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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Untitled Article
barbed , and thrust into the sore-placed arcana of our diseased government . * All these things , reasoning from cause to effect , are as plain as the stars in the sea . It is no use to persist in being a devil thus prematurely . We will not allow it here . You cannot fail of understanding me ; for you must assuredly be a man of conspicuous wisdom , elected expressly from your tribe , or you would never have been placed in so important a situation ! Your mission must also be attended with
considerable expense to your people . Act , therefore , according to reason . Go down to Macao with all becoming speed . Treat us with the respect
which is due from a barharian nation seeking commerce with the Celestial Empire , and we will trade as usual with your honourable merchants . But do not come to us with peacock's feather , sword , and trumpet , saying , " Your Twankay , or your life !'' ' Governor of Canton , we come over to your side ! Barbarians though you call us , we forgive you for your cause . Despotic as is your government , we know that it . is not your fault ; and if it
were , we must pronounce fairly in this question . You have the best of the argument . You have the best of it by far ; it is we , English , who are the despots at heart . We will come up to Canton ; we will outrage and deride your laws ; we will trade with you , whether you like it not !—in short , we will have your twankay , souchong , hyson , or your lives ! But , are we not about to prove ourselves the very barbarians they term us ? The original
official documents of the Chinese authorities upon the recent occasion , certainly reminded one very strongly of Gulliver ' s Travels . The emperor of Lilliput to the emperor of Blefuscu , &c . Fiction , founded upon elementary principles of nature , is the best and truest matter-of-fact history . The version of Loo ' s mandates and other ' chops , ' was rather high-wrought in the
' Examiner / though not quite so much embellished as the present Speech : both , however , are nothing more than fair deductions and paraphrases from the original papers . Granting , then , that the Chinese appear to us a singular , almost a ludicrous nation , does this justify us in acting upon the old barbaric axiom , that s might makes right / ' Is it thus we would convince them of our civilizat ion ?
\ n the eyes of the millions of the Celestial Umpire , excepting only a mere handful of merchants , we are outside barbarians and intruders . They do not wish to have anything to do with us . How would a man ' s justified pride prompt him to behave , if he knew this feeling existed among the inmates of any private house he had been in the habit of visiting / Why , of course , lie would go there * no more . Hut we , * proud English , ' seem disposed to act diiVerently abroad , where our interest is at stake ; and the sense of individual meanness is carried oil * in the generalized idea . li" the Chinese wish to have nothing to do with us , we have something to do with them . We want their twankay ! The Chinese
Untitled Article
Chinese Politics . 279
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1835, page 279, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2644/page/55/
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