Our Policy in China 3 



the Taipings in their progress alienated pubhc opinion from 

 their cause, and hence we joined our quondam enemies, 

 the Manchus, in suppressing the rebellion, lent Gordon to 

 the Imperialists to train and lead the " Ever-victorious 

 Army" of six thousand disciplined men, and restored 

 Confucianism and countenanced a conservative reaction 

 which, after thirty years' undisputed sway, has now brought 

 the mighty Empire once more to a crisis of dissolution. We 

 have allowed the Chinese mandarins to persist in their 

 outre conservatism which will have none of the evil thing 

 called Progress. Instead of actively promoting reforms and 

 innovations, in the way that Sir Harry Parkes, in Tokio, 

 backed up young Japan, even at the cost of civil war, our 

 Government has in China yielded to the corrupt Court at 

 Peking, and, until quite recently, discouraged British enter- 

 prise with the pitiful result we see to-day — China ruined by 

 her defeat at the hands of the Japanese, and the resulting 

 exorbitant indemnity; and our trade generally stationary, 

 and in part unfairly excluded from those outlying districts of 

 the Empire already seized by our European rivals. 



For, viewing the enormous population, now again estimated 

 at over 400,000,000, the richness of the soil, the genial 

 climate, the inexhaustible mineral wealth, and, above all, 

 the untiring industry of the people, the trade at present 

 carried on is not a tithe of that which we should naturally 

 look for. In the number of Great Britain's foreign 

 customers China proper takes seventeenth rank, being just 

 on a par with Scandinavia. Our exports to the Celestial 

 Empire are not one-fourth of those to the United States, 

 with a population of 60,000,000; just one-sixth of our 

 exports to British India, and not one-tenth of that to our 

 Australian and other Colonies, all, except India, countries 

 fenced in with hostile tariffs ranging from thirty to sixty per 



