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PRECONVENTIONAL PERIOD
guese to be slanderers or the English to be scoundrels, could not but anticipate that the presence of the two together in Canton would conduce little to the preservation of peace and good order. There is, indeed, no blacker page in all this record than the page setting forth the acts of the Portuguese. They never lost an opportunity of misrepresenting the character and designs of the English to the Chinese authorities; twice (1802 and 1808) when an English garrison was placed at Macao to protect the place against possible French designs,—Great Britain regarding Macao as a Portuguese colony,—the Portuguese did everything in their power to injure their protectors in the estimation of the Chinese and to incite the latter against them, and in 1773 they handed over to the local authorities for execution an Englishman against whom no evidence whatever had been adduced. On that occasion the Vicar-General declared before the Senate of Macao: "Moralists decide that when a tyrant demands even an innocent person with menaces of ruin to the community if refused, the whole number may call on any individual to deliver himself up for the public good, which is of more worth than that of an individual. Should he refuse to obey, he is not innocent, he is a criminal;" another Senator said: "The Mandarins are forcing away the Chinese dealers, determined to starve us; therefore we had better surrender the Englishman." In every phase of
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