advances on the goods and merchandise of individuals intended for consignment to England. They pleaded that this practice was an infringement of the Act of Parliament which required the East India Company to abstain from all commercial business; that it raised the prices of Chinese produce; that it encouraged improvident speculation; that it shut out British mercantile capital through occupying the field with the revenues of India; and that it formed, through an understanding with the Hong Merchants, a close monopoly of the most desirable teas.
Meanwhile the Chinese Authorities continued their previous tactics. They had not the slightest wish to kill the goose which laid the golden eggs; only the goose must have no aspirations above a goose and remain in their own exclusive grasp. As soon as they heard of Lord Napier's arrival in Macao, they re-opened trade (September 29, 1834) and rescinded the prohibition against pilots bringing foreign vessels up to Whampoa. Trade forthwith re-commenced and proceeded as briskly as ever, both at Canton and at Lintin. But the Cantonese authorities and the Hong Merchants scrupulously avoided recognizing the British Superintendents as having any official status whatever, whilst they used every possible means, fair and foul, to persuade individual British merchants to disavow the authority and jurisdiction of the Superintendents. They even attempted to induce the Chamber of Commerce to nominate 'a trading tai-pan' (a Chief-Supercago) to be officially recognized by the Chinese Government as responsible for the personal conduct and for the commercial transactions of every foreign merchant, and especially also for the Lintin opium trade. To the invitation to nominate a trading tai-pan, specially ordered by the Governor (October 19 and 20, 1834), the British merchants, having been particularly warned by the Secretary to the Superintendents to remain loyal (November 10, 1834), replied in a body, that no authority of the kind could be held by any British merchant without the authority of the British Crown.
Nevertheless the British community did not disguise to the Superintendents that, if the suggestions they had both made
