to compel them to make restitution to the contraband opium dealers, for the destruction of this deadly poison, which continues to be grown by the East India Company, and poured into China in defiance of all laws, human and divine.  Besides the loss of life sustained by the Chinese, and the fearful mortality amongst the British troops, from the unhealthiness of the climate, it is probable that little short of ten millions sterling has already been expended in naval and military armaments, and the enhanced price of tea and sugar,[A] in the monstrous attempt to force the Chinese to pay about two millions to those opium smugglers.  All this, be it remembered, is added to the burdens upon the industry of our own oppressed population.

[Footnote A:  It is well known that the high rate of freights from Calcutta, in consequence of the shipping required for the Chinese expedition, greatly contributed to the late extravagant price of sugar.]

“Earnestly desiring that you may be induced to discharge your duty as Christians, and whatever may be the result, acquit yourselves of your share of the national guilt, I conclude with the words of a friend:  ’For my own part, I think the present distress of the nation may be the retributive chastisement of our recent atrocious war in China and the East. * * * All history, and the daily march of events, demonstrate the perpetual retributive interference of an overruling providence.  Yet this doctrine, proclaimed as loudly by experience as by revelation, and as legibly written on the page of history as in the Bible, appears to have not the smallest practical influence on the most enlightened statesmen, and the most Christian and enlightened nation in the world.’

    “Very respectfully,

    “JOSEPH STURGE.

    “Birmingham, 9th Month 30th, 1841.”

    “10th Month 9th, 1841.

“Since writing the foregoing, the intelligence has arrived that Canton has been seized; that ’Gen. Sir Hugh Gough calculates the loss of the Chinese, in the different attacks, at one thousand killed and three thousand wounded;’ that the British have extracted six millions of dollars as a ransom for evacuating the city, which the Chinese call ‘opium compensation;’ and it is but too evident that the work of the wholesale murder of this unoffending people has but begun, for Capt.  Elliot, who appears to have been too tender of shedding human blood to please his employers, is recalled, and is succeeded by Sir H. Pottenger, who, it is reported, has instructions from Lord Palmerston to demand fifteen millions of dollars for the opium smugglers, and the whole of the expenses of the war, and to secure the right to the British of planting armed factories in the different Chinese ports.

    “Shall history record that no voice was raised by the Christians
    of Britain against the employment of their money, and that of
    their starving countrymen, in deeds like these!!”