provisions are refused. The sailors take them by force. Then a
well is poisoned. Two or three of the ship's company die in
agonies. The crew in a fury land, shoot and stab every man whom
they meet, and sack and burn a village. Is this improbable?
Have not similar causes repeatedly produced similar effects? Do
we not know that the jealous vigilance with which Spain excluded
the ships of other nations from her Transatlantic possessions
turned men who would otherwise have been honest merchant
adventurers into buccaneers? The same causes which raised up one
race of buccaneers in the Gulf of Mexico would soon have raised
up another in the China Sea. And can we doubt what would in that
case have been the conduct of the Chinese authorities at Canton?
We see that Commissioner Lin has arrested and confined men of
spotless character, men whom he had not the slightest reason to
suspect of being engaged in any illicit commerce. He did so on
the ground that some of their countrymen had violated the revenue
laws of China. How then would he have acted if he had learned
that the red-headed devils had not merely been selling opium, but
had been fighting, plundering, slaying, burning? Would he not
have put forth a proclamation in his most vituperative style,
setting forth that the Outside Barbarians had undertaken to stop
the contraband trade, but that they had been found deceivers,
that the Superintendent's edict was a mere pretence, that there
was more smuggling than ever, that to the smuggling had been
added robbery and murder, and that therefore he should detain all
men of the guilty race as hostages till reparation should be
made? I say, therefore, that, if the Ministers had done that
which the right honourable Baronet blames them for not doing, we
should only have reached by a worse way the point at which we now
are.