Their own government is founded upon the principle that as a nation
they are superior to the rest of mankind. They believe themselves
and their country especially privileged over all others; that their
dominion is the celestial empire, and their territory the flowery
land.

"The fundamental principle of the Chinese empire is anti-commercial.
It is founded entirely upon the second and third of Vattel's general
principles, to the total exclusion of the first. It admits no
obligation to hold commercial intercourse with others. It utterly
denies the equality of other nations with itself, and even their
independence. It holds itself to be the centre of the terraqueous
globe,--equal to the heavenly host,--and all other nations with whom
it has any relations, political or commercial, as outside tributary
barbarians, reverently submissive to the will of its despotic chief.
It is upon this principle, openly avowed and inflexibly maintained,
that the principal maritime nations of Europe for several centuries,
and the United States of America from the time of their acknowledged
independence, have been content to hold commercial intercourse with
the empire of China.

"It is time that this enormous outrage upon the rights of human
nature, and upon the first principle of the rights of nations,
should cease. These principles of the Chinese empire, too long
connived at and truckled to by the mightiest Christian nations of
the civilized world, have at length been brought into conflict with
the principles and the power of the British empire; and I cannot
forbear to express the hope that Britain, after taking the lead in
the abolition of the African slave-trade and of slavery, and of the
still more degrading tribute to the Barbary African Mahometans, will
extend her liberating arm to the furthest bound of Asia, and at the
close of the present contest insist upon concluding the peace upon
terms of perfect equality with the Chinese empire, and that the
future commerce shall be carried on upon terms of equality and
reciprocity between the two communities parties to the trade, for
the benefit of both; each retaining the right of prohibition and of
regulation, to interdict any article or branch of trade injurious to
itself, as for example the article of opium, and to secure itself
against the practic