got near the wall in our own occupation, some people ran up to us complaining that they had been robbed.  We went into the houses and saw clearly enough the signs of devastation.  I have no doubt, from the description, that the culprits were French sailors.  If this goes on one fortnight after we have captured the town, when is it to stop?...  It is very difficult to remedy....  Nothing could, I believe, be worse than our own sailors, but they are now nearly all on board ship, and we have the resource of the Cat....  All this is very sad, but I am not yet quite at the end of my tether.  If things do not mend within a few days I shall startle my colleagues by proposing to abandon the town altogether, giving reasons for it which will enable me to state on paper all these points.  No human power shall induce me to accept the office of oppressor of the feeble.

[Sidenote:  A sober population.] [Sidenote:  Maintenance of order.]

January 20th.—­I hinted at my ideas as to the evacuation of the city, and it has had an excellent effect....  There is a notable progress towards quiet in the city.  Still, I fear the tide of emigration is going on.  Parkes is exerting himself with considerable effect, and he is really very clever.  There were a great many more shops open in the streets yesterday than I had seen before....  What a thing it is to have to deal with a sober population!  I have wandered about the streets of Canton for some seven or eight days since the capture, and I have not seen one drunken man.  In any Christian town we should have had numbers of rows by this time arising out of drunkenness, however cowed the population might have been.  The Tribunal convicted a Chinaman the other day for selling ‘samshoo’ to the soldiers.  I requested Parkes to hand him over to the Governor Pehkwei for punishment.  This was done, and the arrangement answered admirably.  The Governor was pleased, he presented himself before the Chinese as the executor of our judgments, and at the same time we, to a certain extent, seemed to be conceding to the Chinese the principle of exterritoriality which we assert as against them....  I have no ‘responsible ministers’ here, though the presence of a colleague, and, since military operations began, the position of the naval and military Commanders-in-Chief, have required me to act with some caution, in order to make the wheels of the machine work smoothly and keep on the rails.  For this reason it was that I suggested a few days ago the plan of evacuation.  The maintenance of order in a city under martial law was, I felt, an affair rather for the Commander-in-Chief than for me, therefore I was in a false position when I meddled with it directly.  But the question of remaining in the city or not was a political one.  By letting it be known that I had there my lines of Torres Vedras, upon which I should fall back if necessary, I obtained the influence I required for insuring, as far as possible, the adoption