Superintendent at Canton with
powers and instructions calculated to provide against the growing evils
connected with the contraband trade in opium, and adapted to the novel
and difficult situation in which the Superintendent was placed."

As soon as the question had been put from the Chair the following Speech
was made.

The motion was rejected, after a debate of three nights, by 271 votes to
261.

Mr Speaker,--If the right honourable Baronet, in rising to make an
attack on the Government, was forced to own that he was unnerved and
overpowered by his sense of the importance of the question with which he
had to deal, one who rises to repel that attack may, without any shame,
confess that he feels similar emotions. And yet I must say that the
anxiety, the natural and becoming anxiety, with which Her Majesty's
Ministers have awaited the judgment of the House on these papers, was
not a little allayed by the terms of the right honourable Baronet's
motion, and has been still more allayed by his speech. It was impossible
for us to doubt either his inclination or his ability to detect and
to expose any fault which we might have committed, and we may well
congratulate ourselves on finding that, after the closest examination
into a long series of transactions, so extensive, so complicated, and,
in some respects, so disastrous, so keen an assailant could produce only
so futile an accusation.

In the first place, Sir, the resolution which the right honourable
Baronet has moved relates entirely to events which took place before the
rupture with the Chinese Government. That rupture took place in March,
1839. The right honourable Baronet therefore does not propose to pass
any censure on any step which has been taken by the Government within
the last thirteen months; and it will, I think, be generally admitted,
that when he abstains from censuring the proceedings of the Government,
it is because the most unfriendly scrutiny can find nothing in those
proceedings to censure. We by no means deny that he has a perfect right
to propose a vote expressing disapprobation of what was done in 1837 or
1838. At the same time, we cannot but be gratified by learning that he
approves of our present policy, and of the measures which we have taken,
since the rupture, for the vindication of the national honour and for
the protection of the national interests.

It is also to be observed that the right honourable Baronet has not
ventured, either in