The Sun.
London, England, 1864-01-06 00:00:00

SHALL WE CONQUER CHINA?

(From an article by Mr. Meredith Townsend in the Vic'oria

Magazine

The conquest of Chin I may be easy, but to make it of
practical value the country must also be held, and held
perhaps for centuries, a task which would strain English
resources to the uttermost. We are accustomed to believe
that the Anglo-Saxon possesses in some peculiar degree the
old Roman governing power, but the boast has little foun-
dation. " Spawning force," as Emerson called it, we do in-
deed possess, but England lost the finest colonies any coun-
try ever secured through sheer mismanagement. She has
only kept her remaining Anglo-Saxon colonies by giving
them anamount of liberty which insures them independence
whenever they choose to ask it; her French subjects in Ca-
nada have tried one great rebellion; India, after a century
of her rule, sprang with hearty pleasure at her throat, and
still demands a huge foreign garrison ; and Ireland is quit-
ting the empire rather than remain under the cold shadow
of the dominant race. Rome had no revolts to quell save in
Judea, and the probability is that the British are rather a
settling than a ruling race. However that may be, the fact
is certain that it cannot rule the Chinese. The experiment
has been tried, and the Chinaman calmly and successfully
placed himself outside British law. In the little Chinese
colony of Calcutta, which is completely under British do-
minions, pays all taxes, and is externally undistinguished
from other classes, the only real authority is Chinese. A
secret society governs the body, and though for half a cen-
tury it has notoriously inflicted death for breach of its
rules, it has never once been brought within the grasp of
the criminal law. in Singapore, inhabited by 60,C00 pro-
sperous Chinamen, the Hoeys or Associations are by offi-
cial admission quite beyond the law, defy the police, and
govern their countrymen by a system of combined intrigue
and terrorism with which no law applied by Englishmen
has strength or promptitude to cope. In Australia it has
been found necessary to resort to the brutal device of ex-
cluding the most industrious of colonists just as we were
demanding by arms entrance into those colonists' native
land, and Hong Song is the asylum of all the worst vil-
lains of the Chinese seaboard. The people of India asks as
a principle to be let alone, the Chinese asks that their in-
ternal social arrangements shall be enforced from above,
and Englishmen failing to enforce them, they would in
twelve months honeycomb China with irresistible political
secret societies.

Then, noEnglish Government, however well inclined, can
resist the intrusion of Western ideas into its Oriental pos.
sessions, with the shattering force which they exert against
all Asiatic formulas. In a vary few years the Chinaman
would find that the social system he loves so well was be-
ginning to decay, to dissolve as it were in the presence of
the new ingredient, and the fierce resistance to the process
now evident in India, and which, if it did not produce the
mutinies, produced the popular favour with which the Sepoy
cause was regarded, would be repeated in China. We should
be harassed by incessant rebellions, and though they might
be suppressed, it would be at the cost of all the sympathy
between the governors and the governed, and of the possi-
bility of allowing natives to bear rule under us. Then as in
India we should close up all careers till all that the land
had of ambition; or generous, or original, or turbulent would
be forced by the mere necessity of things into an antagonism
to the foreign intruders all the more deadly because so long
concealed. Imagine the British position when maintaining
a rule which stiflid all aspirations, except the single one for
wealth, among a half of the human race ! As for educating
the people to govern themselves, it is not from conquerors
that the conquered accept their political, and still less their
moral ideas. The check on the spread of Christianity in
India, as the ablest of native converts once openly declared,
is that it comes to the people through the race at whose
hands Hindostanees are hardly willing to accept even sal-
vation. There is something in the manner of Englishmen,
perceptible sometimes even to themselves, which turns
the feeling of the races among whom they live into a kind
of respectful loathing, into a sort of sentiment with which
Englishmen regarded the Spaniards, when in the height of
their career. Men so regarded can teach nothing, and in
China as in India our rule, we fear, would produce little
except a leaden order, a material civilisation whose only
fruit would be the limitless accumulation of wealth. Since
we entered India not one idea has come forth of a native,
and the race which is tempted or coerced into abandoning
the production of ideas has lost all that gives it a hold upon
the future.

The social hostility, the habit of seizing every opportunity
against the British, which would assuredly arise in China,
would be twice as formidable as the same habit in India, be-
cause it would be in addition to it. So tremendous an ac-
quisition as this empire would triple the area, and, there-
fore, quintuple the possibilities of disturbance. Already the
fortunes of Englishmen are frightfully beyond their own
control. Already their comfort and their status, their in-
ternal taxation and external position, are alike at the mercy
of races scattered over every part of the globe ; a rising in
the Punjab or a revolt among the Maories, an invasion of
Zooloos, or an outburst among the Cingalese, a panic about
convicts in Australia, or a surge of protectionist madness
in Canada, every one of these or fiity similar events draws
from England some morsel of its resources, some expendi-
ture of its treasure and blood and energy. Doubtless such
exertions are in part recuperai ive, for human strength is de-
veloped rather than weakened by exercise, but it is possible
to overstep the limit, and convert the labour which the
Almighty in his mercy has made beneficial, into the toil
which involves a life of suffering and premature old age.
The conquest of China would, we believe, carry us just be-
yond that limit. It would be, it is true, in part an Indian
conquest, mit just because it would be so, the two countries
would fall into a dangerous eapport. They are already, so
to speak, visible to each other, and the permanent tendency
would be for Chinese to move whenever we had an Indian
rising, for the Hindoos to rebel whenever we were troubled
on the Yangtse. The mere addition of territory, too, to be
defended would in the event of a great foreign war be a most
frightful burden. That contact with the Russian empire
which we so dread for India has in China occurred, and our
frontier would march with the Russian for more than 1,000
miles. The seaboard cities would grow into mighty em-
poriums—Shanghai, which in 1860 was a village, has to-day
a million and a half of people, and a trade of 530,000,000
—each of which would demand a squadron to attend it.
That squadron could only be English, and war once de-
clared, our maritime force must either be dangerously scat-
tered, or we must consent to keep up a fleet which even
our maritime population wculd be overstrained to sup-
ply. As to armies, our resources in men are limited, and
statesmen ceafess even now, that should India rebel while
wo were at war the country might be overtaxed, and com-
pelled either to resort to conscription, that is to cease to be
England, or suddenly "to recall the legions to defend
Rome," leaving utter anarchy over one-half the world. All
those possibilities of evil would be tripled by the possession
of China, and add to these dangers the incessant drain upon
this little island for the able and daring and ambitious, the
classes who are to the community what nervous strength is
to the body, and our readers may perceive the risk England
would run of being overweighted. We have heard much of
late of the difficulty of keeping together empires grown too
vast—what shall keep together an empire with a third of
the earth's surface, and a half of its population ?
Finally, there are two moral questions to be considered,
one doubtful, the other certain, and loth decidedly opposed
to any immediate realisati Ai of so vast a project. Is there
any proof whatever, of any sort or kind, that the Chinese
want us to rule them ? If there is not, the conquest would
be a direct violation of all the principles which we confess to
revere—as direct a one as the conquest cf any European
State. The Chinese are not savages whom we can replace
by a race doing more work in the world. They have not
shown in their history any incapacity for surveying periodic
calamities such as the ono occurring now, and which after
all, is a trifle compared to the Tartar invasion. They are
not dangerous to any neighbours, to any grand but ill-based
European system which, like a Tor rock, may stand aloft

for ever if only it be not shoved. There is no reason for
conquest save their good and ours, and we have yet to learn
that their consent has been received to their own " im-
provement." We are in India, it is true, without such con-
sent, but then also we are there. Should we conquer India
now if the work were still to be done? The consent of the
governing class matters nothing, for it is as foreign as our-
selves, and Englishmen did not consider the Austrians
justified in crushing Italy because they were invited by the
Italian foreign princes, The willingness of the Chinese to
accept new lords has still to be decided ; but the other fact
has not. We already possess in Asia a dominion inhabited
by two hundred millions of men, for whose welfare we are
responsible, and what law of God, or rule known anrosg
men, justifies us in neglecting them for our new acquisi-
tions ? Nobody pretends that our work in India i s done,
that we have educated the people, or enabled them to
govern themselves, or supplied adequate justice or even
completed the work of material civilisation. In that great
empire there is scarcely a road, and not one great canal, not
a square mile of territory to which the title is perfect, not
a tribe every male of which can write and read. Districts

of two millions are left to a single magistrate, entire pro-
vinces have not a single college,throughout great kingdoms
millions of quarters of wheat and rice are destroyed in all
" good" years for want of means of transport to the external
world. The people cry aloud for more courts and more edu-
cation,for the improvement of their cities which we have neg-
lected,and for the rebuilding of their crowded and inconve•
nient capitals we have,it is true,made wealthy. Every pound
of force expended in China is half a pound substracted from
India, every merchant who prefers the broader field takes a
source of wealth from the narrower one, the able man who
goes to rule Kwangtung, might have made Chittagon a gar-
den, the very judges who would make Shanghai secure for
commercial men aro sighed for with bitter longing in Be-
cares and Nagpore. The Government of India needs more
railways, more roads, many canals, buildings without end,
°dicers without number ; whole departments of effort are ne-
cessary to progressive civilisation ; are we,who have accepted
the charge of Ilindoo destinies, to give all these things to
China, to feed the people with whom we have nothing to do,
by starving the people fcr whom we must !ender an ac-
count ? All we can gain in China in developed trade, and
new influence, and fresh resources, we can also acquire in
India, which answers every fresh demand by new millions of
produce, responds to improved organization by the ruizvel-
lous increase of strength which alone makes the conquest
of China pesibie. Suppose India heartily conciliato',