The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2

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[4] '_By the gallows:_'--Or much rather by decapitation. Accordingly, we
read of a Ming (_i. e._, native Chinese) emperor, who (upon finding
himself in a dreadfully small minority) retired into his garden with his
daughter, and there hanged both himself and the lady. On no account
would he have decapitated either; since in that case the corpses, being
headless, would in Chinese estimation have been imperfect.

[5] '_Colonel Chesney:_'--The same, I believe, whose name was at one
time so honourably known in connection with the Euphrates and its steam
navigation.

CONDUCT OF THE WAR.

Such is the condition of that guilty town, nearest of all Chinese towns
to Hong-Kong, and indissolubly connected with ourselves. From this town
it is that the insults to our flag, and the attempts at poisoning,
wholesale and retail, have collectively emanated; and all under the
original impulse of Yeh. Surely, in speculating on the conduct of the
war, either as probable or as reasonable, the old oracular sentence of
Cato the Elder and of the Roman senate (_Delenda est Carthago_) begins
to murmur in our ears--not in this stern form, but in some modification,
better suited to a merciful religion and to our western civilization. It
is a great neglect on the part of somebody, that we have no account of
the baker's trial at Hong-Kong. He was acquitted, it seems; but upon
what ground? Some journals told us that he represented Yeh as coercing
him into this vile attempt, through his natural affection for his
family, alleged to be in Yeh's power at Canton. Such a fact, if true,
would furnish some doubtful palliation of the baker's crime, and might
have weight allowed in the sentence; but surely it would place a most
dangerous power in the hands of Chinese grandees, if, through the
leverage of families within their grasp, and by official connivance on
our part, they could reach and govern a set of agents in Hong-Kong. No
sympathy with our horror of secret murders by poison, under the shelter
of household opportunities, must be counted on from the emperor, for he
has himself largely encouraged, rewarded, and decorated these claims on
his public bounty. The more necessary that such nests of crime as
Canton, and such suggestors of crime as Yeh, should be thoroughly
disarmed. This could be done, as regards the city, by three
changes:--First, by utterly destroying the walls and gates; secondly, by
admitting the British to the freest access, and placing their residence
in a special quarter, upon the securest footing; thirdly, and as one
chief means in that direction, by establishing a police on an English
plan, and to some extent English in its composition. As to the cost, it
is evident enough that the colonial head-quarters at Hong-Kong must in
future keep up a _permanent_ military establishment; and since any
danger threatening this colony must be kindled and fed chiefly in
Canton, why not make this large city, sole focus as it is of all
mischief to us, and not a hundred miles distant from the little island,
the main barrack of the armed force?

Upon this world's tariff of international connections, what is China in
relation to Great Britain? Free is she, or not--free to dissolve her
connection with us? Secondly, what is Great Britain, when commercially
appraised, in relation to China? Is she of great value or slight value
to China? First, then, concerning China, viewed in its connection with
ourselves, this vast (but perhaps not proportionably populous) country
offers by accident the same unique advantage for meeting a social
_hiatus_ in our British system that is offered by certain southern
regions in the American United States for meeting another _hiatus_
within the same British system. Without tea, without cotton, Great
Britain, no longer great, would collapse into a very anomalous sort of
second-rate power. Without cotton, the main bulwark of our export
commerce would depart. And without tea, our daily life would, generally
speaking, be as effectually-ruined as bees without a Flora. In both of
these cases it happens that the benefit which we receive is _unique_;
that is, not merely ranking foremost upon a scale of similar benefits
reaped from other lands--a largest contribution where others might still
be large--but standing alone, and in a solitude that we have always
reason to regard as alarming. So that, if Georgia, &c., withdrew from
Liverpool and Manchester her myriads of cotton bales, palsied would be
our commercial supremacy; and, if childish China should refuse her tea
(for as to her silk, that is of secondary importance), we must all go
supperless to bed: seriously speaking, the social life of England would
receive a deadly wound. It is certainly a phenomenon without a parallel
in the history of social man--that a great nation, numbering twenty-five
millions, after making an allowance on account of those amongst the very
poorest of the Irish who do not use tea, should within one hundred years
have found themselves able so absolutely to revolutionise their diet, as
to substitute for the gross stimulation of ale and wine the most
refined, elegant, and intellectual mode of stimulation that human
research has succeeded in discovering.[6] But the material basis of this
stimulation unhappily we draw from the soil of one sole nation--and that
nation (are we ever allowed to forget?) capricious and silly beyond all
that human experience could else have suggested as possible. In these
circumstances, it was not to be supposed that we should neglect any
opening that offered for making ourselves independent of a nation which
at all times we had so much reason to distrust as the Chinese. Might not
the tea-plant be made to prosper in some district of our Indian Empire?
Forty years ago we began to put forth organised botanical efforts for
settling that question. Forty years ago, and even earlier, according to
my remembrance, Dr Roxburgh--in those days the paramount authority upon
oriental botany--threw some energy into this experiment for creating our
own nurseries of the tea-plant. But not until our Burmese victories,
some thirty years since, and our consequent treaties had put the
province of Assam into our power, was, I believe, any serious progress
made in this important effort. Mr Fortune has since applied the benefits
of his scientific knowledge, and the results of his own great personal
exertions in the tea districts of China, to the service of this most
important speculation; with what success, I am not able to report.
Meantime, it is natural to fear that the very possibility of doubts
hanging over the results in an experiment so vitally national, carries
with it desponding auguries as to the ultimate issue. Were the prospects
in any degree cheerful, it would be felt as a patriotic duty to report
at short intervals all solid symptoms of progress made in this
enterprise; for it is an enterprise aiming at a triumph far more than
scientific--a triumph over a secret purpose of the Chinese, full of
anti-social malice and insolence against Great Britain. Of late years,
as often as we have accomplished a victory over any insult to our
national honour offered or meditated by the Chinese, they have recurred
to some old historical tradition (perhaps fabulous, perhaps not), of an
emperor, Tartar or Chinese, who, rather than submit to terms of
equitable reciprocity in commercial dealings with a foreign nation, or
to terms implying an original equality of the two peoples, caused the
whole establishments and machinery connected with the particular traffic
to be destroyed, and all its living agents to be banished or beheaded.
It is certain that, in the contemplation of special contingencies likely
to occur between themselves and the British, the high mandarins dallied
at intervals with this ancient precedent, and forbore to act upon it,
partly under the salutary military panic which has for years been
gathering gloomily over their heads, but more imperatively, perhaps,
from absolute inability to dispense with the weekly proceeds from the
customs, so eminently dependent upon the British shipping. Money, mere
weight of dollars, the lovely lunar radiance of silver, this was the
spell that moonstruck their mercenary hearts, and kept them for ever
see-sawing--

'Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.'

Now, upon this--a state of things suspected at times, or perhaps known,
but not so established as that it could have been afterwards pleaded in
evidence--a very grave question arose, but a question easily settled:
had the Chinese a right, under the law of nations, to act upon their
malicious caprice? No man, under any way of viewing the case, hesitated
in replying, '_No_.' China, it was argued, had possessed from the first
a clear, undoubted right to dismiss us with our business unaccomplished,
_re infecta_, if that business were the establishment of a reciprocal
traffic. In the initial stage of the relations between the two powers,
the field was open to any possible movement in either party; but,
according to the course which might be severally pursued on either side,
it was possible that one or both should so act as, in the second stage
of their dealings, wilfully to forfeit this original liberty of action.
Suppose, for instance, that China peremptorily declined all commercial
intercourse with Britain, undeniably, it was said, she had the right to
do so. But, if she once renounced this right, no matter whether
_ex_plicitly in words, or silently and _im_plicitly in acts (as if, for
example, she looked on tranquilly whilst Great Britain erected elaborate
buildings for the safe housing of goods)--in any such case, China
wilfully divested herself of all that original right to withdraw from
commercial intercourse. She might say _Go_, or she might say, _Come_;
but she could not first say, _Come_; and then, revoking this invitation,
capriciously say, _Go_.

[6] Down to George I. there _could_ have been no breakfast in England for a
gentleman or lady--there is none even yet in most parts of the
Continent--without wine of some class or other.

To this doctrine, thus limited, no man could reasonably demur. But to some
people it has seemed that the limitations themselves are the only unsound
part of the argument. It is denied that this original right of refusing a
commercial intercourse has any true foundation in the relations of things or
persons. Vainly, if any such natural right existed, would that broad basis
have been laid providentially for insuring intercourse among nations, which,
in fact, we find everywhere dispersed. Such a narrow and selfish
distribution of natural gifts, all to one man, or all to one place, has in a
first stage of human inter-relations been established, only that men might
be hurried forward into a second stage where this false sequestration might
be unlocked and dispersed. Concentrated masses, impropriations gathered into
a few hands, useless alike to the possessor and to the world, why is it
that, by primary arrangements of nature, they have been frozen into vast,
inert insulation? Only that the agencies of commerce may thus the more
loudly be invoked for thawing and setting them free to the world's use.
Whereas, by a diffusive scattering, all motives to large social intercourse
would have been neutralised.

It seems clear that the practical liberation and distribution throughout the
world of all good gifts meant for the whole household of man, has been
confided to the secret sense of a _right_ existing in man for claiming such
a distribution as part of his natural inheritance. Many articles of almost
inestimable value to man, in relation to his physical well-being (at any
rate bearing such a value when substitutional remedies were as yet unknown)
such as mercury, Jesuit's bark, through a long period the sole remedy for
intermitting fevers, opium, mineral waters, &c., were at one time _locally_
concentred. In such cases, it might often happen, that the medicinal relief
to an hospital, to an encampment, to a nation, might depend entirely upon
the right to _force_ a commercial intercourse.

Now, on the other hand, having thus noticed the question, what
commercial value has China irrevocably for England, next in the reverse
question--namely, what commercial value does England bear to China?--I
would wish to place this in a new light, by bringing it for the first
time into relation to the doctrine of rent. Multitudes in past days,
when political economy was a more favoured study, have spoken and
written upon the modern doctrine of rent, without apparently perceiving
how immediately it bears upon China, and how summarily it shatters an
objection constantly made to the value of our annual dealing with that
country. First, let me sketch, in the very briefest way, an outline of
this modern doctrine. Two men, without communication, and almost
simultaneously, in the year 1815, discovered the law of rent. Suddenly
it struck them that all manufactured products of human industry must
necessarily obey one law; whilst the products of land obey another and
opposite law. Let us for a moment consider arable land as a natural
machine for manufacturing bread. Now, in all manufactures depending upon
machinery of human invention, the natural progress is from the worse
machines to the better. No man lays aside a glove-making machine for a
worse, but only for one that possesses the old powers at a less cost, or
possesses greater powers, let us suppose, at an equal cost. But, in the
natural progress of the bread-making machines, nature herself compels
him to pursue the opposite course: he travels from the best machines to
the worse. The best land is brought into cultivation first. As
population expands, it becomes necessary to take up a second quality of
land; then a third quality; and so on for ever. Left to the action of
this one law, bread would be constantly growing dearer through a long
succession of centuries. Its tendency lies in this direction even now;
but this tendency is constantly met, thwarted, and retarded, by a
counter-tendency in the general practice of agriculture, which is always
slowly improving its own powers--that is, obtaining the same result at a
cost slowly decreasing. It follows as a consequence, when closely
pursued, that, whilst the products of pure human skill and human
machines are constantly, by tendency, growing cheaper, on the other
hand, by a counter-tendency, the products of natural machines (as the
land, mines, rivers, &c.) are constantly on the ascent. Another
consequence is, that the worst of these natural machines gives the
price for the whole; whereas, in a conflict between human machines, all
the products of the worse would be beaten out of the field by those of
the better. It is in dependency upon this law that all those innumerable
proposals for cultivating waste-lands, as in the Scottish Highlands, in
the Irish bogs, &c., are radically vicious; and, instead of creating
plenty, would by their very success impoverish us. For suppose these
lands, which inevitably must have been the lowest in the scale (or else
why so long neglected?) to be brought into tillage--what follows?
Inevitably this: that their products enter the market as the very lowest
on the graduated tariff--_i. e._, as lower than any already cultured.
And these it is--namely, the very lowest by the supposition--that must
give the price for the whole; so that _every_ number on the scale will
rise at once to the level fixed by these lowest soils, so ruinously
(though benevolently) taken up into active and efficient life. If you
add 20,000 quarters of wheat to the amount already in the market, you
_seem_ to have done a service; but, if these 20,000 have been gained at
an extra cost of half-a-crown on each quarter, and if these it is that,
being from the poorest machines, rule the price, then you have added
half-a-crown to every quarter previously in the market.

Meantime, returning to China, it is important to draw attention upon this
point. A new demand for any product of land may happen to be not very large,
and thus may seem not much to affect the markets, or the interests of those
who produce it. But, since the rent doctrine has been developed, it has
become clear that a new demand may affect the producers in two separate
modes: first, in the ordinary known mode; secondly, by happening to call
into activity a lower quality of soil. A very moderate demand, nay, a very
small one, added to that previously existing, if it happens not to fall
within the powers of those numbers already in culture (as, suppose, 1, 2, 3,
4), must necessarily call out No. 5; and so on.

Now, our case, as regards Chinese land in the tea districts, is far beyond
this. Not only has it been large enough to benefit the landholder
enormously, by calling out lower qualities of land, which process again has
stimulated the counteracting agencies in the more careful and scientific
culture of the plant; but also it has been in a positive sense enormous. It
might have been large relatively to the power of calling out lower qualities
of soil, and yet in itself have been small; but _our_ demand, running up at
present to 100,000,000 pounds weight annually, is in all senses enormous.
The poorer class of Chinese tea-drinkers use the leaves three times
over--_i. e._, as the basis of three separate tea-makings. Consequently,
even upon that single deduction, 60,000,000 of Chinese tea-drinkers count
only as 20,000,000 of ours. But I conclude, by repeating that the greatest
of the impressions made by ourselves in the China tea districts, has been
derived from this--that, whilst the native demand has probably been
stationary, ours, moving by continual starts forward, must have stimulated
the tea interest by continual descents upon inferior soils.

There is no doubt that the Emperor and all his arrogant courtiers have
decupled their incomes from the British stimulation applied to inferior
soils, that but for us never would have been called into culture. Not a
man amongst them is aware of the advantages which he owes to England.
But he soon _would_ be aware of them, if for five years this exotic
demand were withdrawn, and the tea-districts resigned to native
patronage. Upon reviewing what I have said, not the ignorant and
unteachable Chinese only, but some even amongst our own well-informed
and reflecting people, will see that they have prodigiously underrated
the commercial value of England to China; since, when an Englishman
calls for a hundred tons of tea, he does not (as is usually supposed)
benefit the Chinese merchant only by giving him the ordinary profit on a
ton, repeated for a hundred times, but also infallibly either calls into
profitable activity lands lying altogether fallow, or else, under the
action of the rent laws, gives a new and secondary value to land already
under culture.

Other and greater topics connected with this coming Chinese campaign
clamorously call for notice: especially these three:--

First, the pretended literature and meagre civilisation of China--what
they are, and with what real effects such masquerading phantoms operate
upon the generation with which accidents of commerce have brought us
connected.

Secondly, what is the true mode of facing that warfare of kidnapping,
garotting, and poisoning, avowed as legitimate subjects of patronage in
the practice and in the edicts of the Tartar Government? Two things may
be said with painful certainty upon this subject: first, the British
Government has signally neglected its duties in this field through a
period of about ninety years, and apparently is not aware of any
responsibility attaching in such a case to those who wield the functions
of supreme power. Hyder Ali, the tiger, and his more ferocious son
Tippoo, practised, in the face of all India, the atrocities of Virgil's
Mezentius upon their British captives. These men filled the stage of
martial history, through nearly forty years of the eighteenth century,
with the tortures of the most gallant soldiers on earth, and were never
questioned or threatened upon the subject. In this nineteenth century,
again, we have seen a Spanish queen and her uncle sharing between them
the infamy of putting to death (unjudged and unaccused) British soldiers
on the idlest of pretences. Was it then in the power of the British
Government to have made a vigorous and effectual intercession? It was;
and in various ways they have the same power over the Chinese sovereign
(still more over his agents) at present. The other thing which occurs to
say is this: that, if we do _not_ interfere, some morning we shall
probably all be convulsed with unavailing wrath at a repetition of Mr
Stead's tragic end, on a larger scale, and exemplified in persons of
more distinguished position.

Finally, it would have remained to notice the vast approaching
revolution for the total East that will be quickened by this war, and
will be ratified by the broad access to the Orient, soon to be laid open
on one plan or other. Then will Christendom first begin to _act_
commensurately on the East: Asia will begin to rise from her ancient
prostration, and, without exaggeration, the beginnings of a new earth
and new heavens will dawn.

SHAKSPERE'S TEXT.--SUETONIUS UNRAVELLED.

_To the Editor of 'Titan'._

Dear Sir,--A year or two ago,[7] I received as a present from a
distinguished and literary family in Boston (United States), a small
pamphlet (twin sister of that published by Mr Payne Collier) on the text
of Shakspere. Somewhere in the United States, as here in England, some
unknown critic, at some unknown time, had, from some unknown source,
collected and recorded on the margin of one amongst the Folio reprints
of Shakspere by Heminge & Condell, such new readings as either his own
sagacity had summarily prompted, or calm reflection had recommended, or
possibly local tradition in some instances, and histrionic tradition in
others, might have preserved amongst the _habitues_ of a particular
theatre. In Mr P. Collier's case, if I recollect rightly, it was the
_First_ Folio (_i. e._, by much the best); in this American case, I
think it is the _Third_ Folio (about the worst) which had received the
corrections. But, however this may be, there are two literary
_collaborateurs_ concerned in each of these parallel cases--namely,
first, the original collector (possibly author) of the various readings,
who lived and died probably within the seventeenth century; and,
secondly, the modern editor, who stations himself as a repeating
frigate that he may report and pass onwards these marginal variations to
us of the nineteenth century.

[7] Written in 1856. H.

COR. for _Corrector_, is the shorthand designation by which I have
distinguished the _first_; REP. for _Reporter_ designates the other. My
wish and purpose is to extract all such variations of the text as seem
to have any claim to preservation, or even, to a momentary
consideration. But in justice to myself, and in apology for the hurried
way in which the several parts of this little memorandum are brought
into any mimicry of order and succession, I think it right to say that
my documents are all dispersed into alien and distant quarters; so that
I am reduced into dependence upon my own unassisted memory.

[THE TEMPEST. _Act I. Scene 1._

'Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and play'd
Some tricks of desperation.'

COR. here substitutes, 'But felt a fever of the _mind_:' which substitution
strikes me as entirely for the worse; 'a fever of the mad' is such a fever
as customarily attacks the delirious, and all who have lost the control of
their reasoning faculties.

[_Ibid._

'O dear father,
Make not too rash a trial of him; for
He's gentle, and not fearful.'

Upon this the _Reporter's_ remark is, that 'If we take _fearful_ in its
common acceptation of _timorous_, the proposed change renders the passage
clearer;' but that, if we take the word _fearful_ in its rarer
signification of _that which excites terror_, 'no alteration is needed.'
Certainly: none _is_ needed; for the mistake (as _I_ regard it) of REP. lies
simply in supposing the passive sense of _fearful_--namely, that which
_suffers_ fear--to be the ordinary sense; which now, in the nineteenth
century, it is; but was _not_ in the age of Shakspere.

[MACBETH. _Scene 7._

'Thus even-handed justice
_Commends_ the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.'

COR. proposes, _Returns_ the ingredients of, &c.; and, after the word
_returns_ is placed a comma; which, however, I suppose to be a press
oversight, and no element in the correction. Meantime, I see no call for any
change whatever. The ordinary use of the word _commend_, in any advantageous
introduction of a stranger by letters, seems here to maintain
itself--namely, placing him in such a train towards winning favour as may
give a favourable bias to his opportunities. The opportunities are not left
to their own casual or neutral action, but are armed and pointed towards a
special result by the influence of the recommender. So, also, it is here
supposed that amongst several chalices, which might else all have an equal
power to conciliate notice, one specially--namely, that which contains the
poison--is armed by Providence with a power to bias the choice, and commend
itself to the poisoner's favour.

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