OUR CHINESE LAURELS.
[From the Times of August 5.] There bas been some more fighting at Ningpo, in which from five to seven hundred more Chinese have perished, with the loss of three killed and forty wounded to ourselves. It is with no pleasure that we report these sickening successes : such news may, of course, be periodically expected, so lung as our disciplined troops are employed against this helpless and uuwarlike enemy, and can afford little subject for pride or satisfaction. War is bad enough in itself. It is always sufficiently shocking to destroy armies and chastise people for the alleged fault of their governors, and only bearable from its absolute necessity ; but with such a cause and such an enemy as we have here to deal with, it be- comes a subject for unmixed and bitter shame. The principal head, however, of our intelligence from China was more important if true. 'It was said that Yang, an Imperial Commissioner, was en route to offer 40,000,000 dollars as compensation to the British for the expenses of the war and the surrendered opium ; also the cession of Hong Kong as the price of peace.' Our feelings respecting such news as this are, we confess, of a mixed, perhaps in- consistent character. Infamously as we have used the Chinese, we are glad to hear that they are giving in; because, if they do not, it is unhappily certain that we shall use them worse. We and our country are implicated in the dis- credit, in the guilt of these transactions ; and we feel, while that is the case, somewhat as a well-meaning traveller might whom some strange freak of for- tune had compelled to cast in his lot with a company of footpads—earnestly disposed to deprecate any desperate resistance on the part of the objects of his companions' cupidity and to pray for their speedy victory, not, certainly, from any favour towards their unholy vocation or anxiety to enrich himself by any share in the plunder, but from a knowledge of Iris companions' determination, and a consequent fear of finding himself involved as accessory to a murder as well as robbery. We have little hope that under any Ministry, Whig or Tory, our entangled Eastern policy will be settled on principles of true honour and Justice; and, little as we should have to be proud of in the appropriation of the 40,000,000 dollars of which Yang is said to be the bearer, we cannot but rejoice at the prospect of any approaching settlement, and are content to limit our aspirations to the hope that we may aa soon, and with as little noise as possible, get quit of this most ugly affair. With regard to the cession of Hong Kong, we must express our earnest hope that that standing disgrace, for such it would be, may at least be spared us, and that our negotiators will satisfy themselves with the receipt of that treasure which is to remunerate us and our proteges, the opium-smugglers, for Our actual disbursements, without saddling the nation with a permanent record of its own disgrace in an unjustifiable acquisition of territory. Having forced ourselves on their shores and our commerce into their ports, for our own and strictly for our own advantage—having encouraged the violation of their laws by our subjects, and that on no point of formal or ceremonial enactment, but in a matter affecting closely and deeply the wellbeing of the people— we proceed to take advantage of the mismanagement of our own people, and their rude way of enforcing substantial justice, to carry on, not so much a war as a slaughter against this harmless people. We insist on placing ourselves under their law ; we quarrel with them because that law, which is thus of our seeking, not their imposing, is not correspondent with European notions of fairness; and we are now, it seems, about to exact from the comparatively innocent party, not only the expenses of the quarrel—not only compensation for the arbitrary though substantially just punishment to which our merchants have been subjected, but a locus stanch within their do- minions, from which, if the analogy of our past Indian policy has any signifi- cance, we can and probably shall extend, first our influence and then our em- pire, over au such parts of his Celestial Majesty's present dominions as may from time to time appear convenient. 'We earnestly trust, that, in spite of the theories of shameless conquest avowed by some of those who have lately directed our Indian policy, the present Government, if they do not immediately abandon, will yet shrink from such an unscrupulous development of a system of mere selfish aggrandizement.
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