6th October.
THe Department of State at Washington will not be very much assisted in its decision as to whether and how far it shall adopt the new British Commercial Treaty with China by the resolutions passed on Friday last at the meeting of the American Association of China. They are so narrow-minded, contradictory, and devoid of any atmosphere of statesmanship, that we regret to see that they are to be forwarded as the official expression of the concentrated wisdom of the American Association of China to the Department of State at Washington, to the American Treaty Commissioners, and to the American Asiatic Association. The first important paragraph in the preamble is such an extraordinary misrepresent"tion, thnt we cannot understand the meeting allowing it to pass, It says:
"Whereas Article VIII of the said British Treaty of Shanghai expressly stipu ates that native Custom-houses at the open ports on the seaboard, on rivers, inland waterways, land routes, or land frontiers' and ' offices for collecting duty on native opium' at important points on the borders of each province,—either on land or water—and salt reporting offices; etc, are to be retained or established.
The ordinary reader would naturally gather from this, particularly from the words "expressly stipulates," that one of the objects of the Treaty was the maintenance of all these taxing offices, whereas thecxact oppo-ite is the truth. Section 1 of Article VIII says: "The Chinese Government undertake that all barriers of whatsoever kind, collecting likin or such like dues or duties, shall be permanently abolished;..." and in the preamble it is stated with equal distinctness: "It is clearly understood that, afer likin barriers and other stations for taxi, goods in transit have been removed, no attempt shall be made to revive them in any form or under any pretext whatsoever." The native customhouses in the interior which are excepted in this section are, as we have said before, old-established places, few in number and mainly interprovincial; their locations and their changes have to be notified to the British Government, and their number may not be increased. It is obvious, too, that China must have maritime custom-houses to deal with her junk trade. As to the offices for the collection of duty on native opium, and those at which salt junks are to report, their scope is very strictly limited by the treaty. As to the opium offices, "no barriers or other obstructions are to be erected, and the excise officers or police of these offices shall not stop or molest any other kinds of goods, or collect taxes thereon." As to the salt reporting offices, the only boats which can be called upon to stop and report are those " conveying; ig salt which is being moved under salt passes or certificates:" and it is expressly stipulated that "at such offices no likin or transit taxation shall be levied and no barriers or obstructions of any kind shall be creeled."
All. taxes, and herein we agree with the American Association, retard the internal development and prosperity of 2 country, and by hampering its purchasing power, seriously affect its foreign trade, but unfortunately the government of a country cannot be carried on, nor the interests on its debts paid, without money, and money cannot be raised without taxation. The object of the Treaty of Shanghai is to make that taxation as little injurious to trade as possible. The real point of the objection of the American Association lies in the words, we " reatlirm our opinion as to the inability of the Chinese Government to abolish likin and other illegal taxation." If'so, as we have said before, why have tie merchants and Chambers of Commerce of China been crying out for years for what they say they know isan impossibility? and what is the use of making a treaty with China at all, if we assert beforehand tha' she cannot observe it The most amusing paragraph in the resolution is the second one:
Resolved that we deprecate any attempt to impose or sanction in treaty form excise and consumption taxes on the internal trade and merchandise of China, an independent friendly nation." We presume this means that it is wrong of the treaty to impose or sanction excise and consumption taxes on or in China, As we have said before, we regard the excise stipulated for in §9 of Art VIII as a blot on the treaty; but the consumption tax, as any one who reads §8 will see, is a concession to, not an imposition on, this "independent, friendly nation." Now the real American objection to the excise, weare informed, is that it i8 an anti-Protectionist provision, while the Government of the United States is pledged to Protection, and cannot therefore consistently discourage it in China. The American Association lays stress on China's being an "independent, friendly nation." Is it returning this friendliness to declare that she cannot keep the promises she makes to abolish likin, or to refuse her the taxes for which she asks in compensation, on the ground that "no additional benefits will accrue to American trade under the conditions proposed in Article VIII"? It is needless to ask how much the asserted independence of China is recognised in this preamble and these resolutions. We could well wish that the American Association had taken a broader view of the situation; had realised that any treaty, to really benefit foreigners, must not be one-sided, but must be to the benefit of China as well. The t objection t the Treaty of nghai is given in the "Current {Comment " in the August issue of the "Journal of the American Asiatic Association Meanwhile, the American exporter of cotton domestics may be pardoned if he fails to see anything but a new obstacle to trade in the proposed surtax, be it seven and one-half er cent, or ten per cent. Where his goods find their chief markets, the likin system remains undeveloped, and all he. can discover in the change isa substantial advance in the price of drills and sheetings to the consumer in North China and a" consequent contraction of the demand.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.