the real nature of the basic difference between East and West, which prompted the Chinese to keep the foreigner either in subjection or at a distance; and they foresaw that acquiescence in this their attitude must eventually lead to hostilities. Lord Macartney's mission produced no satisfactory results; on the contrary, the British traders' lawful occasions became more frequently hampered and endangered, so that gradually their patience became strained to the breaking-point.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the British Government's attention was again diverted from Chinese affairs by more urgent matters, so that, when a new Embassy under Lord Amherst was despatched to Peking in 1816, the instructions conveyed to it by Lord Castlereagh—not to mention the attitude of the Ambassador and certain members of his staffreflected a state of mind in which most of the experience gained by the earlier mission was ignored, with grave results. The Government's instructions, as Lord Amherst read them, implied that "the Mission went simply in search of whatever it could pick up, and that the performance of the kotow (ceremony of prostration) was to be regarded in no other view than as it affected the question of profit or loss." Mr. Henry Ellis, Commissioner to the Embassy, held the view that the kotow was a matter of indifference: a view to which the East India Company's Court of Directors was opposed. For some time, Lord Amherst vacillated between compliance with the peremptory insistence of the Chinese and a dignified refusal. Finally he was led to adopt the latter course, and to leave the Chinese capital without audience of the Emperor, by the wise counsel of Sir George Staunton, President of the Select Committee, who " could not bring himself to believe that the attainment of the objects of the Mission would be promoted in the smallest degree by the compliance in question, and the mere reception of the Embassy would be too dearly purchased by such a sacrifice."

In a minute attached to Lord Amherst's report on the proceedings of the Embassy, Sir George Staunton placed on record a statement of policy, the practical wisdom and value of which have been in no wise diminished by the lapse of time :

To have acquiesced in the performance of the ceremony, thereby abandoning the precedent of Lord Macartney, would have been to have purchased degradation and disgrace without even the show of an

equivalent, the result of which would have fatally shaken that confidence, which we have with considerable success established at Canton, in "the firm adherence to principle" which distinguishes the British character, a confidence which is our best ally in all our differences with the Chinese and probably our only preservative against such a systematic oppression on the part of the local authorities as would necessarily terminate (in the present state of British feeling) in a rupture of intercourse between the two countries.

The subsequent history of our relations with China contains many instances of men like Staunton who understood the mentality of the Chinese and insisted on firm adherence to principle in dealing with them; for instance, Lord Napier, Sir Harry Parkes, General Gordon and Sir Rutherford Alcock. It also shows how frequently such men have been hampered in their useful activities by the tendency of the Home Government to subordinate principle to benevolent sentiments, political expediency, or easygoing ignorance. Thus, for example, many results beneficial to China, which might have been attained by the war of 1842 and the long-delayed punishment of the arrogant Cantonese mandarins, were subsequently sacrificed to the misguided sentiment underlying the Clarendon-Granville (as opposed to the Palmerston) policy, and to the outcry of the Nonconformist conscience, then, as now, determined to believe, against a mass of evidence, in the ability and genuine intention of Chinese officialdom to put an end to the opium traffic. During the period which followed the Treaty of Nanking (1842) until the renewal of hostilities in 1857, the Clarendon School, like the "F.O. School of Thought "to-day, deprecated the application of force to China, and advocated measures of conciliation. Citing in support of their views the peaceful persuasion policy pronounced by Wellington in 1835, they allowed the impression to be created in the mind of the mandarin that a strong body of public opinion in England deplored the " Opium War" as unnecessary and illadvised. The result was that another war soon became inevitable, as the only alternative to complete abandonment of our legitimate commerce in the East and grave injury to our Imperial interests and prestige throughout Asia. The position of affairs prior to the outbreak of this war, which ended in the Treaty of Tientsin, bore, in fact, a remarkable resemblance to that which has existed for the past three years.

In both cases, the losses and humiliations suffered by the

British community in China are primarily due to the fact that the present generation has sinned against the light painfully acquired by its forbears. In so far as the actual situation to-day is concerned, the explanation lies, no doubt, in the fact that the crowding cares and burdens of the West are so much with us, and Asia so remote, that the average politician, journalist or preacher cannot bring the light of other days to bear upon contemporary events in China. Whenever a problem arises which threatens danger to our peace or our pockets, the official mind, reflecting that of the public, is content to attempt to meet it by a policy determined by the exigencies of domestic politics and the line of least resistance. Solvitur ambulando; since 1921, Westminster has displayed no more inclination than Washington to follow a line of action consistently based on firm adherence to principle and serious study of the life-history of the problem itself. Therefore it is that the words and works of contemporary statesmen, where China is concerned, take their inspiration more often from the latest creeds and catchwords in vogue at Geneva or Locarno, than from the garnered wisdom of the men who studied, and tant bien que mal solved, the same problems in the old time before us. In a word, our present troubles and difficulties may fairly be ascribed in the first place to neglect of the lessons of the past; in the second, to the widespread prevalence of the dogmatic and profoundly false democratic theory which professes belief in "racial equality" and credits the Chinese people with the political qualities and instincts requisite for the successful working of democratic institutions.

If there be one subject connected with China in regard to which British policy should be amply illuminated by long and costly experience, it is the peculiar disposition of the Cantonese, the Irish of the East. Apart from the long record of our dealings with the inhabitants of that region, during the two centuries when the City of Rams held a monopoly of overseas commerce, the history of the period from 1842, when Canton was by treaty declared open to foreign trade, until 1857, when the city was finally taken by the Anglo-French forces, is peculiarly instructive. It repeatedly confirmed the men on the spot in the conviction that in dealing with these people, noted in their own country for restlessness, indiscipline and predatory instincts, the only safe policy was one of absolute firmness, tempered by justice. Lord

Napier, invoking all past experience, urged the British Government in 1858 to consider that "in every instance, nothing but humiliation and failure had ever followed attempts to obtain any just or reasonable demand by a show of moderation." A contemporary writer, well acquainted with the mentality of the Cantonese, discussing the events which had led to the renewal of hostilities, observed that :

So long as the Cantonese were puffed up with a vain conceit of their own immeasurable superiority and our forced but proper debasement, there was no other mode of intercourse possible, than that which should be marked by insult and outrage on the one side, and by submission, that had at least all the air of pusillanimity, on the other.

Two years earlier, Mr. Thomas Meadows, a serious student of Chinese history, in sympathy with the moral principles underlying the Confucian conception of political economy, had drawn attention to the errors committed by British statesmen by reason of their failure to connect their practice with the principles prescribed by experience and to take into account the "dominant morality" of the people with whom they were dealing.

There is (he wrote) unfortunately, in British official life, much ignorance of and consequent inattention to, fundamental beliefs and general principles. Men of cultivated minds know very well that les institutions et la condition d'un peuple sont toujours l'application de la morale qui y est dominante, and that consequently in every sound practical procedure, the dominant morality should constantly be kept in view. . . . So far as British official procedure is concerned, a large proportion of our errors arise from neglecting to connect our practice with corresponding theoretical principles, the mere attempt to do which would often expose the unsoundness of measures, before we were irrevocably embarked upon their execution.

Mr. Meadows, Chinese Interpreter in H.M. Civil Service, was a man of learning and a trained observer; his work on the chronic causes of unrest in China is well worth study to-day. Another member of H.M.'s Consular Service, Mr. W. J. Clennell, has recently embodied a similarly convincing exposition of the basic facts of the situation in an official report, published with others in 1925 as a Blue Book, under the title of "Papers Respecting Labour Conditions in China."* Mr. Clennell, like Mr. Meadows, suffers from no delusions concerning either the

*Vide Article in this REVIEW, January, 1926.

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institutions or the condition of the Chinese people. Touching the dominant morality he says: "The real abuses under which China labours are nepotism and corruption. Both are intimately connected with-indeed, they are, in a sense, consequences of― social facts which lie at the root of the better side of the national character." To these social facts we shall refer later. It is difficult to explain British policy and proceedings in China since the Washington Conference, and especially since the conclusion of the offensive alliance between the Cantonese Nationalists and Moscow, except upon the assumption that the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and his advisers regard the Locarno spirit as a force sufficiently potent to outweigh the accumulated experience of the past and consideration of the dominant morality of the Chinese people. Making every allowance for his desire to conform loyally to the impossible policy laid down in the sonorous platitudes of the Washington agreements, allowing also for the tendency in high places to make all possible concessions to American sentiment (howsoever misguided), such things as the tame submission to the attack on the British Concession at Shamsen in 1925, the parlous negotiations with Mr. Eugene Chen, the abject surrender of the Hankow Concession to mob violence, and the expression of Great Britain's readiness to abolish extraterritorial rights in a land over-run by bandits, these must all be attributed to a state of mind which subordinates political science to sentiment and history to histrionics.

Yet, even now, while the inevitable consequences of these errors are manifested and history repeats itself in an expedition of horse, foot and artillery to hold in check those hostile forces which we ourselves have helped to create, the tendency to forget the past persists, and the voice of authority continues to proclaim its belief in the laudable inspiration and purposes of Chinese "Nationalism." Only by shutting our eyes to the dominant morality of the Chinese people, and particularly to the record of the Cantonese leaders in that purely predatory movement, only by abandoning those principles which in the past have won for us the mutually beneficial respect of Asiatic nations, can we subscribe to the fashionable but fatuous delusion that the three principles of Sun Yat-Sen, or Mr. Wong Ching-wai's hysterical outbursts against " Imperialism," represent the deep-felt sentiments and patriotic aspirations of the Chinese people. Only