For four months before Lin's arrival at Canton (February 1839), the opium market had been overstocked and hardly any sales had taken place. The great bulk of the supply of 1838 had remained unsold, owing to the energetic measures taken in the inland districts, all through the southern provinces, to repress the consumption. The immense stock of the year 1839 was just commencing to arrive from India where, on the very day when over 20,000 chests were surrendered in Canton, sales were either impossible or ruinous, because the prices in China had fallen to between two or three hundred per cent. below the cost of production and charges. Under these circumstances, to rob the holders of opium of the stock which glutted the market, and to destroy over 20,000 chests of opium for which Elliot paid the owners at the rate of £120 a chest, by twelve months' bills on the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, was not to extinguish the trade but to give it a fresh fillip by relieving an overglutted market from the depressing weight of stocks. After March 24, 1839, when 20,283 chests of opium, which the holders could not have sold without ruin, were surrendered to Lin, prices recovered and the opium traffic was carried on with greater vigour and yielded larger profits than ever. By binding sixteen men, among whom were some of the foremost English merchants, gentlemen of high culture and refined feelings, to abstain from all future participation in the opium trade, which promise they all adhered to honourably, Lin merely helped to drive the opium trade into the hands of a lower and less scrupulous set of merchants. Lin's opium policy was an utter failure.
His policy with regard to the legitimate foreign trade was, moreover, equally unfortunate, because based on an utter misconception of the character and power of the English, whom Lin, like Napoleon, supposed to be nothing but a nation of shopkeepers, whose lives and fortunes depended upon the supply of Chinese tea, silk and rhubarb. His utter disregard of the sacredness which Britain attributes to the life, the liberty and the property of others, his reckless assumption that civilised
