Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/271

Rh forces of the Czar, and with reiterated assurances of a perfectly honorable purpose to presently withdraw, they commenced the absorption of the 400,000 square miles which Japan had been forced to relinquish. At once Germany and England discovered that the "balance of power" had been deranged to a degree that required the cession of Kjao-chau to the one, and of Wei-hai-wei to the other. The balance of power! Unhappy China!

But all these injuries, inflicted upon the most inoffensive race of people on earth, accompanied as they have been by every form of diplomatic bullying, coercion and insult, and not infrequently by armed invasion, sink into inconsequence in comparison with the superlative infamy of the opium trade forced upon her by Great Britain. For centuries the production and use of the drug had been prohibited in the empire and punished with the utmost severity; but in 1773 the British East India Company, which had the monopoly of the article in India, smuggled a small shipment into the province of Kwang Tung. The profits of the enterprise proved to be great, and by the end of the century, notwithstanding the endeavors of the Chinese authorities to suppress it, the illicit trade had grown to important proportions. The government at Peking placed heavy penalties upon the importation, but through bribery and intimidation of the customs officials the traffic rapidly increased, and regular lines of swift, heavily armed schooners and junks set the laws at defiance. On the expiration of the charter of the East India Company in 1834 the opium monopoly fell into the hands of the British government, which took up the business with energy and protected it with the guns of a powerful fleet. Under these auspices the smuggling continued with practical impunity until at last, thoroughly alarmed at the rapid growth of the vice which was fastening itself upon his subjects in spite of the penalties of transportation or death for its indulgence, the Emperor ordered one of his most vigorous officers, Commissioner Lin, to stop the trade at whatever cost. In 1839 this officer seized and destroyed at Canton an amount of opium worth $9,000,000, and exacted from the dealers, Chinese and foreign, pledges that they would not resume the traffic. But by thia time Great Britain was deriving an annual revenue of over seven million dollars from the smuggling, and outraged by the high-handed action of the Chinese government in venturing to enforce its own laws, promptly sent a military force to demand reparation. The war was disastrous to China, and she was whipped into a treaty of "amity and commerce," compelled to cede Hong Kong to the British, and to pay $23,000,000 indemnity. The warning was ample, and the imperial officials dared offer no further hindrance to the admission of the "foreign devil's dirt." Even this condition of affairs was unsatisfactory to England, however, for the trade was still illicit, the goods contraband, and she was placed, by the unreasonable laws of China, in the position