Page:Europe in China.djvu/63

Rh an armed demonstration of force could induce the Chinese Mandarins to grant foreign trade a dignified modus vivendi. War with China was, at the close of the year 1834, a mere question of time. Strictly speaking it was simply a question of arousing public opinion in England to a recognition of the actual necessities of the case. But it took years to accomplish this, and meanwhile affairs in China were in a state of transition, which made the position of the British merchants and their Superintendents extremely awkward.

British merchants in Canton, at Macao and at the anchorage of Lintin, were nominally under the control of the British Superintendents. But the Chinese Authorities persistently protested against their claim of an official status, and the British Cabinet left their political authority unsupported and their jurisdiction over British subjects undefined. Moreover it was asserted by many British merchants that their own Government had broken faith with them in the matter of the dissolution of the East India Company's trade monopoly. For the Government had by Act of Parliament thrown open the trade with China and thereby invited them to operate at Canton, and yet the Government appeared to tolerate and sanction a survival in Canton of the East India Company's trade monopoly in the form of a Financial Committee of bill brokers who, with the resources of the Indian revenues at their command, hampered, and domineered over, the commercial operations of British free traders. This yoke was the more chafing, because the Chinese Authorities increased their exactions on British trade almost from month to month, ever since the East India Company's charter had ceased.

Consequently, headed by Jardine, Matheson & Co., R. Turner & Co., J. Innes, J. McAdam Gladstone, A. S. Keating, J. Watson, N. Crooke, W. S. Boyd, J. Templeton & Co., and Andrew Johnstone, the British Chamber of Commerce at Canton protested against the continuance in China of any part of the East India Company's factory, even for the purpose of selling bills on India and purchasing bills on England, by making