How far these great potentialities were foreseen in the earlier years of the Customs service is doubtful. Even in their parental complacency Sir Rutherford Alcock and Mr Wade may well have failed to realise, as an uninterested outsider might have done, the nature of the power that was being nursed in their infant Hercules. Certain it is that they reckoned it as a factor on their own side. It is clear that Sir Rutherford Alcock, so far from regarding the inspector-general as an opponent, commended him to the Foreign Office as a valuable auxiliary. Mr Wade clung to the same belief for a good many years longer.
The first to perceive the tendency of the new relationship which events were bringing about was, no doubt, the inspector-general himself. China, he saw, could be best served by a virtual control of the British Legation. The nascent power was, however, too precious to be trusted to personal accidents, and the inspector-general wisely availed himself of circumstances as they arose to widen his basis of influence by establishing such relations with the Home Government as might save him from being wholly dependent on the life or the caprice of the representative for the time being at Peking. Such to an ordinary man might have appeared a hopeless ambition, considering the circumstance of distance and other adverse conditions. Yet by gradual steps this too was accomplished. A well-directed stroke or a happy accident established the inspector-general in high favour with the Board of Trade when under the presidency of Mr John Bright. He had summed up the results of the treaty revision[13] negotiations in 1868 in a congratulatory letter to the British Minister which has been many times published. As a masterly exposition of the State of China in its relation to foreign Powers it was warmly indorsed by Sir Rutherford Alcock, and is well worth perusal even at this day. The Board of Trade was much impressed by a presentment of the Chinese case so much in sympathy with the views often expressed by Mr Cobden and Mr Bright, and which are traditional in the Board of Trade. Their policy was noninterference in the affairs of China, based largely on their disparagement of the value of British interests in that country. In commenting on this closely reasoned State Paper, the Board of Trade specially selected for illustration of its merit the following passage: "Of course, force will wrest anything from China: but wherever there is action there is reaction; and as sure as natural laws continue to act, so sure it is that appeals to force in one age will give to the men of a later day a heritage of vengeance,--the Europeans of some future day may wish that their forefathers had not sown the seeds of hatred in the bayonet-ploughed soil of Cathay."