supervision of the English representatives was not perfect, there will be less or more of smuggling." Keying paid Sir Henry Pottinger a ceremonious visit at Hongkong on the 2eth of June, 1843, and within one month of that day the commercial treaty was signed. Sir Henry issued a public proclamation calling upon British subjects to faithfully conform with its provisions, and stating that he would adopt the most stringent and decided measures against any offending persons. On his side Keying published a notification that "trade at the five treaty ports was open to the men from afar." The only weak point in the commercial treaty was that it contained no reference to opium. Sir Henry Pottinger failed to obtain the assent of the Chinese government to its legalization, and he refused to undertake the responsibility of a preventive service in China, but at the same time he publicly stated that the "traffic in opium was illegal and contraband by the laws and imperial edicts of China." Those who looked further ahead realized that the treaty of Nankin, by leaving unsettled the main point in the controversy and the primary cause of difference, could not be considered a final solution of the problem of foreign intercourse with China. 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. However inadequately the work of far-seeing statesmanship may have been performed in 1842, enough was done to make present friendship possible and a better