When two men were murdered at Wusüeh, the village ought, at least, to have been razed to the ground. When the Kucheng massacre occurred, the Viceroy and the Chinese officials, who _laughed_ about it all as they talked with the British officials sent to settle about compensation with them, ought one and all to have been degraded at the very least. No one likes bloodshed. The Chinese only get on as they do without an army or a police force by means of very exemplary punishments; they understand slight punishment as a confession of weakness, or an acknowledgment that the offender was not so much to blame after all. Nor does any one who lives in China believe in Chinese peasantry ever daring to murder foreigners except at the instigation of men in high place. People in England often fancy missionaries are very much disliked in China. As a rule, they seem greatly liked and respected each in his own neighbourhood, although in the abstract officials and old-fashioned literati may object to them.
Whatever may be said about all these matters, an English subject cannot but be pained on finding how little British Consuls are able to effect in redressing serious grievances, such as inability to buy or rent land in the surrounding country, whereby we were for many years forcibly compelled to live in a Chinese house in a filthy street inside the walls of an overcrowded Chinese city. Let a Frenchman or a Russian be the aggrieved party, and instantly his Consul is on the war-path, and the Chinese have to give way at once. Englishmen have gone on paying _likin_ illegally, until a Frenchman, backed by his Consul, successfully protested. British steamers are illegally arrested and detained by the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, and no redress is obtainable; when a French steamer is only boycotted by Chinese shippers, an indemnity is immediately claimed, and at once paid.
It is little things like these, for ever being repeated, that lead to Englishmen in the west of China often saying they must take out naturalisation papers as Frenchmen or Italians in order to get on. Possibly the bitterness thereby engendered will do the British Government no harm; but it paralyses commercial enterprise. And Manchester will suffer from it, when it is too late to alter anything, unless a more consistent and dignified policy be pursued in the Far East. People have not been proud of England out in China lately. It may be stupid of us all; but as a rule it takes a good deal to make Englishmen ashamed of their country. And that point has been unfortunately reached some time ago.