Right and Wrong in Politics [pp. 265-293]

THE PRINCE TON PtL VIEW.
the field, promises to ambassadors, and capitulations of all sorts,
-were held to stamp the community with a permanent reputation
;of the highest or the lowest kind. It cannot be said that in
-modern times the stringent exactions of moralists in respect of
ordinary good faith between state and state, as between other
moral beings, is in any degree relaxed. A wholesome difference
and improvement, however, is observable in the greater exten.
:sion to which the moral scrutiny is carried out, and the more precise details to which it is held practicallyto apply. It is especially in the transactions of a stronger with a weaker state, or with
a state which, through the momentary event of an unsuccessful
war, finds itself in the condition of a weaker state, that the force
of a purely ethical canon of action is most decisively put to the
test. Not to dwell on the more perplexed and ambiguous history of British policy in the East Indies during the last century
and a half, and the current treatment of hopeful aboriginal communities by British colonists, only too often aided by a mass of
unscrupulous prejudice and guilty ignorance at home, the treatment of the great, tho unhappily, for too many purposes, impotent Chinese Empire, is a deplorable illustration of the quantity of iniquity which, even at the present day, one state may
wreak on another without exciting animadversion or odium
either at home or abroad. The facts are patent enough to the
eyes of all men, that England first countenanced and patronized
in every way it could the habitual evasion by its own subjects
and by Chinese citizens of Chinese laws for the prevention of
the importation of opium; that, because the Chinese Government determined, in the year I839, to put into execution its
own laws, and, after due notice given to British smugglers, confiscated smuggled opium which it destroyed without making the
slightest profit from the enterprise, the British Government
waged a desolating war with China, and extorted an enormous
fine on which the merchant smugglers were held to have a claim
by way of compensation for the losses incurred in conducting a
confessedly illegal and contraband trade; that advantage was
taken of the results of the war to wring from China a treaty by
which the weaker state was compelled to open its ports for traffic with the stronger; that in I859 fresh occasion was taken of
what was allowed afterwards to have been a culpable mistake by
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