in one
feature of so grand a distinction, in one reasonable presumption for
inferring a profounder national conscientiousness, as diffused among the
British people, stands upon record, in the pages of history, this
memorable fact, that always at the opening (and at intervals throughout
the progress) of any war, there has been much and angry discussion
amongst us British as to the equity of its origin, and the moral
reasonableness of its objects. Whereas, on the Continent, no man ever
heard of a question being raised, or a faction being embattled, upon any
demur (great or small) as to the moral grounds of a war. To be able to
face the trials of a war--_that_ was its justification; and to win
victories--_that_ was its ratification for the conscience.'

[1] That is--the publication of the pamphlet.--H.

CHINESE POLICY.

'The dispute at Shanghai, in 1848, equally as regards the origin of that
dispute, and as regards the Chinese mode of conducting it, will give the
reader a key to the Chinese character and the Chinese policy. To begin
by making the most arrogant resistance to the simplest 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 th