Amboyna, in Japan, and in Java, &c.; witness the bigoted
oppressions, where and when soever they had power, of the colonising
Portuguese and Spaniards. Tyranny and merciless severities for the ruin
of commercial rivals have been no rarities for the last three and a half
centuries in any region of the East. But first of all, from Great
Britain in 1842 was heard the free, spontaneous proclamation--this was a
rarity--unlimited access, with advantages the very same as her own, to a
commerce which it was always imagined that she laboured to hedge round
with repulsions, making it sacred to her own privileged use. A royal
gift was this; but a gift which has not been received by Christendom in
a corresponding spirit of liberal appreciation. One proof of _that_ may
be read in the invidious statement, supported by no facts or names,
which I have just cited. Were this even true, a London merchant is not
therefore a Londoner, or even a Briton. Germans, Swiss, Frenchmen, &c.,
are settled there as merchants, in crowds. No nation, however, is
compromised by any act of her citizens acting as separate and
uncountenanced individuals. So that, even if better established as a
fact, this idle story would still be a calumny; and as a calumny it
would merit little notice. Nevertheless, I have felt it prudent to give
it a prominent station, as fitted peculiarly, by the dark shadows of its
malice, pointed at our whole nation collectively, to call into more
vivid relief the unexampled lustre of that royal munificence in England,
which, by one article of a treaty, dictated at the point of her
bayonets, threw open in an hour, to all nations, that Chinese commerce,
never previously unsealed through countless generations of man.

[3] '_America_:'--For America in particular there is an American
defence offered in a Washington paper (the _Weekly Union_, for May 28,
1857), which, for cool ignoring of facts, exceeds anything that I
remember. It begins thus:--'Since our treaty with China in 1844' (and
_that_, be it remembered, was possible only in consequence of our war
and its close in 1842), 'the most amicable relations have existed
between the United States and China--China is our friend, and we are
hers.' Indeed! as a brief commentary upon that statement, I recommend to
the reader's attention our Blue-books on China of last winter. The
American commander certainly wound up his quarrel with Yeh in a
mysterious way, that drew some sneers from the variou