Next, then, having endeavoured to place these preliminary points in their true light, I will anticipate the course by which the campaign would naturally be likely to travel, supposing no alien and mischievous disturbance at work for deranging it. Simply to want fighting allies would be no very menacing evil. We managed to do without them in our pretty extensive plan of warfare fifteen years ago; and there is no reason why we should find our difficulties now more intractable than then. I should imagine that the American Congress and the French Executive would look on uneasily, and with a sense of shame, at the prospect of sharing largely in commercial benefits which they had not earned, whilst the burdens of the day were falling exclusively upon the troops of our nation; but _that_ is a consideration for their own feelings, and may happen to corrode their hearts and their sense of honour most profoundly at some future time, when it may have ceased to be remediable. If that were all, for us there would be no arrears of mortified sensibilities to apprehend. But what is ominous even in relation to ourselves from these professedly inert associates, these sleeping partners in our Chinese dealings, is, that their presence with no active functions argues a faith lurking somewhere in the possibility of _talking_ the Chinese into reason. Such a chimera, still surviving the multiform experience we have had, augurs ruin to the total enterprise. It is not absolutely impossible that even Yeh, or any imbecile governor armed with the same obstinacy and brutal arrogance, might, under the terrors of an armament such as he will have to face, simulate a submission that was far from his thoughts. We ourselves found in the year 1846, when in fidelity to our engagements we gave back the important island of Chusan, which we had retained for four years, in fact until all the instalments of the ransom money had been paid, that a more negligent ear was turned to our complaints and remonstrances. The vile mob of Canton, long kept and indulged as so many trained bull-dogs, for the purpose of venting that insolence to Europeans which the mandarins could no longer utter personally without coming into collision with the treaty, became gradually unmanageable even by their masters. In 1847 Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, was reduced to the necessity of fulminating this passage against the executive government of the murdering city--'You' (Lord Palmerston was addressing Sir John Davis, at that time H. M. Plenipotentiary in China) 'will inform the Chinese authorities, in plain and distinct terms, that the British Government will not tolerate that a Chinese mob shall with impunity maltreat British subjects in China, whenever they get them into their power; and that if the Chinese authorities will not punish and prevent such outrages, the British Government will be obliged to take the matter into their own hands; and it will not be _their_ fault if, in such case,