are to trade upon the Yang-tze at their pleasure, and as soon as there is an end of the rebellion of the Tae-Pings. This, to be sure, is a somewhat remote contingency, but no doubt Lord Elgin in the further negotiations with the Imperial Court, now imminent, will take care that the condition is removed, and that the trade of the Yang-tze is opened to our merchants at once. Of course, by this time everything is conceded, as the allied expedition, which got ashore at Peh-Tang on the 1st of August last, must long since have received satisfaction, or be billeted within the walls of Pekin.
John Chinaman, as we have had experience of him from the days of Sir Henry Pottinger downwards, is not a man of half-measures. He either concedes everything, or nothing. But when every method of physical defence which Chinese ingenuity can suggest has been exhausted; when every wily trick with which the traditions of his craft are stuffed has been tried by the Chinese negotiator, and tried in vain; and everything has been yielded in appearance, it must not be supposed that the Chinaman has given up his game. He accepts his defeat as a fresh starting-point. Relax the grasp upon his throat but by a hair’s breadth, and you will find that no signatures are so evanescent as those which have been signed with the vermilion pencil. The most valuable concession ever made by China to Europe was the possession of the island of Chusan, not that in many respects the position of the island was the one which we would have chosen upon commercial grounds; but because it was a material guarantee, a palpable and undeniable proof of victory upon our side, and defeat on the other. As long as the British held Chusan it was clear that the Chinese Emperor was occupying a somewhat humiliating position in the presence of the outside barbarians; it was clear to all his subjects, and the Tae-Ping rebellion was the result.
On the whole this opening up of China is perhaps the greatest event of our time. What was the discovery of two comparatively uninhabited continents—the two Americas—by the side of the discovery of a continent inhabited by a third, probably by more than a third, of the human beings now existing upon the surface of the planet? It seems impossible to suppose that the representatives of a society which has existed for as long a period, probably for a longer period than our own, can be nothing better than the grotesque figures which we see on the willow-pattern plates, or the sweepings of Canton and Hong-Kong. Within this Flowery Land, as it is called, there are more people than we are in Europe, who have not drawn their religion from Galilee, their philosophy from Athens, their laws from Rome. Yet have they increased and multiplied in abundant measure, and all that we have heard of the interior of their country is to the effect that they have enjoyed a great share of material prosperity.
If we were to inquire very nicely into what the condition of China was a few centuries ago, a Chinese inquirer might with perfect propriety turn round upon us, and ask how it fared with Europe at the close of the thirty years’ war, or of the seven years’ war, or of Napoleon’s great wars? True, their philosophy, their taoli of which Mr. Wingrove Cooke has told us so much, is unintelligible and ridiculous enough to us—but what would an intelligent Chinaman think of Bishop Berkeley’s theory, that a fat mandarin existed only in the imagination of the spectator? What would he say to Kant, and Hegel, and a hundred other blowers of metaphysical soap-bubbles? Nay, what do we say to them ourselves? It is clear enough that there are certain points upon which the Chinese are deficient enough. They are not nearly so well instructed as we are in the various methods of slaughtering their fellow-creatures. They have, indeed, a very pretty taste in executions, and would be perfectly willing to avail themselves of the facilities offered by our minie rifles, and Armstrong guns, if they were so fortunate as to possess them. In medical science, they are far behind the Europeans of their own day, probably pretty much where Harvey found us. So in the physical and mathematical sciences, and in all matters of engineering, their ignorance would appear very gross to a well-educated English schoolboy. On the other hand, they are excellent agriculturists. They can weave their own silk into fabrics of great beauty and durability. They understand how to cut and embank canals. They are most shrewd and intelligent merchants, even upon the admissions of Liverpool and Ker York men, who have tried conclusions with them, and the men of Liverpool and New York are not very easily beaten in commercial matters. They have solved the problem of living together for centuries with a decent regard for family ties, and probably to the full in as peaceable a manner as the ancestors of the Europeans who write books about them. They are physically brave, and let sentimental and poetical gentlemen say what they will, physical courage lies at the bottom of all the manly virtues. Our own ancestors yielded readily enough, but yet not without a struggle, to the discipline and military virtue of the Romans. Only conceive what must be the effect upon the mind of a half-civilised man—that is, upon the mind of a man who is only accustomed to kill his fellow-creatures with bows and arrows, or a smooth bore—of the Enfield rifle, or the Armstrong gun?
Of China, as it really is, we really know very little. Mr. Fortune, Mr. Wingrove Cooke, and Captain Sherard Osborn, are our three great modern English authorities in the matter. Before their time there was a mist or a halo—which shall we call it?—around China and Chinese things. Sir John Davis was perhaps the most practical writer about the Chinese before their day; but even he dealt with them rather as an hierophant, than as that gentleman will do to whom Mr. Murray is about to entrust the task of writing a Chinese Handbook. Their customs, we were told, were not our customs; nor their ways, our ways. As soon might we expect to establish relations with the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter—if any such there be—as with the denizens of the flowery land. They would just permit us to stand at the back-door of the empire, and fling us occasionally, and contemptuously, a Pound of Tea, in return for which we were to pay largely, and swallow as