Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/251

Rh numbers. After Chekiang and Anhui, together with the captured places in Kiangsu, are recovered, foreigners might conceivably be used in the final attack on Nanking. But if such an innovation were to be made everything ought to be specified in the minutest detail — the numbers of ships and men, the exact payments to be made and supplies to be furnished. As to the transport of rice by sea in foreign vessels, Tsêng was more willing, but in that case also the contracts made with the Americans must be clear and explicit.

This reply affords us a slight insight into Tsêng's reputed anti-foreign tendencies. It is not unreasonable prejudice against foreigners as such that actuates him in his apparent unwillingness to make use of them, but rather a consideration for the honor of China. This we shall have occasion to confirm in later incidents. Although Tsêng had had practically no direct dealings with foreigners hitherto, he had nevertheless reached some conclusions regarding them from accounts given him by other officials. England he regarded as the most deceitful of all Western nations, France next. Russia was reputed to be the strongest of the European nations, with which England feared to quarrel. America was of a complaisant disposition as regards China, a fact proved at the time of the Opium War and at other times. Whoever gave Tsêng the information that led to this observation, it shows that among the Chinese administrators of that day the Westerners were by no means classed together as 'barbarians,' but were studied with at least some attempt to understand their different tendencies.

Incidentally it is an interesting speculation whether this Russian offer to aid China — even though the help proffered was not great — did not have something to do with the change of front which led the Allies, almost