Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/264

Rh their hosts, could work their will in the land. The forces of Tolunga, Pao Ch'ao, and Tsêng Kuo-ch'üan above Nanking, and the newly recruited army of Li Hung-chang which was about to be sent to Shaghai, could not spare the necessary men to organise a sufficient Chinese force to coöperate with the foreigners in the immediate attack on Soochow, Ch'angchow, and Nanking. The Chinese would therefore be placed in the plight of a man who could do nothing but write polite notes and must hire a champion to go out and fight his battles. Only in this case it would be worse, for they would neither be able to write the notes or to fight, and could simply become a laughing-stock far and near. Since the enemy on their part were also hesitating whether to use foreigners in any numbers — although it was believed that the Taiping pretender, Hung Siu-ch'üan, hated them — prudence would dictate that the imperial government should likewise be careful in the matter, and make temporising replies, neither refusing nor accepting the foreign help, but continuing the conversations while they pressed on. For the moment the Tsungli Yamen might intimate that Tsêng had too few men to permit of his detaching any to coöperate with the foreigners, but after the campaign against Wuhu and the Two Pillars their aid might be invoked.

We must not infer from these several messages of ill-concealed opposition to the policy of employing foreigners under any circumstances that Tsêng had no interest in the province of Kiangsu, or that he underrated the importance of Shanghai. In many of his letters home he mentions the place and his great anxiety over keeping it from falling into the power of the enemy. As early as November 4, 1861, he mentions it. About the middle of