CHAPTER IX.
Exodus from Macao and Events Leading up to the Cession of Hongkong.
1839 to 1841.
he Imperial Commissioner Lin had been instructed by the Government of Peking to do two things, both of which were equally impossible, viz. to extirpate the opium traffic, root and branch, but at the same time to secure the continuance at Canton of the legitimate foreign trade under the old regime. When Lin arrived in Canton, he found the opium trade stagnant and its worst features, the forced trade between Lintin and Whampoa, entirely cut off through the vigorous action, resorted to at the last moment, of the Cantonese Authorities. Had he confined himself to do the only thing possible, viz. to seek to initiate measures tending to bring about, in course of time, a moral regeneration of the Chinese nation, so as to reduce the demand for opium to the lowest possible minimum, and at the same time to introduce a moral reform of the mode of conducting the opium trade, so as to prevent the recurrence of its glaring abuses, he might have done some good and paved the way for an eventual peaceful solution of this complicated opium problem. But his instructions, based as they were on his own original violent recommendations to the Throne, pledged him to an extreme policy, impossible to carry out and necessarily resulting in giving the opium trade a new impetus, besides convincing at last even the people in England that, apart from the opium question, the legitimate trade itself could not be carried on, in a manner compatible with England's dignity, under the old conditions.
