The extremes of both despotism and democracy acknowledge no intermediary power or rank. The sovereign is the vice-regent of heaven, and all in all; he is the only rule of right and wrong, and commands both what shall be done in this world and thought of concerning the next. It may be easily imagined, that the Jesuits, on their first arrival in China, were delighted with such a perfect specimen of government according to their political sentiments. They tried all that human power could command to succeed in the conversion of this worldly paradise. The fathers disguised themselves as astronomers, watchmakers, painters, musicians, and engineers.[2] They forged inscriptions[3] and invented miracles, and almost went to the extent of canonizing Confucius. But this cunning deference to Chinese customs involved the Jesuits in a dispute with their more pious but less prudent competitors; and notwithstanding all the cleverness of the Jesuits, the Chinese saw at last, that in becoming Roman Catholic Christians they must cease to be Chinese, and obey a foreign sovereign in the _Great Western Ocean_. Toland affirms, that the Chinese and the Irish, in the time of their heathen monarch Laogirius, were the only nations in which religious persecutions never existed;[4] this praise now refers exclusively to Ireland. Roman Catholicism is at this moment nearly extinguished in China. To become a Christian is considered high-treason, and the only Roman Catholic priest at Canton at the present time, is compelled to hide himself under the mask of shopkeeper. In their successful times, during the seventeenth century, the Roman Catholic Missionaries published in Europe, that no nation was more virtuous, nor any government more enlightened than that of the Chinese; these false eulogies were the source of that high opinion in which the Chinese were formerly held in Europe.
The merchants and adventurers who came to China "to make money" found both the government and people widely different from descriptions given by the Jesuits. They found that the Chinese officers of government, commonly called Mandarins, would think themselves defiled by the least intercourse with foreigners, particularly merchants; and that the laws are often interpreted quite differently before and after receiving bribes. The Europeans were proud of their civilization and cleverness in mercantile transactions, and considered the inhabitants of all the other parts of the world as barbarians; but they found, to their astonishment and disappointment, the Chinese still more proud and cunning. We may easily presume that these deluded merchants became very irritated, and in their anger they reported to their countrymen in Europe that the Chinese were the most treacherous and abandoned people in the world,[5] that "they were only a peculiar race of savages," and required to be chastised in one way or another; which would certainly be very easy. Commodore Anson, with a single weather-beaten sixty-gun ship, in fact, set the whole power of the Chinese Government at defiance.