mediately after their successes in war, to turn around and give active and open help to the imperial government, whereas they had hitherto maintained a scrupulous neutrality.[1] The usual explanation is that the commercial motive, alone or chiefly, determined the change in policy, anxiety, that is, to secure the river trade opened by the new treaties. While that is doubtless one of the strong factors, it seems possible that the Russian offer, if it was known to the British representative, would have furnished an even more powerful political motive, namely, a desire to prevent the Russians from securing the Yangtse trade which Great Britain regarded chiefly as her prerogative. From now on, at any rate, little or no opposition is registered against the foreign adventurers who were helping the imperialists in the interior near' Shanghai. Some of these the Chungwang had encountered first at Tsingpu, apparently just after his capture of Soochow, and frequently thereafter he met them.[2]
- ↑ This had been greatly stressed in 1853 when the British visited Nanking. Meadows, p. 265, inserts a letter of Bonham, assuring the rebels that the British were forbidden to break neutrality.
- ↑ Chungwang, Autobiography, p. 35 and passim. But prior to that Ward had already made a name by the capture of Sungkiang with a few daring men, July 17, 1860. Morse, International Relations, II, 70.
