The British cruisers _assumed_ that the Ti-Ping junks were pirates, because they captured Chinese vessels.

The British ship Bittern and another steamer sank every vessel but two in a rebel fleet, and gave up the crew of one which they captured to be put to death.

This is the description of another transaction of the same kind, in the harbor of Shi-poo: "The junks were destroyed, and their crews shot, drowned, and hunted down, until about a thousand were killed; the Bittern's men aiding the Chinese on shore to complete the wholesale massacre."[26] It is the deliberate opinion of this well-informed English writer that the Ti-Ping insurrection would have succeeded but for British intervention; that the Tartar dynasty would have been expelled, the Chinese regained their autonomy, and Christianity have been established throughout the Empire.

At the end of his book he gives a table of _forty-three_ battles and massacres in which the British soldiers and navy took part, in which about four hundred thousand of the Ti-Pings were killed, and he estimates that more than two millions more died of starvation in 1863 and 1864, in the famine occasioned by the operations of the allied English, French, and Chinese troop's, when the Ti-Pings were driven from their territories.

In view of such facts, well may an English writer say: "It is not once or twice that the policy of the British government has been ruinous to the best interests of the world.