Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/113

 to land under special rules. Another clause in the same treaty provides that at each of the five ports opened to trade "one English cruiser will be stationed to enforce good order and discipline amongst the crews of merchant-shipping and to support the necessary authority of the consul over British subjects".

Here exterritorial jurisdiction emerges, not as it has developed, but as then seemed necessary. It was a police-authority over unruly persons of alien race who had forced their way into Chinese anchorages and were so determined to trade that the right to do so had been granted them by the Emperor. All the rough-and-tumble history of the Canton delta during the generation preceding these formal treaties looms up from these clauses; drunken English seamen rowing off from their sailing-ships and indulging in riotous conduct; opium-dealers slipping away in fast boats to hidden creeks where their traffic could be carried on concealed; the Chinese authority, unable to cope with these heavy-fisted men, and only occasionally, when murder or manslaughter was involved, getting hold of the culprit, who was strangled in accordance with the lex loci.

Nearly twenty years pass with practice in this inchoate state, the more precise American