Success Quote by Townsend Harris

It reads like friendly advice, but it’s really a piece of geopolitical salesmanship dressed up as pragmatism. Townsend Harris is telling his counterpart: lock in a deal with the United States now, and you can’t be bullied later. The hook is the promise of leverage. In mid-19th-century Asia, treaties weren’t mutual expressions of goodwill; they were legal crowbars. Harris offers a procedural trick: use one Western power to box out another, then call it sovereignty.

The opium reference is the pressure point. After Britain’s Opium War victories, “settling” the opium trade was a euphemism that could mean anything from moral restriction to formalizing a lucrative vice under foreign protection. Harris positions America as the cleaner option, implicitly contrasting the U.S. with Britain’s openly coercive opium imperialism. That contrast isn’t innocence; it’s branding. The United States had its own expansionist appetite, but in East Asia it could market itself as the reasonable alternative to British gunboat economics.

The sentence’s real power is the claim of inevitability: “England cannot change this.” It flatters the listener with a sense of control while smuggling in the premise that capitulating to treaty-making is unavoidable. Subtext: you’re going to sign something anyway, so choose the partner who lets you save face. It’s diplomacy as wedge strategy, using rivalry between empires to secure American access, legitimacy, and commercial footing - all while framing it as protection from the worst kind of foreign influence.