From these two circumstances—the serious deterioration of our position, and the prompt and efficacious remedy provided—an important conclusion may be drawn as to our means of effecting any required change in our relations.
In an empire vast in area as China, with an overflowing population, it is no slight advantage to be enabled, without a single battle, to invest and vigorously blockade the capital; and this it is in our power to effect by a small squadron at the mouth of the Grand Canal in the early spring, when Peking is dependent for its supplies for the year on the arrival of the grain and tribute junks by that channel. A more effective means of coercion this than the destruction of twenty cities on the confines of the Chinese territory or on the coast. With a starving Court and population around him, flight or concession appears to be the emperor's only alternatives.
The facility and the certainty with which this object may be attained are important considerations. The insurmountable obstacles to the advance of a European army into the interior are rendered nugatory and altogether unimportant by the knowledge of this highroad to the heart of the empire.
The maintenance of our present relations is probably in no slight degree due to the secret consciousness of their weakness at this point.
In any future policy that may be adopted, therefore, these facts and views are calculated to supersede the necessity for active hostilities, and must tend to avert from a peaceful and industrious population all the worst calamities of war, at the same time that they free her Majesty's Government from the embarrassment of a costly and protracted war in prospectu.
A simple and ready resource for commanding attention to any just demands is indeed invaluable in China, and without it there is every reason to believe the Chinese rulers would still be the most impracticable of Orientals. With such a power, no insuperable obstacles exist to the satisfactory solution of difficulties without either costly effort or interruption to the trade of the five ports; and it was the long-matured conviction of our powerful action, by means of a command over the necessary supplies for Peking, that dictated the course followed in the Tsingpu affair.
The Chinese view of the opium trade and our agency in it forms perhaps the chief obstacle to our taking that high ground with the rulers, and good position with the people, which the extension of our commercial interests demands. Let us look, then, to this opium traffic and the influence it actually exercises upon our position in China.
It is no question here whether opium should be classed in the category of medicines, stimuli, or fatal poisons; the Chinese have decided that for themselves, and regard it only as a poison, and the British as the great producers, carriers, and sellers of the drug, to our own great profit and their undoubted impoverishment and ruin. Nor does their conviction end here: they believe to maintain this traffic we made war and dictated a humiliating peace, and that we are prepared to do so again, if they ventured on any interference to its prejudice.
These opinions may be false or true in their foundation, that is not the question, but, What is the influence they are calculated to exercise? Hostility and distrust can alone be traced to this source. No other feelings flow from it, and the consequences will meet us at every turn of our negotiations, in our daily intercourse, and every changing phase of our relations. As it overshadows with a sinister influence the whole field of our political action, so must it be seriously taken into account and calculated upon as an adverse element in all we attempt in China.
Accepted as un fait accompli, the best means of neutralising and counteracting its bad effects are alone to be considered, since the enormous capital, large revenue, and inseparable connection of our legitimate trade with opium, as a means of laying down funds in China, involved in the traffic, precludes all idea of its cessation or removal.