Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/47

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PRECONVENTIONAL PERIOD

tuguese to instruct Chinese artificers at Canton in the art of shipbuilding and have offered to purchase foreign ships, guns, rockets, and powder from any persons wishing to sell. Not only could we have obtained these articles in exchange for our produce, but we might have accepted them in payment of duties. In this way we might have been content to extract a few millions only from the Co-hong merchants, and in a short time we should have been able to confront foreign skill with Chinese skill. We could have leisurely strengthened the walls of outer Canton and the forts upon the river; got our armies properly together, and trained them up to naval tactics, gradually extending the same reforms to Amoy, Ningpo, and Shanghai; after which a grand review might have been held of all the fleet at Tientsin, and such a spectacle of naval greatness witnessed as China had never seen before. What enemy would then have dared to attack us? How could opium then have ventured into China? What slanderers would have then dared to open their mouths? This would have been what may be called "setting your own house in order first."[1]

It has already been shown that Commissioner Lin, at that early epoch, mapped out the only policy which his country's statesmen could have adopted with any hope of success, and which, in later years, they were driven to adopt partially. The above extract from Wei's history shows further that the lessons of the opium war were not lost upon thoughtful Chinese of the time. China herself, however, failed to profit by the knowledge.

  1. ↑ See Appendix, note 1.

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