The omission to consummate the treaty was followed a few months later by an act of commission of which it is difficult to render any clear account, and which Oliphant in his 'Narrative' makes no attempt to explain, merely reproducing the official despatches. Before leaving China Lord Elgin pulled the key-stone from the arch of his own work, reducing the treaty to that condition which Parkes had described as "not worth a straw." At the instance of the Chinese commissioners he moved her Majesty's Government to suspend the operation of "the most important" article in it, the residence of a British Minister in Peking. It is needless to follow the arguments, utterly unreal and having no root either in history or in experience, by which this fatal course was urged upon the Government, for they were of the same species as those which had induced her Majesty's Ministers to tolerate for fourteen years the exclusion of their representatives from Canton, the right to enter which city had just been recovered by force. It is most instructive to mark, as the key to many failures, how, like successive generations of youth, successive British agents in China have failed to profit by the experience of their predecessors, and have had in so many cases to buy their own at the expense of their country; for we see still the same thing indefinitely repeating itself, like a recurring decimal. Even at this the end of the nineteenth century we seem as far off as ever from laying hold of any saving principle, though it stares at us out of the whole panorama of our intercourse. Lord Elgin's procedure afforded at once the best example what to do and the clearest warning what to avoid in China, and it is the most useful for future guidance for the reason that effect followed cause as closely as report follows flash. It was his fate, much against his will apparently, to wage war on China in order to revindicate a right which had lapsed through the weakness and wrong-headedness of certain British representatives; yet in the closing act of a perfectly successful war he commits the self-same error on a more comprehensive scale, entailing on some future Government and plenipotentiary the necessity of making yet another war on China to recover what he was giving away. What is the explanation of this continuous repetition of the same mistake? It would seem that, knowing nothing of the Chinese, yet imagining they know something, the representatives of Great Britain and of other Powers, notably the United States, have been in the habit of evolving from their own consciousness and keeping by them a subjective Chinaman with whom they play "dummy," and of course "score horribly," as the most recent diplomatic slang has it. Their despatches are full of this game—of reckoning without their host, who, when brought to book, turns out to be a wholly different personage from the intelligent automaton kept for Cabinet use. Then, under the shock of this discovery, denunciations of treachery—black, base, and so forth—relieve the feelings of the foiled diplomat, while the substance of his previous triumph has quite eluded him. To this kind of illusion Lord Elgin was by temperament more predisposed than perhaps any of his predecessors save Captain Elliot. Though convinced by his first encounter that Chinese statesmen were "fools and tricksters," the simulacrum soon asserted supremacy over the actuality of experience, and to the honour of the very persons so stigmatised he committed the interests of his country, abandoning all the securities which he held in his hand.

But what, then, is the secret of dealing with the Chinese which so many able men, not certainly intending to make failures, have missed? This interesting question is thus partially answered by Wingrove Cooke. "The result of all I hear and see," he wrote, "is a settled conviction that at present we know nothing—absolutely nothing—of the nature of those elements which are at work inside China. Crotchets, &c., are rife, but they are all the offspring of vain imaginings, not sober deductions from facts.... Treat John Chinaman as a man, and exact from him the duties of a civilised man, and you will have no more trouble with him." Which is but a paraphrase of Lord Palmerston's prescription to consider the Chinese as "not greatly different from the rest of mankind." Such, however, has always been too simple a formula for the smaller minds. They would complicate it by trying, with ludicrous effect, to get behind the brain of the Chinese and play their opponent's hand as well as their own. Probably it matters less on what particular footing we deal with the Chinese than the consistency with which we adhere to it. To treat them as protégés, and excuse them as minors or imbeciles while yet allowing them the full licence and privileges of the adult and the sane, is manifestly absurd. To treat them as dependent and independent at the same time can lead to nothing but confusion and violent injustice. To allow engagements with them to become waste paper is the surest road to their ruin and our discomfiture. To let our Yea be Yea, and our Nay, Nay, is as much the Law and the Prophets in China as it is throughout the world of diplomacy. To this simplicity Lord Elgin had attained, at least in theory, when he told the merchants of Shanghai that in dealing with Chinese officials he had "been guided by two simple rules of action. I have never preferred a demand which I did not believe to be both moderate and just, and from a demand so preferred I have never receded."

What misgiving troubled the repose of Lord Elgin as to the good faith of the Imperial Government on which he had ventured so much, may be partly inferred from his avidity in catching at any straw which might support his faith. Hearing that "his friends the two Imperial Commissioners" who had signed the treaty were appointed to meet him in Shanghai to arrange the tariff, Lord Elgin welcomed the news as "proof that the emperor has made up his mind to accept the treaty." But as the emperor had already, by imperial decree dated 3rd July, and communicated in the most formal manner to Lord Elgin, expressly sanctioned the treaty before the plenipotentiary left Tientsin, wherefore the anxiety for further proofs of his good intentions? "This decree was forced out of the emperor," Mr Oliphant tells us, "by Lord Elgin's pertinacity"—and the threat of bringing up to Tientsin a regiment of British soldiers then at the mouth of the river! As a matter of fact, the mission of the two Imperial Commissioners was of quite another character from that assigned to it by Lord Elgin. The two men were sent to complete their task of preventing by every means the advent of the barbarians to Peking, just as Lord Elgin himself was, two years later, sent back to China to finish his work, which was to bring the said barbarians into the imperial city. Between two such missions there could be neither reconciliation nor compromise.

There is authority for stating that the Imperial Commissioners were expressly sent by the emperor to Shanghai (1) to annul the whole treaty of Tientsin, and (2) failing the whole, as much of it as possible, but especially the article providing for a Minister at Peking. The ostensible purpose of the mission, from the foreign point of view, was the settlement of the tariff and trade regulations,—about which, however, the Chinese cared very little,—and delegates were appointed for this purpose. The labour was conscientiously performed, on one side at any rate, and the result was highly creditable to the delegates. It was by insertion in the tariff of imports that opium became recognised, chiefly, it would appear, at the instance of the United States Minister, Mr W. B. Reed, who was on the spot.

Apart from the tariff two principal questions occupied the minds of the negotiators of the treaty—the actual situation at Canton on the part of the English, and the prospective residence in Peking on the part of the Chinese. Lord Elgin hoped, by an appeal to the treaty of peace, to put an end to the hostile proceedings of officials and people which had harassed the occupying force in Canton with impunity for nine months. But it was the treaty itself against which officials, gentry, and braves were making war, just as they had done in the case of the treaty of 1842. There was no ambiguity about the movement. The Government was carried on not in Canton but in the neighbouring city of Fatshan, where the Governor-General Huang, who had been appointed to succeed Yeh, held his court and issued his decrees. Two months after the occupation of Canton the puppet whom the Allies had installed there admitted that the object of the assemblage of braves was to retake the city. Two months after the signature of the treaty and its acceptance by the emperor the Governor-General Huang was publicly offering a reward of $30,000 for the head of Parkes, and was stimulating the people in every way to expel the foreigners from the city. All this was in perfect accord both with imperial policy and with Chinese ethics. It had the full sanction of the emperor, just as similar operations had formerly had of his father. For the grand purpose of destroying or impairing the treaty there was no distinction in the Chinese mind between legitimate and illegitimate, honourable or treacherous, methods.

Lord Elgin, who had returned from Japan to Shanghai to meet the Imperial Commissioners in September, disappointed at their non-arrival, opened communications with them by a threat of returning to Tientsin and thus saving them the trouble of completing their slow journey to Shanghai. On their eventual arrival there he opened a diplomatic campaign against Canton by a demand (October 7) to know under what authority Huang and the military committees were organising attacks on the Allies. In reply the Imperial Commissioners naïvely proposed to promulgate the treaty. This frivolous answer provoked the rejoinder (October 9) that the treaty had been three months before publicly sanctioned by imperial decree, that something more than "documents and professions" were required to satisfy Lord Elgin on a question of "peace or war," and he demanded the removal of the Governor-General Huang. The commissioners then said they had denounced Huang to the throne, and hoped for his removal at no very distant date. They would also move his Majesty the Emperor to withdraw his authority from the hostile militia. Canton being thus disposed of, as he supposed, Lord Elgin proceeded to other business. But the hostilities at Canton continued without the least abatement for three months longer, until something more strenuous than diplomatising with the Imperial Commissioners was resorted to. The British Government had at last become exasperated, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Malmesbury, wrote on October 14 to Lord Elgin, "The most severe measures against the braves are the only ones which will obtain the recognition by the Cantonese of the treaty of Tientsin." It was not long before Lord Elgin himself became converted to the same belief, for on January 20, 1859, he wrote to General van Straubenzee, after some successful reprisals he had made on the village braves, that "advantage should be taken of the cool weather to familiarise the rural inhabitants of the vicinity of Canton with the presence of our troops, and to punish severely braves or others who venture to attack them." By this time also he had realised that the promise on which he relied in October had been evaded, and he told the Imperial Commissioners on January 22 that he would "have nothing more to say to them on Canton matters,—that our soldiers and sailors would take the braves into their own hands."

The effect of the new tactics was immediate and satisfactory. When the Allied troops began to move about they were welcomed in the very hotbeds of hostility. "At Fatshan," writes General van Straubenzee on January 28, "we were received most courteously by the authorities and respectfully by the people." A five-days' excursion to Fa Yuen, the headquarters of the anti-foreign committee, was likewise a perfect success; and so everywhere throughout the Canton district. Lord Elgin was now able to assume a bolder tone with the Imperial Commissioners and address them in still plainer terms.

"The moderation of the Allies," he wrote to them in February, "has been misunderstood by the officials and gentry by whom the braves are organised.... This habit of insult and outrage shall be put down with the strong hand.... It shall be punished by the annihilation of all who persist in it." There was no need for any such extreme remedy, for as soon as the burglars realised that the watch-dog had been loosed they ceased from troubling the household, and fell back on peaceful and respectable ways of life. "With the cessation of official instigation," Lord Elgin wrote in March, "hostile feeling on the part of the inhabitants appears to have subsided," thus falling into line with Consul Alcock, who wrote: "Clear proof was furnished that the long-nurtured and often-invoked hostility of the Cantonese was entirely of fictitious growth, due exclusively to the inclinations of the mandarins as a part of the policy of the Court of Peking." And then, too, the difficulty of removing the Governor-General Huang disappeared. He had, in fact, been unsuccessful in expelling the barbarians, just as Yeh had been, and the imperial decree superseding him naturally followed. His presence or absence had then become of no importance to the Allies, as, had he remained, he would have accepted the accomplished fact of the foreign supremacy with as good a grace as the gentry and their braves had done, for they never contemplated endangering their lives by fighting. Outrages on stragglers, assassination, kidnapping, and bravado filled up the repertory of their militant resources, and when these were no longer effective they retired into private life as if nothing had happened. The officials were no less acquiescent once they realised that they had a master.

The interest of this Canton episode lies in its relation to the Chinese question generally. Foreign intercourse with China is marked by a rhythm so regular that any part of it may be taken as an epitome of the whole, like a pattern of wall-paper. From Canton we learn that calculation of national advantage or danger, argument from policy, even threats which are not believed, are so much "clouds and wind," not profitable even as mental exercises. What alone is valid is concrete fact; not treaties, but the execution of them.

The Imperial Commissioners had in good time presented their own demand on Lord Elgin, and in most becoming terms, for between preferring and meeting a request there is all the difference in the world. The two Chinese signatories of the treaty frankly avowed that they had signed without scrutiny under military pressure, and that certain stipulations were highly inconvenient to the Imperial Government, particularly the right of keeping a Minister in residence in Peking. Lord Elgin agreed to move his Government, and the Government consented to waive the right, conditionally. Lord Elgin laid stress on the retention of the right as a right, forgetting that in China a right conditionally waived is a right definitely abandoned. Nor only so, but so far from consolidating what remains, it constitutes a vantage-ground for demanding further concessions, and in other fields of international relations besides that of China. Nothing therefore could have been wider of the mark than any expectation that "the decision of her Majesty's Government respecting residence in Peking would induce the Chinese Government to receive in a becoming manner a representative of her Majesty when he proceeds to the Peiho to exchange the ratification." Experience pointed to quite the opposite effect.