o be chopped off without a trial.

Here was a Gordian knot, which nothing but the sword could loose.
War was provoked as before by the rashness of a viceroy. The
peace-loving governor did not choose to swallow the affront to
his country, nor did the occupant of the Dragon Throne deign to
interfere; looking on the situation with the same sublime indifference
with which the King of Persia regarded the warlike preparations of
the younger Cyrus, when he supposed, as Xenophon tells us, that
he was only going to fight out a feud with a neighbouring satrap.
How could China be opened; how was a stable equilibrium possible
so long as foreign powers were kept at a distance from the capital
of the Empire?

[Page 164]
In three months the haughty viceroy was a prisoner in India, never
to return, and his provincial capital was held by a garrison of
British troops. On this occasion the old blunder of admitting the
city to ransom was not repeated, else Canton might have continued
to be a hotbed of seditious plots and anti-foreign hostilities.
Parkes knew the people, and he knew their rulers also. He was
accordingly allowed to have his own way in dealing with them. The
viceroy being out of the way, he proposed to Pehkwei, the Manchu
governor, to take his place and carry on the provincial government
as if the two nations were at peace. Strange to say, the governor
did not decline the task. That he did not was due to the fact that
he disapproved the policy of the viceroy, and that he put faith
in the assurance that Great Britain harboured no design against
the reigning house or its territorial domain.

To the surprise of the Chinese, who in their native histories find
that an Asiatic conqueror always takes possession of as much territory
as he is able to hold, it soon became evident that the Queen of
England did not make war in the spirit of conquest. Her premier,
Lord Palmerston, invited the cooeperation of France, Russia, and
the United States, in a movement which was expected to issue
advantageously to all, especially to China. France, at that time
under an ambitious successor of the great Napoleon, seized the
opportunity to contribute a strong contingent, with the view of
checkmating England and of obtaining for herself a free hand in
Indo-China, possibly in China Proper also. For assuming a hostile
[Page 165]
attitude towards China, she found a pretext in the judicial murder of a
missionary in Kwangsi, just as Germany found two