of preserving neutrality, aided the Imperialists in putting down the insurrection in such ways as this.  The British cruisers assumed that the Ti-Ping junks were pirates, because they captured Chinese vessels.  The British ship Bittern and another steamer sank every vessel but two in a rebel fleet, and gave up the crew of one which they captured to be put to death.  This is the description of another transaction of the same kind, in the harbor of Shi-poo:  “The junks were destroyed, and their crews shot, drowned, and hunted down, until about a thousand were killed; the Bittern’s men aiding the Chinese on shore to complete the wholesale massacre."[26]

It is the deliberate opinion of this well-informed English writer that the Ti-Ping insurrection would have succeeded but for British intervention; that the Tartar dynasty would have been expelled, the Chinese regained their autonomy, and Christianity have been established throughout the Empire.  At the end of his book he gives a table of forty-three battles and massacres in which the British soldiers and navy took part, in which about four hundred thousand of the Ti-Pings were killed, and he estimates that more than two millions more died of starvation in 1863 and 1864, in the famine occasioned by the operations of the allied English, French, and Chinese troop’s, when the Ti-Pings were driven from their territories.  In view of such facts, well may an English writer say:  “It is not once or twice that the policy of the British government has been ruinous to the best interests of the world.  Disregard of international law and of treaty law in Europe, deeds of piracy and spoliation in Asia, one vast system of wrong and violence, have everywhere for years marked the dealings of the British government with the weaker races of the globe."[27]

Other Englishmen, beside “Lin-Le” and Mr. Meadows, give the same testimony to the Christian character of this great movement in China.  Captain Fishbourne, describing his visit in H.M.S.  Hermes to Nan-king, says:  “It was obvious to the commonest observer that they were practically a different race.”  They had the Scriptures, many seemed to him to be practical Christians, serious and religious, believing in a special Providence, thinking that their trials were sent to purify them.  “They accuse us of magic,” said one.  “The only magic we employ is prayer to God.”  The man who said this, says Captain Fishbourne, “was a little shrivelled-up person, but he uttered words of courageous confidence in God, and could utter the words of a hero.  He and others like him have impressed the minds of their followers with their own courage and morality.”

The English Bishop of Victoria has constantly given the same testimony.  Of one of the Ti-Ping books Dr. Medhurst says:  “There is not a word in it which a Christian missionary might not adopt and circulate as a tract for the benefit of the Chinese.”