Tue Friend of Ohina is one of the half-informed and one-sided publica-tious, which require a great deal of patience and self-restraint for their perusal, It is always useful to know what other people are saying but when you know beforehand the goal in view and the groove which lends to it, the journey along the groove is often wearisome, We dislike the opium trade; have doubt at all that the drag is injurious to the Chinese, and regret that England insisted on its import being legalized, Notwithstanding our experience of the hollowness of Chinese euphuisms, which have come to remind us always of the apples of Sodom, we admire, and can even recognise some sincerity in the famous words attributed to the Emperor Taokwang, when the project of establishing a Customs' duty on opium was submitted to him, But we have no sympathy with the tone in which the Friend of China discusses the question, We see no more reason, in the first place, why the British Government should interfere to stop the manufac. ture of opiam because the Chinese smoke it to excess, than why they should put down whiskey stills because certain of their own people elect to get drank, What should be done, is to elide from the treaty the clause, which ought never to have been introduced, legalizing the import of the drag; and so throw into the hands of the Chinese the power, and on their shoulders the responsibility, of preventing its ingress into the kingdom, We do not believe this would lead to the extinction of opium smoking as habit, Opium would still be smuggled with the flagrant condi ance of the mandarins, and manufac. tured extensively from poppies grown under their eyes, But. we should at least be clear from the chat of in-traducing it. This, however, may after all be a matter of opinion; and if the Friend of China prefers to ad-Vooate the stoppage of cultivation, it is welcome to the plea. What we dislike is the historionl ignorance, and the misrepresentation of mercantile aims, which characterise the pamphlet and its supporters, In a recent number, we find Mr. Fowler, one the most conspicuous members of the association, actually discover. ing as a novelty that the Chinese had opium before we sent it to them! "T had," he writes, "a long talk with Sir Harry Parkes about opium, He gave the stereotyped oficial view, The only novel thing he said was that the Chinese must have had opium before we sent it to them!" What are we to think of a leader who has so little studied his subject, as not to know that opium had been manufactured in China for centuries before we attempted to introduce it?
Sir Harry Parkes, he says, gave him the stereotyped official view. And so he and the Friend of China give us the stereotyped view of the clique which they represent:—the Chinese are an unhappy people, baving opium forced down their throats by an aggressive grasping set of men yelept British merchants, backed up by an equally wicked Indian Government, who are always seeking to extract sone new gain from the pockets of the Chinese. The attempt to open the Yunnan trade route is condemned as an nggression, by so much the less excusable that we had limited ourselves to a certain number of ports by the treaty of Tientsin, and break faith in trying to exceed those limits. Why does not the Friend carry out the argoment to its legitimate conclusion, and deduce that the treaty of Tientsin ought also to be torn up, because it carries us farther than the treaty of Nanking? The one extension must be quite as wrong us the other; andas the treaty of Nanking contains no provision about missionaries, they also should obviously withdraw. They are availing themselves of the aggressive action which extorted the treaty of Tientsin, and cannot conscien. viously appeal tots provisions, any more than they can ever avail of the Yunnan route when it is opened in pursuance of the unscrupulous aggression which characterises the merchant-adventurer in this part of the world. Except by the pleas "we are not as other men are," or the "end justifies the means," the clique of which the Friend is an organ cannot escape from thia inference; but the one saying is surely too pharisaical and the other too jesuitical to find favour inthe sight of evangelical writers. We are, however, all so prone to think our own pursuits exceptionally good, that we should not be surprised to find the Friend endeavour to justify the presence of missionaries, as designed so obviously for the moral and spiritual benefit of the Chinese people as to be above and beyond argument. Still, it must remember that Prince Kung did not express a wish that Sir Rather-ford Alcock could take away opium only when he was quitting Peking, but "opium and missionaries so that they are here in opposition to the wish of the Chinese quite as much as merchants—more 80, in fact, for it was only one especial article of commerce which Prince Kung wished to be rid of. If opium and missionaries were removed, he was confident, he said, that our rela~ tions would be friendly. And, coming directly after the Yangchow unplensantness, the remark was not without point. It is to be regretted that, when dwelling 80 unciuously as they are prone to do, on the aggressiveness and iniquity of our relations with China, writers of the Friend of China stamp should for. get that, for one dispute which: arises in regard to merchants, ten occur about missionaries; and we will hazard a considerable wager that, if given the option of rejecting any particular feature of foreign intercourse—not only missionaries or merchants," but "mis. sionaries or opiam"—the Chinese would say "missionaries." Such writing as that of the Friend of China, and such talk as that in which Dr, Dudgeon has been lately indulging, are so "satisfying" to the utterers and to the Exeter Hall class who take the political and social morality of their countrymen under protection—that we cannot wonder at the profuseness of the supply. But it as well they should remember that there another side; and that missionaries have acquired their privileges by the former action, and are dependent for their support on the active presence, of the "gunboat," quite as much as merchants, Tue misfortune of publications like the Friend of China is that, being addressed to people who are generally ignorant of the real facts of the case, they carry a weight to which they are unentitled, and keep up a disinclination to inter. fore in China, which emasculates our policy. Probably the first impulse of every Englishman, on hearing of Mare gary's murder, was that it must be punished; that the Government under whose safe-conduct he was travelling must be held firmly responsible, and must be coerced if it failed to make adequate reparation. But a publicae tion like the Friend of Ohina steps in with a whine of "opium," which sets people doubting whether their first honest impulse was a just one,—Was it really. with a view to increase its opium sales, that the Government of India promoted the expedition! and if so, are not the Chinese rather to be pitied in their weakness, when they try by any means to resist that design?—Or Dr. Bridges reviews the history of our relations with China in the Fort. nightly, and finds nothing but force and aggression, and implies that we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for the past, and turn our left cheek also to the Chinese whenever they arise in their wrath, and offer to smite us on the right. Such tirades do not influence us, on the spot, who know how the case really stands; but they do great harm at home, where the facts are imperfectly appreciated, and tend to make the cause of the merchant in China unpopular, We know that opium was manufactured and used in China, years and years before English. men ever brought there; and that the province of Yunnan, which the Bhamo route is especially designed to open, was the earliest producer—and is now with its neighbour Szechuen believed to be the largest consumer—of the drug. If
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.