone, for he has relinquished his hold on the Government without being compensated by any alternative security. Such was the state of things which had been allowed to grow up in Canton, producing the only fruit possible—outrage, ever increasing in violence and ending in massacre.
The postponement of the right of entry into the city conferred by treaty was a test case which gave the Chinese the clue to the weakness of British policy. The consequences would have been less pernicious had the right been frankly surrendered from the first, for to have it merely deferred from time to time on the avowed ground of the populace not being ready to acquiesce in it was to flatter the mob beyond measure while feeding their passion for violence. It was in this manner that the British Government had "given itself away" to the lawless rowdies of Canton.
The "climax" referred to by Sir John Davis occurred at an interesting juncture of time, for it was in 1846 that the last British soldier quitted Chinese soil, and Sir John Davis testifies that the restoration of Chusan had produced a change for the worse in the tone of the Chinese authorities. Kiying himself forgot his urbanity and acted "with a degree of brusquerie, not to say insolence, never before exhibited by him."
A riotous attack on the foreign factories broke out in July 1846, in which the merchants were compelled in a body to defend themselves against an immense number of assailants. For this outbreak Sir John Davis blamed one of the English merchants, and got him irregularly fined by the consul. A murderous assault was committed on two British seamen in the city of Canton in October following. In the ordinary routine he reported the occurrence to the Foreign Office in a despatch of seven lines. "Two English merchant seamen," he said, "having strayed into the town, had been violently ill-used by the populace"; adding that he "considered it to be the duty of the consul to prevent seamen wandering through Canton." He at the same time instructed the consul to find some means of punishing the master of the ship for allowing his men liberty, and proposed placing greater power in the hands of the consul for the restraint of British subjects generally. Above this level the plenipotentiary seemed unable to rise.
In March 1847 an English party of six, including Colonel Chesney, commanding the Royal Artillery in Hongkong, narrowly escaped murder at the hands of a riotous mob during an excursion up the Canton river. They strayed much farther than the two sailors had done, and if they did not fare worse it was due to the almost miraculous interposition of a Chinese officer with his followers, he himself being roughly handled by the mob. It would not do to apply to Colonel Chesney's case the homœopathic treatment which was thought appropriate to the others, and Sir John Davis made a formal demand on the Chinese authorities for the punishment of the aggressors. The cup of Chinese iniquity was deemed full, and the avenger was at last let loose.
Whence, it is pertinent to ask, came this sudden access of vigour in the British representative?
The juncture of time above referred to was interesting from another point of view, for coincidently with the evacuation of Chusan and the renewed arrogance of the Chinese, a political event took place in the western hemisphere which had an important bearing on the whole attitude of Great Britain. There was a change of Government, Palmerston succeeding Aberdeen at the Foreign Office. The influence of Lord Palmerston on Chinese affairs during his long public career was so remarkable, that the ebb and flow of British prestige may be traced as closely by his periods of office as the course of the oceanic tide by the phases of the moon. Let any patriotic Englishman ransack the records of the sixty odd years of that statesman's full activity, and he will find no despatch or speech on the subject of China, even down to our own day, that will afford him such genuine satisfaction as those emanating from Lord Palmerston. They are so much the embodiment of common-sense that they might sometimes be considered commonplace; practical, true, clear as a bugle-note. He had been barely six months in office when one of his terse despatches to Sir John Davis turned that cautious official for the time being into a hero. The astonishment of Sir John may be imagined when, in reply to his placid report of the outrage on the two seamen, he received a curt communication from the Foreign Office in which his attention was directed to the punishment, not of the victims, but of the perpetrators, of the outrage.