CHAPTER VII.

THE NEW INTERCOURSE: CANTON, 1842-1847.

The fundamental difficulty of giving effect to the treaty -- Necessity for thoroughness -- Character of Kiying, Imperial Commissioner -- His amicable relations with British Superintendent of Trade -- Turbulence of Canton -- Outrages on British merchants -- Condoned by Chinese Government, if not encouraged both by imperial and provincial authorities -- Sir John Davis's testimony -- His passive treatment -- False policy of allowing Chinese Government to screen itself behind the mob -- Postponement of entry into city -- Climax in affair -- Evacuation of Chusan -- Increase of insults at Canton -- Sir John Davis palliates and then asks for redress -- Sudden reaction in his policy consequent on Lord Palmerston's becoming Foreign Secretary -- His clear despatches -- Sir John Davis makes a raid on the river defences -- Has the city at his mercy -- But makes an unsatisfactory agreement -- Withdraws protection in spite of remonstrance of merchants -- Massacre of six Englishmen in 1847 -- Redress -- Whole question of British protection brought up -- Canton consul objects to ship of war at factories -- Palmerston orders one to be there -- Agreement to defer entry into city till 1849 -- People intoxicated with their success -- The potency of the people -- Its limitations -- Interesting correspondence -- Final agreement dictated by people and signed by Sir John Davis and Kiying.

To carry out a treaty which was odious to Chinese officials in general, most of all to the bureaucracy and populace of the main centre of intercourse, Canton, required an effort analogous to that of maintaining a body of water at an artificial level--success in either case depending on completeness. It is easier to keep the reservoir intact than to compromise with leakages, as in certain conditions of the human will total abstinence is less irksome than moderation. To carry out the treaty, the whole treaty, and nothing but the treaty, would seem, therefore, to have been the obvious course for British agents to follow, a course suited equally to strong and to weak characters. This was, no doubt, understood by some, though not by all, of the British staff,--fifty years ago, as in our own day; but in the distribution of the _personnel_ it fell out that the fundamental condition of success was least realised just where it was most imperatively needed--to wit, at that intermittent volcano, Canton. For even the close proximity of the chief superintendent--only 120 miles distant--at Hongkong was insufficient to keep the cistern of our Canton relations water-tight. Sir John Davis, on the whole a competent official, shared to some extent in the common human imperfection of knowing what was right without always doing, or being able to do, it. He is indeed himself the most candid witness to the breakdown of the patchwork policy which he permitted to grow up in Canton, perhaps because he could not do otherwise.

The first British plenipotentiaries under treaty were exceptionally fortunate in their Chinese colleague, the High Commissioner, Kiying. He being a near kinsman of the emperor, and, with Ilipu, the principal instrument in promoting the conclusion of peace, his appointment must have been considered the best recognition the Court could accord of the validity of the treaty. "Kiying," says Sir J. Davis, "was by far the most remarkable person with whom Europeans have ever come in contact in that part of the world; the most elevated in rank as well as the most estimable in character." Intercourse with Kiying, therefore, was pleasant, and conducive to self-respect.

Both officials were unfortunate in having to reckon with an intractable peace-disturbing element in their mutual relations. This is the name which, for want of a more exact designation, must be given to the people of Canton, "who, through every event since 1839, remained incorrigible in the real hatred and affected contempt for foreigners."

It has always been, and still is, the practice of the Chinese authorities to make use of the populace in their aggressions on strangers. There is at all times in China, as in most countries, an inexhaustible fund of anti-foreign sentiment ready to be drawn upon by agitators, whether within the Government circle or not, and subject also to spontaneous explosion. By working on these latent passions, and inflaming the popular mind by the dissemination of odious calumnies, Government could at any moment foment an anti-foreign raid. It was a political engine in the use of which Chinese officialdom had become thoroughly expert. It was tempting by its cheapness, and it had, moreover, the special fascination for them that in the event of being called to account for outrage they could disavow the excesses of the "poor ignorant people." Such a force, however, is not without its drawbacks to those who employ it. Like a fire, which is easy to kindle but hard to control, the popular excitement was apt to extend beyond the limits assigned by its instigators, and many an engineer has thus been hoist by his own petard. "Otho had not sufficient authority to prevent crime, though he could command it," says Tacitus; and the observation fits the case of successive generations of Chinese rulers as if it had been written for each one of them separately.

The rowdy population of Canton enjoyed special immunity from official control. Not only had they been habitually pampered for two hundred years, and diligently taught to tyrannise over and despise foreigners, but during the war they were allowed to organise themselves independently of the authorities, and to claim the honour of driving the invaders off on the occasion when the city was admitted to ransom. On the mendacious reports of these transactions reaching him, the emperor not only bestowed rewards on the leaders but encouraged the populace to further hostile measures against the foreigners. The liberal distribution of arms during the war proved afterwards a powerful incentive to crimes of violence, of which outrages on foreigners were but one development.

The self-organised, self-trained bands of Canton were by no means disposed to submit tamely to the new order of things, in the settlement of which they had had no voice. They had bettered their official instruction in the storing up and practising of hatred and contempt for foreigners, and they did not choose suddenly to recant merely because their Government had been coerced into making a treaty in a distant province. Consequently, within three short months of its signature notices were placarded inciting the people to violence; very soon an organised attack on the British factories was made, and the buildings were burned down.

So far from attempting to repress such outrages, the governor of Canton, "while the ruins were still smoking," reported to the throne that the people "in their natural indignation had committed some excesses against the grasping barbarians," and a very gracious answer was vouchsafed to an offer of the people of certain outlying villages to join the armed bands of the city. The Imperial Government as well as the provincial government was thus identified with the popular hostility to foreigners, and opposition to the fulfilment of the treaty. "The excesses of the Canton mob," writes Sir John Davis, "were perpetually and annually resumed, up to the public decapitation of the four murderers of the Englishmen in 1847, with the subsequent punishment of eleven more."

But this is surely remarkable testimony from the Minister of Great Britain who was charged with the protection of his nationals[13] from wrong? With British garrisons in occupation of Kulangsu and Chusan, a military and naval force in Hongkong, and a Chinese commissioner professedly willing to afford protection and redress to foreigners, the acquiescence of the British authorities in these recurrent outrages seems to stand in need of explanation. The native authorities, it was clear, would not, even if they dared, coerce the Canton populace. Kiying himself, though meaning to be just, and ready to enforce redress against individual culprits, recoiled before the mob. So it would appear did the British representative, who, though vigilant in requiring compliance with the treaty in minor respects, seemed to be paralysed whenever the Cantonese were in question. He had been too long accustomed to their practices not to be aware of the cumulative quality of these outrages, and he was too practical a philosopher not to know the wisdom of arresting the virulent stream at its fountain-head. Yet "the miserable policy of the Chinese Government ... had permitted the populace of Canton ... to reach the culminating-point of organised misrule in 1846," British merchants being the sufferers. Why was nothing done to protect them at least from the consequences of this misrule?

The intricacies of the relation between the criminal rabble of Canton and the authorities there it would be hopeless to unravel, just as it would be vain to make such an attempt with regard to analogous cases which are to this day of constant recurrence. But no special penetration is needed to discover the falsity of a policy of allowing an organised government to plead its inability to control its own populace. Once admit such a plea and the security of the stranger is gone, for he has relinquished his hold on the Government without being compensated by any alternative security. Such was the state of things which had been allowed to grow up in Canton, producing the only fruit possible--outrage, ever increasing in violence and ending in massacre.

The postponement of the right of entry into the city conferred by treaty was a test case which gave the Chinese the clue to the weakness of British policy. The consequences would have been less pernicious had the right been frankly surrendered from the first, for to have it merely deferred from time to time on the avowed ground of the populace not being ready to acquiesce in it was to flatter the mob beyond measure while feeding their passion for violence. It was in this manner that the British Government had "given itself away" to the lawless rowdies of Canton.

The "climax" referred to by Sir John Davis occurred at an interesting juncture of time, for it was in 1846 that the last British soldier quitted Chinese soil, and Sir John Davis testifies that the restoration of Chusan had produced a change for the worse in the tone of the Chinese authorities. Kiying himself forgot his urbanity and acted "with a degree of _brusquerie_, not to say insolence, never before exhibited by him."

A riotous attack on the foreign factories broke out in July 1846, in which the merchants were compelled in a body to defend themselves against an immense number of assailants. For this outbreak Sir John Davis blamed one of the English merchants, and got him irregularly fined by the consul. A murderous assault was committed on two British seamen in the city of Canton in October following. In the ordinary routine he reported the occurrence to the Foreign Office in a despatch of seven lines. "Two English merchant seamen," he said, "having strayed into the town, had been violently ill-used by the populace"; adding that he "considered it to be the duty of the consul to prevent seamen wandering through Canton." He at the same time instructed the consul to find some means of punishing the master of the ship for allowing his men liberty, and proposed placing greater power in the hands of the consul for the restraint of British subjects generally. Above this level the plenipotentiary seemed unable to rise.

In March 1847 an English party of six, including Colonel Chesney, commanding the Royal Artillery in Hongkong, narrowly escaped murder at the hands of a riotous mob during an excursion up the Canton river. They strayed much farther than the two sailors had done, and if they did not fare worse it was due to the almost miraculous interposition of a Chinese officer with his followers, he himself being roughly handled by the mob. It would not do to apply to Colonel Chesney's case the homoeopathic treatment which was thought appropriate to the others, and Sir John Davis made a formal demand on the Chinese authorities for the punishment of the aggressors. The cup of Chinese iniquity was deemed full, and the avenger was at last let loose.

Whence, it is pertinent to ask, came this sudden access of vigour in the British representative?

The juncture of time above referred to was interesting from another point of view, for coincidently with the evacuation of Chusan and the renewed arrogance of the Chinese, a political event took place in the western hemisphere which had an important bearing on the whole attitude of Great Britain. There was a change of Government, Palmerston succeeding Aberdeen at the Foreign Office. The influence of Lord Palmerston on Chinese affairs during his long public career was so remarkable, that the ebb and flow of British prestige may be traced as closely by his periods of office as the course of the oceanic tide by the phases of the moon. Let any patriotic Englishman ransack the records of the sixty odd years of that statesman's full activity, and he will find no despatch or speech on the subject of China, even down to our own day, that will afford him such genuine satisfaction as those emanating from Lord Palmerston. They are so much the embodiment of common-sense that they might sometimes be considered commonplace; practical, true, clear as a bugle-note. He had been barely six months in office when one of his terse despatches to Sir John Davis turned that cautious official for the time being into a hero. The astonishment of Sir John may be imagined when, in reply to his placid report of the outrage on the two seamen, he received a curt communication from the Foreign Office in which his attention was directed to the punishment, not of the victims, but of the perpetrators, of the outrage.

I have [wrote Lord Palmerston, January 12, 1847] to instruct you to demand the punishment of the parties guilty of this outrage; and you will, moreover, inform the Chinese authorities in plain and distinct terms that the British Government will not tolerate that a Chinese mob shall with impunity maltreat British subjects in China whenever they get them into their power; and that if the Chinese authorities will not by the exercise of their own power punish and prevent such outrages, the British Government will be obliged to take the matter into their own hands.

Sir John Davis was the more ready to respond to this stirring appeal that it reached him just as he had entered on a correspondence with the Chinese respecting the attack on Colonel Chesney's party. The turn of the tide was marked with unusual distinctness in a single sentence of the plenipotentiary's despatch dated March 27, 1847. "The records of the Foreign Office," wrote Sir John, "will convince your lordship that during the last three years I have been rigidly tied down by my instructions to the most forbearing policy.... The time has, in my opinion, certainly arrived when decision becomes necessary and further forbearance impolitic." The inspiration of these instructions may be inferred from a speech of Lord Stanley's in 1845, in which he said, speaking of China, "I believe, so far as our later experience has gone, that there is no nation which more highly values public faith in others; and up to the present moment I am bound to say there never was a government or a nation which more strictly and conscientiously adhered to the literal fulfilment of the engagements into which it had entered." This from a Minister of the Crown, after three years of continuous outrages in Canton and of refusal to fulfil a specific article in the treaty, reflects either on the superintendent of trade in China as having withheld information from the Government, or on the Government itself in arriving at conclusions diametrically opposed to the tenor of their agent's despatches. If it be any justification of the Government theory to say so, the sentiments expressed by Lord Stanley were echoed by the newspapers of the day. "The Chinese," said one of them, "have acted with exemplary good faith, nor is there the least probability of their failing in future to do so."

Under the new afflatus, and backed handsomely by the naval and military commanders, Sir John Davis proceeded to prick the bubble of mob lawlessness and to reduce the Anglo-Chinese relations to working order. This he did by a sudden raid on the Canton river defences, without apparently any diplomatic preliminaries. By a brilliant feat of arms General D'Aguilar with a detachment from the Hongkong garrison, conveyed by three small steamers of the China squadron, swept the defences of the Canton river, blew up the magazines, spiked 827 pieces of heavy cannon, and placed the city of Canton "entirely at our mercy, ... all without the loss of one British life." Under the intoxication of such a triumph the plenipotentiary might be pardoned the illusion that the Canton troubles were now at an end. "The Chinese yielded in five minutes what had been delayed as many months." And yet it proved to be a fool's paradise after all in which he found shelter, for the old fatality of half-measures that has marred so many British victories overshadowed Sir John Davis's first essay in diplomacy. The agreement in seven articles concluded with Kiying on April 6, 1847, contained such blemishes as the British negotiator could perceive clearly enough when the work of other officials was in question. Having laid down broadly that the good faith of the Chinese Government bore a direct relation to the hostages they had given, yet the plenipotentiary, when he came to business on his own account, abandoned the securities which were actually in his hands, and, either from misgivings of some sort, or under the impulse of a sudden reconversion, he threw himself unreservedly on the good faith of the Chinese without any guarantee whatever.

With regard to the protection to be afforded to the merchants and the prevention of attacks upon them, Lord Palmerston wrote in December 1846: "Wherever British subjects are placed in danger, in a situation which is accessible to a British ship of war, thither a British ship of war ought to be, and will be ordered, not only to go but to remain as long as its presence may be required. I see no reason for cancelling the instructions given to you for the constant presence of a ship of war within reach of the factories at Canton." This promise of Lord Palmerston's was the sheet-anchor of the merchants' security. The question of having a ship of war close to the factories divided the mercantile from the local official view, and as the Home Government had so clearly adopted the former, the merchants took courage to stand up for what they deemed their rights. Learning that Sir John Davis, in the plenitude of his military success, had resolved to withdraw all her Majesty's forces from Canton, they ventured to make a strong remonstrance against such a step. Sir John, however, while consenting to the retention of a portion of the force, never allowed himself to be convinced of the need of any such measure. Writing to his Government in August 1847, he declared that "the Canton factories were never less in need of the presence of such a vessel than at present,"--an opinion frequently reiterated until November 20, when "for the first time since the peace it may be confidently predicated that a steamer will not be required." This was within sixteen days of the most cruel and revolting massacre of six young Englishmen at Hwang-chu-ke, within three miles of the city. The absence of a ship of war at that moment was deeply deplored, because several of the victims were kept alive long enough to have been rescued had there been any British force at hand.

This massacre naturally produced a profound impression on the Canton community, who felt that their warnings and petitions had been cruelly disregarded. The resident British merchants, in a memorial to Lord Palmerston, quoted his lordship's own instruction as to the stationing of a British ship of war at Canton, and said "it was with the utmost surprise and regret they beheld that officer [Sir J. Davis] shutting his eyes to the danger that menaced us, ... and withholding the protection he had been directed to afford." "The heavy calamity which has befallen us," they add, "is the result of this infatuation."

So much for the protection of life and property resulting from the armed expedition of 1847. The value of the new agreement, purely local in its bearing, which was the result of the successful invasion, was esteemed but lightly by the merchants. In their memorial, written in the month of August, they said: "If it is not deemed expedient to carry out a general measure in the manner contemplated by the 4th article of the new agreement, it would be much better that the merchants be again left to themselves"; while respecting the military raid and its consequences, they represented that "the just alarm occasioned by the expedition four months ago, and the excitement kept up by these fruitless negotiations, have done incalculable injury to the trade without bettering the position of foreigners in the least."

Such diverse views of policy held by the principal parties concerned are typical of the relations which have subsisted between the protectors and the protected throughout a great part of the period which has elapsed since the British Government established relations with China in 1834.

These occurrences at Canton and the decided action taken by the British Government brought up in a definite form the whole question of the safety of British interests in China, and the means by which it was to be secured. The conversion of Sir John Davis, though much, was not everything. The aim of Lord Palmerston's policy was still liable to be deflected by the perturbing influence of a minor planet in the system. The consul in Canton gave him almost as much trouble in his day as the famous Tiverton butcher did afterwards in his; and the patience with which his lordship endeavoured to enlighten his agent on the most elementary principles of human action was admirable. It had been the practice of the consul "to report to your Excellency another wanton and unprovoked attack on the part of the populace upon a party of Englishmen," and at the same time to deprecate any measures of defence, whether by organising volunteers among the residents or having a British ship of war stationed where she could be seen.

The consul's object in all this was to avoid exciting suspicion in the minds of the Chinese populace. Sir John Davis, who had all along agreed with the consul, had now to tell his subordinate that "Viscount Palmerston was of opinion that we shall lose all advantages which we have gained by the war if we take the low tone which has been adopted at Canton."

We must stop [continued his lordship] on the very threshold any attempt on their part to treat us otherwise than as their equals.... The Chinese must learn and be convinced that if they attack our people and our factories they will be shot.... So far from objecting (as the Consul had done) to the armed association, I think it a wise security against the necessity of using force.... Depend upon it that the best way of keeping any men quiet is to let them see that you are able and determined to repel force by force, and the Chinese are not in the least different in this respect from the rest of mankind.

In the light of the history of the subsequent fifty years, one is tempted to say that Lord Palmerston's dictum puts the eternal China question in a nutshell.

But when we reflect on the consequences of a man "of great experience" needing such lectures and yet left for years undisturbed at a centre of turbulence like Canton, can we greatly wonder at the periodical harvest of atrocities which followed?

The one important article in the April agreement was that suspending for a definite period of two years the operation of the article of the treaty of Nanking conferring the right of entering the city of Canton and the other ports of trade. Sir John Davis demanded either permission to "return your Excellency's visit in the city, or that a time be specifically named after which there shall be general free ingress for British subjects." To which Kiying replied, "The intention of entering the city to return my visit is excellent. The feelings of the people, however, are not yet reconciled to it." And Kiying easily had his way. Sir John thereupon explicitly sanctioned a definite delay of two years in the exercise of this treaty right, representing the privilege in his report to Lord Palmerston as of little importance.

Such, however, was not the view either of the Chinese or the British community of Canton. The throwing open of the city was by the latter considered the essential object of the recent expedition, and in their memorial to Lord Palmerston the merchants stated that the Braves having declared their determination to oppose the English at all costs, the withdrawal of our troops _re infectâ_ "intoxicated all ranks of the people with an imaginary triumph." Exclusion from the city thus remained as a trophy in the hands of the reactionaries, to become in 1856 the crux of a new dispute and a new war.

It was no imaginary, but a very real, triumph for "the people"; and even looking back on the transaction with the advantage of fifty years' experience, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was an inversion of judgment to have a city entirely at your mercy and then yield to the city instead of making the city yield to you. The least that could have been expected was, that while the troops were on the spot they should have vindicated the treaty of Nanking once for all by opening the city gates and thus eliminating the most pregnant source of future strife.

On one point Sir John Davis was in agreement with the memorialists--namely, in "tracing back the conduct of the Canton populace to the operations of 1841, on which occasion they were spared by our forces at the rear of the city." But the merchants were pointing out to Lord Palmerston that Sir John Davis was himself implicitly following that very precedent.

The China career of Sir John Davis was destined to a tragic finale, for in the midst of a series of decidedly optimistic despatches he was startled by the news of the Hwang-chu-ke murders. Expiation was as prompt as could have been reasonably expected, the High Commissioner not daring to afford provocation for a further punitive expedition which might not have ended quite so easily as that of the previous April.

The Canton imbroglio of 1847 threw into strong relief the potency of the Chinese demos and its relation to the Central Government. The pretensions of the populace and the stress of events drove the Imperial Government into a corner and forced it to show its hand, with the result that the occult combination which had been the despair of British officials for fourteen years was resolved into its elements, and for a time made amenable to treatment. It was demonstrated by this experiment that though the Imperial Government dared not, except in extremity, oppose any popular movement, yet when necessity required the authorities assumed an easy mastery. Sir John Davis wrote in one of his latest despatches, "Kiying had clearly proved his power over the people when he chooses to exercise it." Coerced themselves, the authorities applied corresponding coercion to the people, even at the behest of foreigners, "truckling" to whom was equally disgraceful to both the Chinese parties. The interaction of the two Powers exemplified in a memorable way the principle of all Chinese intercourse, that boldness begets timidity and gentleness arrogance. When the people asserted themselves the authorities yielded and fell into line with them, and when the authorities asserted themselves the people succumbed. Such were the lessons of the Canton operations of 1847, lessons since forgotten and relearned again and again at ever-increasing cost.

But the relations between the Government and the people bore also a quasi-diplomatic character. They dealt with each other as if they were two Estates of the realm having parallel or concurrent jurisdiction. The most remarkable phase, however, of the popular pretensions which was evolved under the unaccustomed pressure of the British Minister was the attempt of the populace to diplomatise direct with him. So curious an incident may still be studied with profit. The new departure of the people was the more startling in that they had been hitherto known only as a ferocious and lawless mob addicted to outrage, whose hatred of foreigners gained in bitterness by a long immunity from reprisals. Now that they had felt the "mailed fist" of a man of fact, and were almost in the act of delivering up their own heroes for execution, they sought to parley with the Power they had despised.

The elders of the murderous villages, in the midst of his stern demands, sent a memorial to Sir John Davis full of amity and goodwill. "Come and let us reason together" was the burden of this novel address. The elders proposed a convention for the suppression of outrages, somewhat on the lines of the Kilmainham Treaty, to supersede the law of the land. "The former treaty drawn up in Kiangnan was not well understood by the common people"; in other words, it was wanting in validity, for "the resolutions of Government are in nowise to be compared to those self-imposed by the people.... Were not this preferable to the fruitless proclamations and manifestos of government?" "It has, therefore," they say, "been resolved to invite the upright and influential gentry and literati of the whole city to meet together, and, in concert with the wealthy and important merchants of your honourable nation, establish a compact of peace."

Though he could not receive such a communication officially, Sir John Davis forwarded a copy to the Foreign Office, to whom he imparted his belief that the author was no other than Kiying himself--a surmise which was soon confirmed. The paper was extensively circulated; its arguments and phraseology were adopted by Kiying in his official correspondence with Sir John Davis. "The compact of peace" which closed their negotiations amounted to no more, indeed, than police protection for foreigners in their country walks, which, however, was counterbalanced by a new restriction excluding them from the villages as they had already been from the city. The interesting point is that, such as it was, it was the proposal of the people ratified by the two plenipotentiaries.

* * * * *

From this hurried sketch of affairs at Canton during the first five years of the new intercourse we see that the secular policy of China had undergone no change as a result of the treaty. The settled determination of the Government to exclude foreigners from the country and keep them in strict subjection at the farthest maritime outpost of the empire had been overcome by violence; but the Chinese never abandoned the hope of retrieving their position in whole or in part, nor did they forego any opportunity of avenging their military defeat. A frontal attack being out of the question, the invader could be perpetually worried by guerilla tactics, his sentries caught napping, his chiefs bamboozled: what had been lost through force might thus be won back by force and fraud judiciously blended, for craft is the natural resource of the weak. The conditions of the contest have varied with the international developments of fifty years, but time has worked no change in the nature of the struggle East _v._ West.

FOOTNOTE:

[13] This convenient term, borrowed from the French, saves many periphrases and sometimes an ambiguity. Neither "fellow-countrymen," "fellow-subjects," nor "fellow-citizens" fully expresses the relationship between an official in an extra-territorialised country and those whom he protects and governs.