The affair was atrocious enough in itself. But its atrocity was increased by the language and the methods of the English representatives. The _Arrow_ had been entitled by licence to hoist the British flag. The period covered by the licence had expired. "But," argued Sir John Bowring, "the Chinese did not know that the time had expired, so that the insult to the flag is no less, and our pretext no worse." Macchiavelli himself could not have argued more shamelessly than this Utilitarian, and Cobden, who was a personal friend of Bowring, rightly denounced it as the most dishonest thing that had ever been written in a British official letter. The British agents were in fact dealing with people whom they thought to be barbarians, and they were not concerned to stand upon the points of honour which were commonly observed by civilized men. One of the incidents of the war expressed this unworthy discrimination between Europeans and Asiatics no less clearly than the methods of the diplomatists. During the Crimean War the Government had been very careful to avoid the bombardment of unfortified towns. However reckless they had been in going to war, they had had sufficient moral discipline to refrain from the wanton injury of defenceless persons. This rule, now universally adopted by all civilized peoples, was abandoned by the British Government in China, and half Canton was laid in ruins and some hundreds of its peaceful inhabitants were shot or burnt to death, in order to assert the superiority of the civilized Western nation over these insolent barbarians.