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To treat such a case as one of mere provincial brawling and discord, is as preposterous as it would be for the Times' reporter of the Crown cases on the late Circuit, to describe them in like manner, and to lament the unhappy prevalence of all kinds of misunderstandings, between the prisoners on the one side, and the prosecutors, witnesses, juries, and judges, on the other.
But, if it be meant that the relative importance or unimportance of the community, which suffers the wrong, and witnesses the disgrace, is to determine the question, whether the one and the other are or are not to receive redress and chastisement, at the hands of the Parliament and the British people, I am sure that the good sense of every right-thinking man, will repel the unworthy suggestion.
If England will plant, she must cherish, her "little communities."
If Hong Kong was thought of so much importance, as that its cession by the Court of Pekin, was made the price of the Peace of Nanking, in 1842—3, and its wellbeing the main pretext of the second Chinese War, in 1856, surely the demeanour of those, to whom England has confided the care and management of that position, is not a "little" matter, nor one in which England ought to feel no manner of concern.
If the objects which, as we may still read in the despatches of the period of that cession, were the protection of the persons and property of the English and foreign merchants trading with China, and the affording, to China herself, an opportunity of learning and appreciating England and her institutions, from a "little" model of both, to be exhibited from
