to set the imagination at work, and more likely to mislead than
to inform. The right honourable Baronet has told us that an
Englishman at Canton sees about as much of China as a foreigner
who should land at Wapping and proceed no further would see of
England. Certainly the sights and sounds of Wapping would give a
foreigner but a very imperfect notion of our Government, of our
manufactures, of our agriculture, of the state of learning and
the arts among us. And yet the illustration is but a faint one.
For a foreigner may, without seeing even Wapping, without
visiting England at all, study our literature, and may thence
form a vivid and correct idea of our institutions and manners.
But the literature of China affords us no such help. Obstacles
unparalleled in any other country which has books must be
surmounted by the student who is determined to master the Chinese
tongue. To learn to read is the business of half a life. It is
easier to become such a linguist as Sir William Jones was than to
become a good Chinese scholar. You may count upon your fingers
the Europeans whose industry and genius, even when stimulated by
the most fervent religious zeal, has triumphed over the
difficulties of a language without an alphabet. Here then is a
country separated from us physically by half the globe, separated
from us still more effectually by the barriers which the most
jealous of all governments and the hardest of all languages
oppose to the researches of strangers. Is it then reasonable to
blame my noble friend because he has not sent to our envoys in
such a country as this instructions as full and precise as it
would have been his duty to send to a minister at Brussels or at
the Hague? The right honourable Baronet who comes forward as the
accuser on this occasion is really accusing himself. He was a
member of the Government of Lord Grey. He was himself concerned