The result of the increasing irritation was a decree by the
Governor of Canton peremptorily forbidding all further trade
with the English, and in retaliation the landing of a British
force, the sailing of British war-ships up the river and a battle
at the Bogue Forts which guarded the entrance of Canton. A
truce was finally arranged and Lord Napier's commission left
for Macao, August 21st, where he died September 11th of an
illness which his physician declared was directly due to the
nervous strain and the many humiliations which he had suffered
in his intercourse with the Chinese authorities. The
Governor meantime complacently reported to Peking that he had
driven off the barbarians!

The strain was intensified by the determination of the
British to bring opium into China. The Chinese authorities
protested and in 1839 the Chinese destroyed 22,299 chests
of opium valued at $9,000,000, from motives about as
laudable as those which led our revolutionary sires to empty
English tea into Boston Harbor. England responded by
making war, the result of which was to force the drug upon an
unwilling people, so that the vice which is to-day doing more
to ruin the Chinese than all other vices combined is directly
traceable to the conduct of a Christian nation, though the
England of to-day is presumably ashamed of this crime of the
England of two generations ago.

It would, however, be inaccurate to represent Chinese objection
to British opium as the sole cause of the ``Opium War''
of 1840, for the indignities to which foreign traders and foreign