Whereupon the proud Briton published and distributed a review of the case, as he saw it, which closed as follows:—
``Governor Loo has the assurance to state in the edict of the 2d instant that `the King (my master) has hitherto been reverently obedient.' I must now request you to declare to them (the Hong merchants) that His Majesty, the King of England, is a great and powerful monarch, that he rules over an extent of territory in the four quarters of the world more comprehensive in space and infinitely more so in power than the whole empire of China; that he commands armies of bold and fierce soldiers, who have conquered wherever they went; and that he is possessed of great ships, where no native of China has ever yet dared to show his face. Let the Governor then judge if such a monarch will be `reverently obedient' to any one.''[41]
[41] Foster, pp. 61, 62.
The result of the increasing irritation was a decree by the Governor of Canton peremptorily forbidding all further trade with the English, and in retaliation the landing of a British force, the sailing of British war-ships up the river and a battle at the Bogue Forts which guarded the entrance of Canton. A truce was finally arranged and Lord Napier's commission left for Macao, August 21st, where he died September 11th of an illness which his physician declared was directly due to the nervous strain and the many humiliations which he had suffered in his intercourse with the Chinese authorities. The Governor meantime complacently reported to Peking that he had driven off the barbarians!
The strain was intensified by the determination of the British to bring opium into China. The Chinese authorities protested and in 1839 the Chinese destroyed 22,299 chests of opium valued at $9,000,000, from motives about as laudable as those which led our revolutionary sires to empty English tea into Boston Harbor. England responded by making war, the result of which was to force the drug upon an unwilling people, so that the vice which is to-day doing more to ruin the Chinese than all other vices combined is directly traceable to the conduct of a Christian nation, though the England of to-day is presumably ashamed of this crime of the England of two generations ago.
It would, however, be inaccurate to represent Chinese objection to British opium as the sole cause of the ``Opium War'' of 1840, for the indignities to which foreign traders and foreign diplomats were continually subjected in their efforts to establish commercial and political relations with the Chinese were rapidly drifting the two nations into war. Still, it was peculiarly unfortunate and it put foreigners grievously in the wrong before the Chinese that the overt act which developed the long- gathering bitterness into open rupture was the righteous if irregular seizure by the Chinese of a poison that the English from motives of unscrupulous greed were determined to force upon an unwilling people. The probability that war would have broken out in time even if there had been no dispute about opium does not mitigate the fact that from the beginning, foreign intercourse with China was so identified with an iniquitous traffic that the Chinese had ample cause to distrust and dislike the white man.
This hostility was intensified when the war resulted in the defeat of the Chinese and the treaty of Nanking in 1842 with its repudiation of all their demands, the compulsory cession of the island of Hongkong, the opening of not only Canton but Amoy, Foochow, Shanghai, and Ningpo as treaty ports, the location of a British Consul in each port, and, most necessary but most humiliating of all, the recognition of the extra-territorial rights of all foreigners so that no matter what their crime, they could not be tried by Chinese courts but only by their own consuls. This treaty contributed so much to the opening of China that Dr. S. Wells Williams characterized it as ``one of the turning points in the history of mankind, involving the welfare of all nations in its wide-reaching consequences.'' It was therefore a lasting benefit to China and to the world. But the Chinese did not then and do not yet appreciate the benefit, especially as they saw clearly enough that the motive of the conqueror was his own aggrandizement.
Unhappily, too, the next war between England and China, though fundamentally due to the same conditions as the ``Opium War,'' was again precipitated by a quarrel over opium, the lorcha Arrow loaded with the obnoxious drug and flying the British flag being seized by the Chinese. Once more they suffered sore defeat and humiliating terms of peace in the treaty of 1858. The effort of the Peking Government to close the Pei-ho River against an armed force caused a third war in 1860 in which the British and French captured Peking, and by their excesses and cruelties still further added to the already long list of reasons why the Chinese should hate their European foes.
Nor did foreign aggression stop with this war. In 1861, England, in order to protect her interests at Hongkong, wrested from China the adjacent peninsula of Kowloon. In 1886, she took Upper Burma, which China regarded as one of her dependencies. In 1898, finding that Hongkong was still within the range of modern cannon in Chinese waters seven miles away, England calmly took 400 square miles of additional territory, including Mirs and Deep Bays.
The visitor does not wonder that the British coveted Hongkong, for it is one of the best harbours in the world. Certainly no other is more impressive. Noble hills, almost mountains, for many are over 1,000 feet and the highest is 3,200, rise on every side. Crafts of all kinds, from sampans and slipper- boats to ocean liners and war-ships, crowd the waters, for this is the third greatest port in the world, being exceeded in the amount of its tonnage only by Liverpool and New York. The city is very attractive from the water as it lies at the foot and on the slopes of the famous Peak. The Chinese are said to number, as in Shanghai, over 300,000, while the foreign population is only 5,000. But to the superficial observer the proportions appear reversed as the foreign buildings are so spa- cious and handsome that they almost fill the foreground. The business section of the city is hot and steaming, but an inclined tramway makes the Peak accessible and many of the British merchants have built handsome villas on that cooler, breezier summit, 1,800 feet above the sea. The view is superb, a majestic panorama of mountains, harbour, shipping, islands, ocean and city. By its possession and fortification of this island of Hongkong, England to-day so completely controls the gateway to South China that the Chinese cannot get access to Canton, the largest city in the Empire, without running the gauntlet of British guns and mines which could easily sink any ships that the Peking Government could send against it, and the whole of the vast and populous basin of the Pearl or West River is at the mercy of the British whenever they care to take it. When we add to these invaluable holdings, the rights that England has acquired in the Yang-tze Valley and at Wei-hai Wei in Shantung, we do not wonder that Mr. E. H. Parker, formerly British Consul at Kiung-Chou, rather naively remarks:—