or its immediate neighbourhood until the year of our Lord 1904, when a British-led force of Indian troops shot their way over defenceless villages to a distracted capital.
The expulsion of Father Huc was not an isolated episode in the history of an isolated country. It grew out of one of the blackest crimes with which our civilisation is chargeable. Will it not be sufficient to say that the Chinese official who chanced to be then at Lhasa was Ke-Shen, a man who had, as signer, under duress, of a treaty at Canton in 1841, terminated the opium war and had thus participated in his country's humiliation, as well as in the disgrace of his country's enemy—Englandmore shameful in success than China in defeat? For fifty years the Pekin Government had endeavoured to arrest the fatal traffic. Insignificant when the Mogul emperors ruled India, it had grown with the growth of British power. Declared illicit, it had flourished in British hands; from British ships as depots it defied Chinese authority in Chinese ports. When, for a season, righteousness had prevailed ; when a Christian English officer had yielded up twenty thousand smuggled poison-cases to be destroyed ; when they had been burned by "heathen"
heathen" Chinese officers, zealous to protect their country from a curse, then a Christian Government declared war and forced by cannon's might a helpless people to admit the baneful drug. And, even if not baneful, even if it were ambrosia, what shame to override —but why argue this cause néfaste ' Let it not be rehearsed, for all have heard it, and let it not be forgotten in judging all Chinese-European history
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