The process which had been consecrated by time naturally did not stop when the principal cause of it was removed. It continued uninterrupted after the monopoly of the Company had ceased. Indeed the case became much aggravated when the British agents, beginning with Lord Napier, became representatives of the Crown instead of the Company. And so little was the position understood by the authorities in Great Britain that, yielding to considerations of convenience, they appointed some of the very men whom the Chinese had been long accustomed to treat with contumely to be the representatives of the King. But the Chinese had a true presentiment of the nature of the changes which this new departure threatened. They had learned from Captain Weddell, Commodore Anson, and others what were the pretensions of the commander of a Kings ship; and then justly inferred that a King's representative would stand on a wholly different footing from a Company's superintendent. They resolved, therefore, to nip in the bud every effort to open international relations, employing to that end all the weapons which were familiar to them. The viceroy of Canton not only declined communication with the British envoy, but imprisoned him and intercepted his letters, so that a naval force was required to release him from captivity. Yet it was not malevolence but policy that guided the hand of the Chinese authorities--the settled policy of keeping foreigners at arm's-length at all costs. The rule of conduct enjoined by the British Government on the first representatives of the Crown in China was emphatically conciliation, as in the time of the East India Company and its superintendents. They were to "cautiously abstain from all unnecessary use of menacing language, or from making any appeal for protection to our military or naval force (except in extreme cases), or to do anything to irritate the feelings or revolt the opinions or prejudices of the Chinese people." That article of the "Sign-manual Instructions to the Superintendents of Trade in China" was faithfully carried out; while the one ordering the envoy to "take up your residence at the port of Canton" could not be obeyed because the Chinese provincial authorities placed their veto on it. The conciliatory demeanour of the British representative was met by the refusal, accompanied by the grossest insults, of the Chinese to receive or acknowledge him. And not by insults only, such as perverting the phonetic rendering of his name by the substitution of characters bearing odious meanings, and by various indignities offered to his person, but by interference with his domestic servants, and even cutting off his food-supply, did they coerce him into abandoning his post at Canton. Their conduct evoked the opinion from Lord Napier, in reporting the incidents to his Government, that "the viceroy of Canton was guilty of an outrage on the British Crown calling for redress," which drew from the Duke of