In a second article on the same subject, The Economist dwells on the importance, direct and indirect, of the English trade to China. In the year 1858, the British exports to China had risen to 2,876,000, while the value of the British imports from China had averaged upward of cg,000,000 for each of the last three years, so that the aggregate direct trade of England with China may be put down at about ci2,000,000. But beside these direct transactions there are three other important trades with which, less or more, England is intimately connected in the circle of exchanges, the trade between India and China, the trade between China and Australia, and the trade between China and the United States. "Australia," says The Economist, "takes from China large quantities of tea annually, and has nothing to give in exchange which finds a market in China. America also takes large quantities of tea and some silk of a value far exceeding that of their direct exports to China." Both these balances in favour of China have to be made good by England, who is paid for this equalization of exchanges by the gold of Australia and the cotton of the United States. England, therefore, independently of the balance due by herself to China, has also to pay to that country large sums in respect to gold imported from Australia and cotton from America. Now this balance due to China by England, Australia, and the United States and from China to India, as asked by China to India, on account of, en passant, that the imports never yet reached the amount of l,000,000 sterling while the exports to China from India realize the sum of nearly 10,000,000. The inference The Economist draws from these economical observations is, that any serious interruption of the British trade with China would "be a calamity of greater magnitude than the mere figures of our own exports and imports might at first sight suggest," and that the embarrassment consequent upon such a disturbance would not be felt in the direct British tea and silk trade only, but must also "affect" the British transactions with Australia and the United States. The Economist is, of course, aware of the fact that during the last Chinese war, the trade was not so much interfered with by the war as had been apprehended; and that, at the port of Shanghai, it was even not affected at all. But then, The Economist calls attention to "two novel features in the present dispute" which might essentially modify the effects of a new Chinese war upon trade these two novel features being the "imperial" not "local character of the present conflict, and the" signal success which, for the first time, the Chinese have effected against European forces. How very different sounds this language from the war cry The Economist so lustily shouted at the time of the Lorcha affair. The Ministerial Council, as I anticipated in my last letter, witnessed Mr. Milner Gibson's protest against the war, and his menace of seceding from the Cabinet, should Palmerston act up to the foregone conclusions betrayed in the columns of the French Moniteur. For the moment Palmerston prevented any rupture of the Cabinet, and the Liberal Coalition, by the statement that the force indispensable for the protection of British trade should be gathered in the Chinese waters, while before the arrival of more explicit reports on the part of the British Envoy, no resolution should be taken as to the war question. Thus the burning question was put off. Palmerston's real intention however transpires through the columns of his mob-organ The Daily Telegraph, which in one of its recent numbers says: The fix in which the Tories are hemmed up, by having allowed themselves to become inveigled into the responsible editorship of events planned by Palmerston and enacted by two of his agents, Lord Elgin and Mr. Bruce, (Lord Elgin's brother) I shall, perhaps, find another occasion for remarking upon.
Karl Marx in New York Daily Tribune