Canton was one of the least advantageous in the Chinese dominions, either for exports or for imports, that the trade of Canton was wholly abandoned to the arbitrary control of the Local Authorities, and was by them subjected to many and severe and vexatious burdens and to various restrictions and privations of the most galling and oppressive nature, and finally that those evils were wholly attributable to the nature and character of the Chinese Government.
About the time when these sage counsels were urged in the House of Commons upon an apathetic audience, another former servant of the East India Company, Sir J. B. Urmston, who had been at the head of the British Factory in Canton in the years 1819 and 1820, published (London, 1833) a pamphlet under the title 'Observations on the Trade of China' (printed for private circulation only). In this pamphlet, Sir J. B. Urmston impressed upon the British Government the necessity of removing the trade entirely from Canton to some other more northern port of the Empire. His argument was that British trade at Canton had always been at the mercy of the caprice and rapacity of the Cantonese Authorities and their subordinates, and that Canton was one of the worst places in the Empire which could have been chosen as an emporium for the British trade. Accordingly Sir J. B. Urmston named Ningpo and Hangchow as central and convenient places for British commerce, but gave it as his decided opinion that an insular situation, like Chusan, would be infinitely more so. We see, therefore, that Mr. Elphinstone, Sir George Staunton and Sir J. B. Urmston were of one and the same way of thinking, having correctly drawn the lessons of the past history of British trade in China, but that, as former employees of the East India Company, they thought of a factory rather than of a Colony. It is remarkable, however, that Cabinet Ministers profited so little from the advice thus tendered in Parliament and in the Press, as to commit the blunders which characterized, a few months later, their design of Lord Napier's mission and the instructions by which they frustrated it.
