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as to incapacitate them for using the opium-pipe. The foreign merchants still persuaded themselves to believe what Lord Palmerston subsequently stated in Parliament, namely, that the Chinese were insincere in their attempts to check the trade, and that none wonld be more chagrined than they to see it stopped. So English and American schooners continued to deliver the drug, and the governor's preventive officers, whatever might be their zeal against native craft, shrank from attacking these heavily armed vessels.

It must be admitted that there were reasons for such doubts on the part of foreigners. During full half a century the Chinese had suffered the anti-opium laws to be violated with impunity, and it was hard to credit them with any radical change of view now, or to suspect them of imagining that a trade of such importance, sanctioned by long custom, could be exterminated at a moment's notice. The Chinese are nothing if not deliberate. Their sense of expediency is outraged by heroic or precipitate measures. It was scarcely conceivable that they should have been suddenly stirred to a white heat of destructive vehemence against a commerce which had grown by their own connivance to the great dimensions of from three to four millions sterling annually.

Occasion soon arose for the local authorities to make further display of their determination. A seizure of opium having been effected in