The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 | Page 8

tea,
should within one hundred years have found themselves able so
absolutely to revolutionise their diet, as to substitute for the gross
stimulation of ale and wine the most refined, elegant, and intellectual
mode of stimulation that human research has succeeded in
discovering.[6] But the material basis of this stimulation unhappily we
draw from the soil of one sole nation--and that nation (are we ever
allowed to forget?) capricious and silly beyond all that human
experience could else have suggested as possible. In these
circumstances, it was not to be supposed that we should neglect any
opening that offered for making ourselves independent of a nation
which at all times we had so much reason to distrust as the Chinese.
Might not the tea-plant be made to prosper in some district of our
Indian Empire? Forty years ago we began to put forth organised
botanical efforts for settling that question. Forty years ago, and even
earlier, according to my remembrance, Dr Roxburgh--in those days the
paramount authority upon oriental botany--threw some energy into this
experiment for creating our own nurseries of the tea-plant. But not until
our Burmese victories, some thirty years since, and our consequent
treaties had put the province of Assam into our power, was, I believe,
any serious progress made in this important effort. Mr Fortune has
since applied the benefits of his scientific knowledge, and the results of
his own great personal exertions in the tea districts of China, to the
service of this most important speculation; with what success, I am not
able to report. Meantime, it is natural to fear that the very possibility of
doubts hanging over the results in an experiment so vitally national,
carries with it desponding auguries as to the ultimate issue. Were the
prospects in any degree cheerful, it would be felt as a patriotic duty to
report at short intervals all solid symptoms of progress made in this
enterprise; for it is an enterprise aiming at a triumph far more than
scientific--a triumph over a secret purpose of the Chinese, full of
anti-social malice and insolence against Great Britain. Of late years, as
often as we have accomplished a victory over any insult to our national
honour offered or meditated by the Chinese, they have recurred to some

old historical tradition (perhaps fabulous, perhaps not), of an emperor,
Tartar or Chinese, who, rather than submit to terms of equitable
reciprocity in commercial dealings with a foreign nation, or to terms
implying an original equality of the two peoples, caused the whole
establishments and machinery connected with the particular traffic to
be destroyed, and all its living agents to be banished or beheaded. It is
certain that, in the contemplation of special contingencies likely to
occur between themselves and the British, the high mandarins dallied at
intervals with this ancient precedent, and forbore to act upon it, partly
under the salutary military panic which has for years been gathering
gloomily over their heads, but more imperatively, perhaps, from
absolute inability to dispense with the weekly proceeds from the
customs, so eminently dependent upon the British shipping. Money,
mere weight of dollars, the lovely lunar radiance of silver, this was the
spell that moonstruck their mercenary hearts, and kept them for ever
see-sawing--
'Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.'
Now, upon this--a state of things suspected at times, or perhaps known,
but not so established as that it could have been afterwards pleaded in
evidence--a very grave question arose, but a question easily settled: had
the Chinese a right, under the law of nations, to act upon their
malicious caprice? No man, under any way of viewing the case,
hesitated in replying, 'No.' China, it was argued, had possessed from the
first a clear, undoubted right to dismiss us with our business
unaccomplished, re infectâ, if that business were the establishment of a
reciprocal traffic. In the initial stage of the relations between the two
powers, the field was open to any possible movement in either party;
but, according to the course which might be severally pursued on either
side, it was possible that one or both should so act as, in the second
stage of their dealings, wilfully to forfeit this original liberty of action.
Suppose, for instance, that China peremptorily declined all commercial
intercourse with Britain, undeniably, it was said, she had the right to do
so. But, if she once renounced this right, no matter whether explicitly in
words, or silently and implicitly in acts (as if, for example, she looked
on tranquilly whilst Great Britain erected elaborate buildings for the

safe housing of goods)--in any such case, China wilfully divested
herself of all that original right to withdraw from commercial
intercourse. She might say Go, or she might say, Come; but she could
not first say,