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the growing audacity of the foreign smugglers, and preventing their associating themselves with the desperate and lawless of their own large cities. . . . While such a traffic existed in the heart of our regular commerce, I had all along felt that the Chinese Government had a just ground for harsh measures towards the lawful trade upon the plea that there was no distinction between the right and the wrong." It was therefore essential, he urged, that there should be a British official "vested with defined and adequate powers for the reasonable control of men whose rash conduct could not be left to the operation of Chinese laws without the utmost inconvenience and risk, and whose impunity was alike injurious to British character and dangerous to British interest." He himself could not at once assume or acquire these "defined and adequate powers;" the assistance of the British Government had to be invoked. But it doubtless seemed to Captain Elliot, as a practical man, that to revert meanwhile to the arrangement existing in the days of the East India Company, an arrangement which had worked with comparative success, would be better than to continue his predecessor's policy of severed relations. He therefore signified his willingness to communicate through the Hong Merchants as of old, and the governor for Canton readily acceding to the proposition and having obtained imperial sanction, the British superintendent resumed his resi-