declared
that the Taeping cause was a lost one before he assumed the command,
no cause could be pronounced irretrievable with a leader so expert and
resolute as Chung Wang, and opponents so incapable and craven as his
were. But another thing was certainly incontestable, and that was that
the Taepings could not in any sense be regarded as patriots. Their
regular mode of conduct stamped them at once as undiscriminating
plunderers of all, whether Chinese or Manchu, who had the misfortune
to fall into their hands, and their acts of cruelty surpassed
description and even belief. Some instances of the massacres they
perpetrated have been mentioned, but these were only a few out of the
many that stained, or rather characterised, their usual proceedings.
It will suffice to say that their ordinary way of dealing with their
prisoners was to crucify them, and there will then be no difficulty in
accepting the conclusion that the Chinese population thoroughly
detested them, and regarded them as a scourge rather than as
deliverers.

Nor does a closer examination of the system of administration set up
at Nanking by the leader Tien Wang raise one's opinion of the cause or
its promoters. The foreign missionaries long thought that the Taepings
were the agents of Christianity, and that their success would lead to
the conversion of China. That faith died hard, but at last in 1860 a
missionary had to confess that after visiting Nanking "he could find
nothing of Christianity but its name falsely applied to a system of
revolting idolatry," and out of that and other irresistible testimony
resulted the conclusion that the conversion of China by the agency of
the Taepings was a delusion. The missionaries were not alone in their
belief among foreigners. The Consuls and their Governments entertained
a hope that the Taepings might establish an administration which would
be less difficult to deal with than they had found the existing one at
Peking. They attempted to, and did in an informal manner, establish
some relations with Tien Wang. They acquainted him with the articles
of the Treaty of Tientsin, and they requested him to conform with its
conditions. On a second occasion Sir George Bonham, our head
representative in China, even honoured him with a visit; but closer
acquaintance in the case of our diplomatists, as of the missionaries,
stripped the Taepings of the character with which interested persons
would wish they had been invested. From t