Or all the speeches on the China question which have been made in parliament, the recent attempt of Earl Grey to connect the residents at the ports with the Macao coolie traffic, was the most unfair, "That most horrible traffic in coolies, which led to excesses and cruelties equal to those perpetrated in the African slave trade, has continued, notwithstanding attempts on the part of the Government to check it." It is possible that Earl Grey did not know the circumstances of the case; that, on the one hand, so far from residents in the ports being concerned in the trafic, their voice has been invariably and persistently raised against it, and on the other hand continual complaints have wen made of what, to use no stronger erin, may be called the apathy of the British Government; but if Earl Grey did not himself know these things, the same plea of ignorance could scarcely be set up by the Foreign Minister, who should at once have rebutted the implied charge. If there be one thing more than another, connected with our intercourse with the East, which is felt by residents in China to be a scandal, it is this same coolie traffic. Fortunately, as merchants trading at the ports as well as individual residents, we are clear of the stigma. No British subject that we are aware of has been engaged in the traffic; public opinion has sot itself very decidedly against it, and has not failed to drag forward its hide-onsness from under the disguises which have been attempted to be placed on it, this respect, the conduct of the residents has been different from that of the British Government, which has, by means of its representatives at Jeast in Hongkong, on more than one occasion committed itself to acts seemingly very like a protection of the traffic. When the wrongs committed in. the neighbouring port of Macao bad called forth an indignant protest from the residents in Hongkon;, and one of the newspapers there had undertaken to show the matter forth in its true light, it will be fresh in the recollection of our readers that the Colonial Government instituted a vexatious action for libel against the proprietor. No course which legal ingenuity could suggest was left untried to secure a verdict, or, in case of failure, to entail the utmost inconvenience on the defendant. Again, it is only the other day we were forced to comment on the strange attitude of the Government in the Nouvelle Penelope case, and the persistency with which a coolie who had escaped from the wreck of that vessel was hunted down. The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel; and cor-tainly, to outer eyes, the efforts of the Hongkong Government to pnt down the Sacao coolie traffic seem to have an opposite tendency. The new tragedy of the Ugarte Dolores, following'so closely as it las dove on the Nouvelle Penelope, may possibly at last have the effect of inducing Foreign Governments to take more active steps to stop a trade which cannot bat bring discredit ey the Foreign name and embitter the feelings of the Chinese against us.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.