The progress and the result of these negotiations only demonstrate that where our policy has failed, and where it will always fail in China, is in placing confidence in the Chinese. Our distrust must be the groundwork: it is the only sound foundation of our security. When the four ambassadors were at Tien-tsin, and had extorted from the fears of the Chinese treaties more or less humiliating to Chinese pride, according to the amount of pressure employed, it should have been foreseen that on the removal of that pressure the Chinese mind would resume its natural obstinacy. A treaty with China will always be waste paper, unless some security is obtained for giving it due effect. It is, therefore, greatly to be regretted that the ambassadors should have left the most difficult of questions, one most wounding to Chinese pride--the reception of foreign ministers at Peking, and the initiation of their constant residence at court--to be settled by their successors, who had neither the same high diplomatic position, nor the same large naval and military forces at their disposal. It may, indeed, be a question whether it was desirable to force upon the Chinese the recognition of our right to have an ambassador permanently fixed at the capital; but if we thought fit to insist on such recognition, there should certainly have been no vacillation--no disposition shown to surrender in any shape or on any terms the right which had been conceded. We could not plead want of experience, for we had abundant evidence of the determination of the Chinese to repudiate and deny every concession, the enjoyment of which was either rediscussed or deferred. We should have avoided, above all things, the transfer of the Canton question to Peking. Our right to enter Canton was incontestable. Shufflings and subterfuges on the part of the Chinese, hesitation and an erroneous estimate of the importance of the question on the part of the British Government and the British functionaries in China, led to one delay after another, and ended by an absolute denial of our treaty right, and an arming of the Chinese population to enforce that denial, accompanied at the same time by a Chinese proclamation mendaciously averring that we had withdrawn our claims. A similar course has been pursued at Peking. The Chinese, who have no notion--what Oriental has?--of privileges possessed and not exercised, saw in the willingness to give way to their representations, not, as we might have supposed, a consideration for their repugnancy, and a magnanimity in refraining from the enjoyment of a privilege distasteful to them, but an infirmity of purpose--a confession that we had asked for something we did not want, and which they felt to be a degradation needlessly and gratuitously imposed upon them. There is, in fact, neither safety nor dignity in any course but the stern, steady persistence in the assertion and enforcement of whatever conditions are the subject of imperial engagements.