“Now, as my parting words, I say to you, if something is not done, our relations will become bad, our amity be disturbed. I believe that but for the officers of both governments there now might have been a state of things that might have led to a war; but we have exerted ourselves to prevent it.” [Governor Keih--“Yes.”] “I have done well, and on the eve of my departure am most _disinterested_ in what I say. I do not think it is in the power of either officers of either government long to preserve the peace. If the emperor does not listen, and appoint a commissioner to adjust the foreign relations, so sure as there is a God in the heavens, amity cannot be preserved. I say it in sincerity, as my parting words.” The personal character of Yeh tended greatly to complicate every international question. He represented the pride, presumption, and ignorance of a high mandarin, without the restraints which fear of imperial displeasure generally places upon Chinese functionaries. He was the instrument, and for some time the successful instrument, for carrying out the imperial policy as regarded foreign nations. He had a great reputation for learning, had won the most eminent literary grades, was a distinguished member of the highest college (the Hanlin), and the guardian of the heir apparent--indeed, on one occasion he called himself the fourth personage of the empire. Moreover, his despatches were much admired for their perspicuity and purity of language. He was strangely unacquainted with the geography, institutions, and policy of remote nations, and even made his ignorance a ground for self-congratulation. When questions of commercial interest were brought before him, he treated them as altogether below his notice, and on one occasion abruptly terminated a conversation by saying, “You speak to me as if I were a merchant, and not a mandarin.” He devoted himself to the study of necromancy, and relied on his “fortunate star;” believing that the city of Canton was impregnable, he made no serious arrangements for its defence. What Ke-ying preached, Yeh-ming practised; but Ke was a man of a gentle, Yeh of a ferocious nature; and the cautious cunning which often marked the course of the one was wholly wanting to the other. Yeh, armed as he was with powers of life and death, exercised them with a recklessness of which there is no equal example in history. He turned the execution-ground at Canton into a huge lake of blood; hundreds of rebels were beheaded daily. When he was asked whether he had really caused seventy thousand men to be decapitated, he boastingly replied that the number exceeded a hundred thousand; and to an inquiry whether he had inflicted upon women the horrible punishment called the cutting into ten thousand pieces, he answered, “Ay! they were worse than the men.”[12]