The China question Author:James MacDonald Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: This branch of our trade, then, is of incalculable benefit to the Chinese in supplying them with clothing; it is, however, probably as yet only in its infancy, a... more »nd must be guarded with a jealous care. We supply at present about 8,000,000 of pieces of cottons, which is only about one yard to each Chinese a year; but as the country becomes more tranquil, and order is again firmly established, we may, at no distant date, see this trade doubled or trebled, to the advantage of the Chinese, as well as of our merchants, manufacturers, and shipowners, not to mention the original producers of the raw material—the Hindoo cultivator, and the irrepressible Sambo in America. Now, the change proposed would imperil this legitimate trade, struggling at it is under the high cost of cotton; it would be, not a step in the dark, but a blind yielding to a dangerous delusion. Once let the high officials at Peking feel that, instead of being obliged to use the provincial governors as a sponge, they have only to increase the duties on foreign goods, and thus obtain the command of a large additional amount of money without any trouble, would they not feel this to be, as they would phrase it, excessively pleasant ? and how long would we wait before we should see an attempt to repeat the impost ? And what a clever stroke of policy, too, is effected by the proposed change ! The foreigners have been complaining in exaggerated terms that their goods are being subjected to " squeezes" in the interior, much above the legal rate of 2 per cent. Well, we now propose to abolish all transit dues in the interior, and accept in lieu thereof the payment of 2J per cent. additional duty at the ports. It seems so fair and plausible chapter{Section 4—only the remission would soon be seen to be but an opening for a sim...« less