Sir Thomas seems to have been under the delusion all that time that he was under some obligation to concede this increased taxation to China, If there were any such duty on his part, it must have been recorded in the secret history of the proceedings at Chefoo in 1876; for the wording of the Convention concluded there warrants thing of the sort. In Article III the British Minister had only engaged to move his Go-vermont to sanction a different arrangement on opium from that affecting other imports, and this consisted in opium paying duty and lekin at the same time, It is to be noted that this was to be conceded as a special advantage to China "in order to the prevention of the evasion of the duty." This could not mean evasion of import duty, but of the lekin duty, which Chinese mer: chants had managed to effect; and the British Government was to be moved to accede to this in order to help China to collect her inland revenue. At the same time it was settled that the amount of Tekin was to be decided by the different Provincial Governments according to the circumstances of each; but up to the present time no official description of what these Provincial Governments have decided has seen the light, and in its place the Central Government has computed the amount for Imperial, and not for the Provincial, needs, which there seemed at Chefoo to be such necessity to safeguard. The whole of the clauses on trade were on the gratuitous and anti-treaty retentions of the Chinese Government to the right of collecting lekin on foreign goods at the open ports; and in order to give a colour of reality to the claim of such right, the first clause of the Section on actually falsied the situation by inserting had "not settled the areas within which the apocryphal hypothesis that the treaties "Jekin ought not to be collected on foreign. goods at the open ports"—thereby opening the door to the admission that the treaties had settled the area within which Jekin might be collected: whereas in Articles XXV to XXVIII of the Tientsin Treaty, in which the question of import and export duties and transit duties is dealt with, there is no explicit nor implicit mention of cither Lekin or of theareain which it might be levied. Notwithstanding all this, the false idea was adhered to, and was made to serve towards giving the Chinese Government an unparalleled increase of revenue without any corresponding advantage to British trade, and against our treaty rights, which were mercilessly sacrificed by Sir Thomas After this, the endeavour to extract from the British Government the long and much desired increase of revenue from opium taxation was left seemingly in abeyance but not by China, which ever rootlessly longed for such grand extension of its revenue at the expense of Great Britain, though apparently without, pressing the matter on the attention of the Foreign Office. At the beginning however of 1883 Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Earl Granville, spontaneously proposed to the fee Tseng, the Chinese Ambassador in London, to discuss the matters so as to arrive at a satisfactory settlement, Aftera mere formal and feeble proposal by Lord Granville to pay Tis, 70 a chest lekin, which was met. by a peremps tory refusal on the side of the Marquis to even consider any amount under Tis, 80—though Lord Granville stated on the 27th April that he "was confirmed as to the justice of the Tls. 70 he had proposed,"
rd Granville, on the 9th February, 1885, "'in deference to the wishes of the Chinese Government," agreed that the rate of lekin should be 80 a chest! There does not seem to have been anything more than a formal discussion, for the sake of appearances, as to the amount of lekin leviable; but a surrender was made, without further resistance or corns plaint, of all the Chinese Government had demanded,
his memorandum of the 27th September, It is to be noted that og Tseng, in 1884, had endeavoured to mislead Lord Lord Granville by stating that China's consenting to the lekin being fixed at 80 taels "would be in the direction of a yolun+ tary restriction of its power of unlimited taxation, and a concession they had made to commerce rather than one which the; had received." And this unsubstantiated assertion was allowed to passed unchallonged, notwithstanding that the Chinese Government had put on record in the Chefoo Agreement that the collection of lekin by the Customs together with import duty was princi desirable as it prevented the eva+ sion lekin duty by Chinese merchants, and thereby secured to the Chinese Government the collection of all the lekin on opium, calculated on a maximum average of previous years, instead of only half of the computed lekin on the quantity of opium imported. The Chinese Government admitted, too, in 1868, to Sir R. Alcock, that if lekin were not collected at the ports it would be impossible to levy the tax at all. No one seems to have hesitated to accept the bold and fanciful assertion of Marquis Tseng, or to have doubted its accuracy; and after digesting it for nearly five months—from September, 1884, to February, 1885. the demands of China were acceded to with blandness, in the style of those who generous or careless of "other people's money and the scene dropped on the last act of the Chefoo Convention and its
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.