the Ministers at Peking, 'men without truth or good faith,' after concluding a truce and sending Kishen to Canton to arrange terms of peace, suddenly changed their minds, replaced Kishen by Yikshan and commenced a war of extermination, thus compelling the English to take the Bogue Forts, to bring Canton itself to submission, and to take from it a ransom for the punishment of such ill faith; (3) that the High Commissioner Yuekien and other high officers, like Tahunga, had tortured and killed shipwrecked Englishmen, reporting such brutal outrages committed on defenceless individuals to the Emperor as victories gained in battle; and finally (4) that the Cantonese Authorities, seeking to confine to themselves the profits of the foreign trade and extorting, through the Hong Merchants, illegal payments from the foreign merchants, disguised everything under false statements to the Emperor. The demands which the English nation was thus in justice entitled to make were (1) compensation for losses and expenses, (2) a friendly and becoming intercourse on terms of equality between officers of the two countries, and (3) the cession of insular territory for commerce and for the residence of merchants and as a security and guarantee against future renewal of offensive acts.
This appeal to the conscience of the nation, and this impeachment of the Manchu Government at the bar of public opinion in China, had a very great effect. It was, as many Chinese themselves acknowledged, a truthful exposition of the real issue of the conflict between China and England, caused by the treatment accorded to foreigners at the hands of Chinese officials, who acted on the supposition of China's absolute supremacy and in defiance of international equality. Moreover, this proclamation, whilst justifying the cession of Hongkong and the occupation of Chusan, gave to the opium question that accidental and extraneous position which it really occupied in the history of this first Anglo-Chinese war.
Whilst the British forces were steadily advancing towards Chinkiang and Nanking, the minds of the Chinese officials and people in the North were filled with dread. The superiority
