Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/42

desperately daring course for the suppression of the opium traffic. But he now enunciated a policy which his country adopted long afterwards with remarkable success; the policy of playing off China's foreign "friends" against each other. Seeing that the prolonged interruption of trade at Canton was beginning to exasperate other nationals, he advised that they be urged to remonstrate with England; and at the same time he recommended that China should equip herself with Western ships and Western weapons of war, and that she should assume a strictly defensive attitude, leaving England to wear herself out by indecisive attacks. No one has ever bettered that advice. It was given in 1840. Had China then adopted it as the basis of her foreign policy, and had she thereafter followed it persistently, her position would be very different to-day. But Lin had lost favour in Peking at the time when this counsel was given. He was judged to have made a complete failure with his heroic measures, and he remained in disgrace until partially rehabilitated by the ill-success of Kishen's pacific programme.

The abortive convention concluded between Kishen and Elliott passed into history under the name of the "Treaty of the Bogue." Its rejection led to a series of incidents. First the British attacked and captured the outworks at Canton, whereupon trade was resumed with the utmost expedition, foreign merchants hastening