The treaties of 1858 and 1860 were followed by a great development in all three services--diplomatic, consular, and judicial. Some years previously the China consular service began to be treated as a career for which special preparation was required, the entry being by competitive examination, through which a certain number of students were annually sent out to China, there to complete their education and then take their part in executive work. When additional ports were opened, therefore, making about twenty in all, in 1861, there was the full complement of qualified men ready to occupy the new consular posts, each of them competent to be his own interpreter. Diplomatic functions were at the same time withdrawn from Hongkong, where they had been merely nominal for eighteen years, and became centred in the Chinese capital. A few years later the judicial authority, so far as it related to the communities at the Chinese ports, was also withdrawn from Hongkong, and was conferred upon the Supreme Court for China and Japan, having its headquarters in Shanghai, established by the Queen's Order in Council of 1864. The new court was inaugurated by Sir Edmund Hornby, who brought to the work practical experience gained in the Levant, the assistant judge being Mr C. W. Goodwin, Barrister of the Inner Temple. This establishment has furnished a solvent for many of the difficulties connected with British residence in the Far East. Adapted with judgment to local circumstances, the court has proved of immense assistance to the consuls, who, subordinated judicially to the chief judge, could now obtain from him proper guidance in their difficulties, a facility of which they availed themselves freely.
Although a great advance on what preceded it, the Supreme Court could not of course escape from all the drawbacks which affected the consular courts. As between British subjects, it enjoyed the full powers of law courts in the mother country; but as between British subjects on the one hand, and the natives of the country, or non-British residents, on the other, the authority of the British court could only be exercised over the former. This one-sided action has been to some extent compensated in later times by the judicial qualifications of consuls representing other Western nationalities, who administer their own laws with the same impartiality as the British courts do theirs. But as regards the Chinese no such compensation operates, for although the treaties make provision for the judicial action of the Chinese authorities, their conceptions of equity and forms of procedure being wholly alien to those of the Western nations, their decisions seldom satisfy the foreign litigant. An attempt to supply a connecting-link between two radically different juridical ideals was made in the setting up of mixed courts for the purpose of dealing with petty cases between natives and foreigners within the settlements of Shanghai. These courts have been occasionally presided over by honest and competent judges, assisted by able foreign assessors; but as the native magistrates, being men of low rank, could always be overruled by the local executive, they lacked the power to make their decisions effective.