Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/287

able outrage, sallied out en masse, drove away the executioner and his myrmidons, and subsequently undertook to disperse with sticks a crowd of harmless natives who had assembled to view these unwonted events. The natives, however, retaliated with stones, and the foreigners, being compelled to retire into the Factories, remained there in some jeopardy until a band of Chinese soldiers dispersed the mob. "All these desperate hazards," says the official despatch of the British superintendent, "were incurred for the scrambling and comparatively insignificant gains of a few reckless individuals, unquestionably founding their conduct upon the belief that they were exempt from operation of all law, British or Chinese."

Captain Elliot was now thoroughly alarmed. He had been instructed by the British Foreign Secretary that no protection should be afforded to enable British subjects to violate the laws of the country where they traded, and that such persons must bear the consequences of the more efFectual exercise of Chinese authority against them. He saw, and publicly declared, that the continuance of the opium traffic was "rapidly staining the British character with deep dis-grace," and exposing the regular commerce to imminent risks, and he therefore ordered all British-owned opium-vessels to leave the river within three days, threatening that if they failed to do so he would seek Chinese co-operation to drive them out.