The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 | Page 2

demands of justice, to end by cringing in the lowliest fashion before the guns of a little war-brig, there we have, in a representative abstract, the Chinese system of law and gospel. The equities of the present war are briefly summed up in this one question: What is it that our brutal enemy wants from us? Is it some concession in a point of international law, or of commercial rights, or of local privilege, or of traditional usage, that the Chinese would exact? Nothing of the kind. It is simply a license, guaranteed by ourselves, to call us in all proclamations by scurrilous names; and secondly, with our own consent, to inflict upon us, in the face of universal China, one signal humiliation.... Us--the freemen of the earth by emphatic precedency--us, the leaders of civilisation, would this putrescent[2] tribe of hole-and-corner assassins take upon themselves, not to force into entering by an ignoble gate [the reference here is to a previous passage concerning the low door by which Spanish fanaticism ordained that the Cagots (lepers) of the Pyrenees should enter the churches in a stooping attitude], but to exclude from it altogether, and for ever. Briefly, then, for this licensed scurrility, in the first place; and, in the second, for this foul indignity of a spiteful exclusion from a right four times secured by treaty, it is that the Chinese are facing the unhappy issues of war.'
[2] Putrescent. See the recorded opinions of Lord Amherst's suite upon the personal cleanliness of the Chinese.
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The position and outcome of matters in those critical years may be recalled by a few lines from the annual summaries of The Times on the New Years' days of 1858 and 1859. These indicate that DE QUINCEY was here a pretty fair exponent of the growing wrath of the English people.
[January 1, 1858.]
'The presence of the China force on the Indian Seas was especially fortunate. The demand for reinforcements at Calcutta (caused by the Indian Mutiny) was obviously more urgent than the necessity for punishing the insolence at Canton. At a more convenient season the necessary operations in China will be resumed, and in the meantime the blockading squadron has kept the offending population from despising the resentment of England. The interval which has elapsed has served to remove all reasonable doubt of the necessity of enforcing redress. Public opinion has not during the last twelvemonth become more tolerant of barbarian outrages. There is no reason to believe that the punishment of the provincial authorities will involve the cessation of intercourse with the remainder of the Chinese Empire.'
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[January 1, 1859.]
'The working of our treaties with China and Japan will be watched with curiosity both in and out of doors, and we can only hope that nothing will be done to blunt the edge of that masterly decision by which these two giants of Eastern tale have been felled to the earth, and reduced to the level and bearing of common humanity.'
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The titles which follow are those which were given by DE QUINCEY himself to the three Sections.--H.
HINTS TOWARDS AN APPRECIATION OF THE COMING WAR IN CHINA.
Said before the opening of July, that same warning remark may happen to have a prophetic rank, and practically, a prophetic value, which two months later would tell for mere history, and history paid for by a painful experience.
The war which is now approaching wears in some respects the strangest features that have yet been heard of in old romance, or in prosaic history, for we are at war with the southernmost province of China--namely, Quantung, and pre-eminently with its chief city of Canton, but not with the other four commercial ports of China, nor; in fact, at present with China in general; and, again, we are at war with Yeh, the poisoning Governor of Canton, but (which is strangest of all) not with Yeh's master--the Tartar Emperor--locked up in a far-distant Peking.
Another strange feature in this war is--the footing upon which our alliances stand. For allies, it seems, we are to have; nominal, as regards the costs of war, but real and virtual as regards its profits. The French, the Americans,[3] and I believe the Belgians, have pushed forward (absolutely in post-haste advance of ourselves) their several diplomatic representatives, who are instructed duly to lodge their claims for equal shares of the benefits reaped by our British fighting, but with no power to contribute a single file towards the bloodshed of this war, nor a single guinea towards its money costs. Napoleon I., in a craze of childish spite towards this country, pleased himself with denying the modern heraldic bearings of Great Britain, and resuscitating the obsolete shield of our Plantagenets; he insisted that our true armorial ensigns were