The Opium Question Remained Over To Again Disturb The Harmony Of
Our Relations.
As has been said before, it would be taking a narrow view of the question
to affirm that opium
Was the principal object at stake during this war.
The real point was whether the Chinese government could be allowed the
possession of rights which were unrecognized in the law of nations and
which rendered the continuance of intercourse with foreigners an
impossibility. What China sought to retain was never claimed by any other
nation, and could only have been established by extraordinary military
power. When people talk, therefore, of the injustice of this war as
another instance of the triumph of might over right, they should recollect
that China in the first place was wrong in claiming an impossible position
in the family of nations. We cannot doubt that if the acts of Commissioner
Lin had been condoned the lives of all Europeans would have been at the
mercy of a system which recognizes no gradation in crime, which affords
many facilities for the manufacture of false evidence, and which inflicts
punishment altogether in excess of the fault. It is gratifying to find
that many unprejudiced persons declared at the time that the war which
resulted in the Nankin treaty was a just one, and so eminent an authority
on international law as John Quincy Adams drew up an elaborate treatise to
show that "Britain had the righteous cause against China." We may leave
the scene of contest and turn from the record of an unequal war with the
reflection that the results of the struggle were to be good.
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