for two long centuries, Manchu arrogance and tyranny has, thanks to the apathy of the East-India Company's Directors, the upper hand over the representatives of European commerce and civilization, and keeps them locked up within the narrow limits of the Canton Factories. The latest portion of this volume exhibits that same Manchu tyranny, undeterred by repeated defeats and humiliations, because aided and abetted by H.M. Ministers and Consuls in China, surrounding the hated Free Trade Colony of Hongkong by a narrow circle of Customs stations and maintaining an effective blockade which to the present day disgraces British relations with China. All honour to Great Britain's magnanimous forbearance in the interest of what her Crown lawyers consider to be the just demands of international law. Covered by that law, Mandarindom still seeks to strangle the Free Trade movement of the Colony and still slanders the fair name of the Colony by regarding that amount of smuggling, which everywhere in the world naturally results from oppressive and irregular taxation and peculation, as an inherent vice of the native population of Hongkong. But a divine Nemesis is watching over all these things and Mandarindom will eventually discover its mistake when British patience is exhausted. An effective solution of the problem can, however, hardly be expected so long as the present division between the Colonial and Foreign Offices continues. This division which, in its practical working in the Far East, bristles with unavoidable jealousies and irreconcilable antagonisms, impedes the natural process of bringing China into subordination to Europe. The furtherance of that process demands a special Ministry charged with the direction of all Her Majesty's possessions and interests in the East and bringing British Colonial and Imperial policy into a working and effective unity.
Historically speaking it seems undeniable that, as in the days of the East-India Company at Canton, so in the more recent history of Hongkong, European merchants have ever been the leaders and the Chinese merchants the indispensable hangers-on
