Early Relations hetzvcen the United States and China. 125 



interest in the afifairs of the Celestial Kingdom. The war would 

 have attracted attention in any case, since it so deeply concerned 

 American trade and missions, and bade fair to open the country 

 more fully to both,^- but the added moral question raised by the 

 intimate relations of the opium trade to the struggle called forth 

 much additional discussion. On the whole there was a strong 

 feeling that an unjust attempt was being made to force a poison- 

 ous drug on an unwilling nation. John Quincy Adams was clear 

 visioned enough to see that there was a deeper question, the right 

 of China to deny commerce to other nations, and in November, 

 1841, expressed his views before the Massachusetts Historical 

 Society.®^ The lecture aroused a storm of protest and was so 

 unpopular that the North American Review refused to publish 

 it. The thought of crowding the deadly opium on another nation, 

 and even of forcing her to accept any trade she did not want, 

 antagonized the independent American spirit. Hunt's Merchant 

 Magazine^* came out strongly with the statement that "we can 

 imagine no more glaring violation of the law of nations than 

 the successful attempt which has been made to cram down her 

 [China's] throat by force, an article which she has deliberately 

 refused to receive. Undoubtedly the bearing of the Chinese 

 government was preposterous, and the aspect of Chinese insti- 

 tutions, to a stranger, ludicrous in the extreme ; but we cannot 

 discover in what way the conceit and ignorance of the Chinese 

 authorities can be considered sufficient to justify the summary 

 remedies which have been adopted." John W. Edmonds, in a lec- 

 ture delivered before the Newburgh Lyceum, asked indignantly, 

 "To what code of either natural or national law are we to be 

 referred for a principle that would justify the permanent intru- 

 sion of a foreign agent upon our domicile, either national or indi- 

 vidual, against our will, and in defiance to our repugnance to all 

 intercourse?"^^ Yet in this indignation there was mixed a 

 curiously inconsistent enthusiasm over the prospect of an open 



'■'" Niles Reg., Vol. 57 et sqq., passim, is an example of the way news 

 of the war was published. 



"'The paper is given in Ch. Rep., 11 :274-28g. 



'■'* Hunt's Alerchant Mag., 8:205, Mar., 1843. 



"'John W. Edmonds, Origin and Progress of the War Between England 

 and China, New York, 1841. 



