Page:Europe in China.djvu/571

community, when it was reported that, in a debate in the House of Lords (May 9, 1879), Lord Salisbury had stated that the Governor of Honokong had reported that the grievance, which a certain clause of the Chefoo Convention intended to remove by the appointment of a Mixed Commission, had ceased to exist and that therefore there was no further reason to appoint the Commission. This was the more puzzling as, a few weeks before this news arrived in the Colony, Sir John had admitted in Legislative Council (May 29, 1879), in speaking of the blockade, that 'there is something pressing on the junk trade of the Colony that prevents its expansion.' When Sir Th. Wade again passed through Hongkong (December, 1879), he suggested to a Committee of the Chamber that the blockade stations would not be removed by the Chinese until the Colony devised some scheme by which the Chinese Government could collect the revenue fairly due to them. Sir John, taking the same view, now gave some hints of the plan by which he proposed to remove the blockade. He stated in Legislative Council (December 30, 1879) that, if the trade in salt were put down and an undertaking entered into for the collection of duty on opium, the Chinese Government would be willing to remove the taxing stations. Practically, therefore, the question was whether the Colony as willing to sacrifice the freedom of the port in order to gain the removal of the blockade, or, in other words, whether the Colony would prefer to have Chinese Customs offices in town or Chinese blockade stations outside the harbour. Such was Sir John's plan, so far as he unfolded it. The determination shown by him, on all occasions, to court the good-will of the Chinese Authorities, combined with his habitual disregard of the views of 'the British trader,' as he called the mercantile community of Hongkong, caused the community to mistrust any scheme for the abolition of the blockade emanating from Sir J. Pope Hennessy. Hence there ensued now the general apathy of hopelessness, which Sir John was careful not to disturb, and thus it happened that the blockade question was allowed to slumber all through the year 1880. On 10th March, 1881, the