Page 316 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

302.

Repository in 1832 that although the Chinese "wholly deprecate

the friendship of strangers, .when you come into close con-

tact with them, .then, not the people only, but the local

officials also, shew themselves as fully sensible of the

advantages of opening a trade, as we ourselves are." The

missionaries further postulated their belief in the tie

between commerce and proselytism: "When a free intercourse
shall be opened, the influence of our conversation with the

heathen, and the example we set before them, .will be felt."

Nevertheless, an expanded commerce depended on a relaxation of

Imperial restrictions. Opening China to free trade assumed

paramount importance to missionaries. "Nothing is so impor-

tant," the Repository proclaimed, "as securing a free inter­

course with the empire. This for the present should be made
26
the chief object of our efforts."

Prodded by the views of its missionaries at Canton, the

American Board of Commissioners adopted a position of promoting

commercial expansion in China. In its instructions to S. Wells

Williams and Ira Tracy, who followed Bridgman to Canton, the

Board predicted that eventually trade would open China's doors

to all foreigners. A change in Imperial restric�ions would "be

silently accomplished by public opinion in China, roused by the

voice of commerce along her whole extent of sea-coast. II

26
chinese Repository, I, 5 (September 1832), 200; II,
12 (April 1834), 567. The author of both articles, who signed him­
self Philosinensis, was Charles Gutzlaff. English missionaries
often wrote for the Repository, although American missionaries
remained its editors.