“The Foreign Office repeat the instructions they have already given the Inspector-General, to give effect to the arrangement for the purchase of foreign steamers with the utmost despatch. The orders to the various customhouses to get ready their quota were issued some time back; and these orders have been repeated, coupled with a caution against delay, as it is the Emperor’s particular wish that not a day should be lost. The Board understand that there are several classes of foreign steamers—the mail steamer, the merchant steamer, and the war steamer; that the first is very small, the second the reverse of handy, and that neither are available like the third for warlike purposes. They are further informed that the mail and merchant steamers are paddle-wheel steamers, while the war steamers are ‘secret wheel’ (screw) vessels. This is a point of great importance, to which they would draw the special attention of the Inspector-General. The money being now ready for transmission, there is no reason why there should be any, the slightest, delay.” The despatch gives instructions upon other points, and concludes with again urging the Inspector-General to lose no time, closing with the words, “Hasten! hasten!!” The Inspector-General, obliged by ill-health to return to England, was the better able to work out the desires of the Emperor’s Council, and put himself in communication with Her Majesty’s Government, with a view to obtain their necessary sanction before he could legally purchase a vessel or employ a British subject. He was, above all, desirous to insure the thorough respectability and good character of the European force destined to guide as well as aid the Chinese—at the same time, to take care that the help should be granted in a way to insure real progress at Pekin, and thus guard against a return to the old policy of exclusion as soon as the officials were relieved from the fears and difficulties of their present position—and to effect this in such a manner as should not supersede, but merely supplement, the action of the Chinese themselves. This maxim should ever be borne in mind in our dealings with China. To supersede the native authority, besides humiliating him, brings about no beneficial result.