Page 338 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

324.

colony. They also kept watch during these months on English

activity at Hong Kong. Although they rejoiced with the mer­

chants over the reopening of Canton in April 1841, Bridgman and

his aides did not move back upriver. By this time Bridgman for­

saw Hong Kong supplanting Canton in foreign commerce and con­

sidered moving the headquarters of the American mission there.

The resumption of the war in 1841 convinced the missionaries
of the inadvisability of an imminent return to Canton. This

realization reinforced their support of English policies to

defeat China.

Bridgman's Chinese Repository labelled the Chinese

"false and treacherous" and denounced the "perfidy and cruelty

of the Chinese government" in its attack on the Foreign Fac­

tories at Canton. The Repository stated that such an act called

for swift punishment. "Future operations, on the part of the

British government, must now be pushed on with all possible

decision and dispatch--the forces stopping at nothing short of
11 60
the walls of the capital. As the English fleet moved up the

coast to the north, Bridgman explained the necessity for such

hostile measures in the same terms the missionaries had ration-

alized their earlier support of English demands. In letters

to the American Board of Commissioners, he wrote that "God

is evidently carrying on his own great designs; and in wrath

he will remember mercy, bring order out of confusion, good

out of evil, and make even man's wickedness promotive of

60
"Journal of Occurrences," Chinese Repository, X,
5 (May 1841), 292, 296.