ABSTRACT
People who read all the verbiage that is poured out like a washy deluge of nonsense on this subject might imagine that China was a kind of Utopia where prisoners slept in cambric sheets perfumed with rose water, and that we, the horrible Fanquis, had come to disturb this by inventing tortures undreamt of by Danté. … We have a Judge, and Jury, and a fair trial, in which, from our ignorance of the language, the people and their manners, everything is in favour of the criminal. What would be the case with this man had he come under the power of his own countrymen on suspicion of such an offence? We should have had evidence, true or false, forced out of him for his conviction by torture; and the next morning, with two or three or more, whose happiness it is to live and die under the mild, benignant, and well-understood laws of China, he would have had his head chopped off on the execution ground, still damp with the blood of previous executions, and rank with the putrefying smell of rotting mortality.
