I. THE EARL OF ELGIN AND HIS MISSION.
Capture of Canton—The Treaty of Tientsin—Comments on the treaty—Sequel to the treaty—Omission to visit Peking—Comments thereon—How to deal with Chinese—Commissioners to Shanghai to negotiate the tariff—Two pressing questions to be settled—Delay of Commissioners' arrival—Resentment of Lord Elgin and change of tactics re Canton—Canton question same as Chinese question—Chinese demand for abandonment of Resident Minister—Lord Elgin's assent—Comments thereon—Treaty with Japan—The Taku disaster.
The transports bringing the troops from England were meanwhile hurrying at top speed—not in those days a very high one—round the Cape of Good Hope, and the navy was being reinforced by several powerful ships, including the mosquito squadron of gunboats which were destined to play so useful a part, first in the operations of war, and subsequently in patrolling the coast and rivers for the protection of peaceful traders. Lord Elgin's arrival in Hongkong, coinciding in time with that of the frigates Shannon, commanded by Sir William Peel, and Pearl, Captain Sotheby, put heart into the long-suffering British community at the port. But sinister news from India had reached Lord Elgin on his voyage to China, in consequence of which, and on the urgent request of the Governor-General, he took on himself to intercept the troopships wherever they could be met with, and turn their course to Calcutta. Before he had been many days in Hongkong, foreseeing an indefinite period of inaction in China, and being obliged in any case to wait the arrival of his French colleague, without whom no French co-operation could be had, Lord Elgin determined to proceed himself to Calcutta, taking with him the two frigates Shannon and Pearl. This welcome reinforcement not only arrived opportunely in India, but, as is well known, did heroic service in throwing back the tide of mutiny.
Fortune seemed in all this to be favouring the Chinese, nothing more hurtful threatening them than a passive blockade of the Canton river and its branches. But a fresh expedition was promptly despatched from England to take the place of that which had been diverted to India. A body of 1500 marines arrived in the autumn, and on them, supplemented by the Hongkong garrison, devolved the duty of bringing China to terms, the navy, of course, being the essential arm in all these operations.
Lord Elgin returned to China in ample time to meet the French plenipotentiary, Baron Gros. His lordship's policy had from the first been an interesting theme for speculation, not less so as the time for putting it in force drew near. It had been surmised that his object would be to leave Canton alone, and set out on another wild-goose chase to the north. That so futile a scheme should not be carried out without at least a protest, the mercantile community met Lord Elgin on his arrival in June with an address couched in the following terms:—
We venture upon no opinion at present respecting the readjustment of our relations with the empire at large, though always prepared to hold our advice and experience at your lordship's command; but upon that branch of the question which we distinguish as the "Canton difficulty" we would take this, the earliest opportunity, of recording our opinion—an opinion founded upon long, reluctant, and, we may add, traditional experience—that any compromise of it, or any sort of settlement which shall stop short of the complete humiliation of the Cantonese,—which shall fail to teach them a wholesome respect for the obligations of their own Government in its relations with independent Powers, and a more hospitable reception of the foreigner who resorts to their shores for the peaceable purposes of trade,—will only result in further suffering to themselves and further disastrous interruptions to us.
Many of us have already been heavy sufferers by the present difficulty. It must be apparent to your lordship that our best interests lie upon the side of peace, and upon the earliest solid peace that can be obtained. But, notwithstanding this, we would most earnestly deprecate any settlement of the question which should not have eliminated from it the very last element of future disorder.
The meaning of these weighty words, as interpreted by Wingrove Cooke, was, "You must take Canton, my lord, and negotiate at Peking with Canton in your possession." And he adds, "Such is the opinion of every one here, from the highest to the lowest." We learn from his private letters that it was by no means the opinion of the new plenipotentiary. "The course I am about to follow," he writes, "does not square with the views of the merchants." Yet his reply to their address was so diplomatic that he was able to say "it gave them for the moment wonderful satisfaction." The editor of Lord Elgin's letters suppresses the rest of the sentence. The new plenipotentiary hoped even "to conclude a treaty in Shanghai, and hasten home afterwards,"—a hope which could only coexist with an entire disregard of our whole previous experience in China; almost, one might argue, with an entire ignorance of the record.[37]
On his return from India, however, and on the assembling of the Allied forces, he found that the course prescribed by history and common-sense was, after all, the only practical one to follow, and that was to commence hostilities at Canton. Yet Lord Elgin seems to have submitted to the inexorable demands of circumstances with no very good grace. Indeed his attitude towards the Canton overture and his mission generally was decidedly anomalous. The two leading ideas running through the published portion of his correspondence were, "It revolts me, but I do it"; and, "Get the wretched business over and hurry home." Lord Elgin's mental constitution, as such, is of no interest to us except as it affected his acts and left its impress on the national interests in China. From that point of view, however, it is public property, and as much an ingredient in the history as any other quality of the makers of it. First, we find him at variance with the Government which commissioned him, in that he speaks with shame of his mission: "That wretched question of the Arrow is a scandal to us." Why? Her Majesty's Government had deliberated maturely on the Arrow question, had referred it to their law officers, had concluded it was a good case, and had written unreservedly in that sense to their representative in China. Was it, then, greater knowledge, or superior judgment, that inspired Lord Elgin to an opposite opinion? And in either case would it not have been better to have had the point cleared up before undertaking the mission?
But, in point of fact, the Arrow question was not the question with which Lord Elgin had to deal, as it had long before been merged, as we have said, into the much larger one of our official relations with China.
The truth seems to be that Lord Elgin came to China filled with the conviction that in all our disputes the Chinese had been the oppressed and we the oppressors. Of our intercourse with them he had nothing more complimentary or more definite to say than that it was "scandalous." For his own countrymen he had never a good word, for the Chinese nothing but good—until they came into collision with himself, when they at once became "fools and tricksters." Having assembled a hostile force in front of Canton, he writes, December 22, 1857, "I never felt so ashamed of myself in my life.... When I look at that town I feel that I am earning for myself a place in the Litany immediately after 'plague, pestilence, and famine.'" Becoming gradually reconciled to events, however, he writes, "If we can take the city without much massacre I shall think the job a good one, because no doubt the relations of the Cantonese with the foreign population were very unsatisfactory." But why "massacre," much or little? It was but a phantasy of his own he was thus deprecating. The curious point is, however, that Lord Elgin imagined that everybody was bent on this massacre except himself, and when all was over, and "there never was a Chinese town which suffered so little by the occupation of a hostile force," he appropriates the whole credit for this satisfactory issue! "If," he writes, "Yeh had surrendered on the mild demand made upon him, I should have brought on my head the imprecations both of the navy and the army, and of the civilians, the time being given by the missionaries and the women." An insinuation so purely hypothetical and so sweeping would not be seriously considered in any relation of life whatsoever; but no one who knows either the navy or the army would hesitate to affirm that the humanity of every officer and man in these services was as much beyond reproach as Lord Elgin's own, albeit it might assume a different form of expression. When the city, "doomed to destruction from the folly of its own rulers and the vanity and levity of ours," had been occupied, and the bugbear of massacre had vanished, the object of Lord Elgin's sympathies became shifted: "I could not help feeling melancholy when I thought that we were so ruthlessly destroying"—not the place or the people, but—"the prestige of a place which has been for so many centuries intact and undefiled by the stranger." Had he written this after witnessing some of the horrors of the city described by Wingrove Cooke, possibly these regrets for its defilement might have been less poignant. But though reverence for the mere antiquity of China is a most salutary lesson to inculcate in these our days, it is pathetic to see the particular man whose mission was to humble her historical prestige tortured by compunctions for what he is doing. One is tempted to wish the "job" had been intrusted to more commonplace hands.
Some of those English officials by whose vanity and levity the "city was doomed to destruction" were also writing their private letters, and this was the purport. "I confidently hope," wrote Mr Parkes, before Lord Elgin's first arrival in China, "that a satisfactory adjustment of all difficulties may be attained with a slight effusion of blood. Canton, it is true, must fall. I see no hope of any arrangement being arrived at without this primary step being effected, but I trust that with the fall of that city hostilities may end, and that the emperor may then consent to receive a representative at Peking." However, as soon as he gets to actual business with the Chinese, Lord Elgin finds that he also has to be stern even as others. As early as January 10, 1858, a week after the occupation of the city, "I addressed the governor in a pretty arrogant tone. I did so out of kindness, as I now know what fools they are, and what calamities they bring upon themselves, or rather on the wretched people, by their pride and trickery." But what the novice was only beginning to find out the veterans had learned years before.[38]
His attitude to his countrymen generally is scarcely less censorious than towards the officials who had borne, and were yet to bear, the burden and heat of the day in China. From Calcutta he wrote:—
It is a terrible business being among inferior races. I have seldom from man or woman since I came to the East heard a sentence which was reconcilable with the hypothesis that Christianity had ever come into the world. Detestation, contempt, ferocity, vengeance, whether Chinamen or Indians be the object.
From China:—
The whole world just now is raving mad with a passion for killing and slaying, and it is difficult for a person in his sober senses, like myself, to keep his own among them.
Again:—
I have seen more to disgust me with my fellow-countrymen than I saw during the whole course of my previous life.... I have an instinct in me which loves righteousness and hates iniquity, and all this keeps me in a perpetual boil.... The tone of the two or three men connected with mercantile houses in China whom I find on board is all for blood and massacre on a great scale.
The perennial fallacy that underlies the "one-righteous-man" theory from the days of Elijah the Tishbite downwards, and the ineptitude of all indiscriminate invective, would be sufficient answer to such sweeping maledictions. Below these ebullitions of the surface, however, there lay a grave misgiving in Lord Elgin's mind concerning his mission as a whole, in which many thoughtful people must have shared: "Whose work are we engaged in when we burst thus with hideous violence and brutal energy into these darkest and most mysterious recesses of the traditions of the past?" This was written at Tientsin after the passage of the forts, and it is well worth recalling, now that the vultures of Europe are wheeling round the moribund empire.
Canton city was occupied by the Allies on January 2, 1858. Commissioner Yeh was captured, carried on board the paddle-sloop Inflexible, and conveyed to Calcutta, where he eventually died. His absence made it easier to deal with the other authorities. He is perhaps the only Chinese official who has ever been made personally responsible for attacks on foreigners.
A provisional government was established under three commissioners nominated by the Allied commanders-in-chief, though in fact the labour and responsibility rested solely on one of the three, Mr Parkes. Having induced the native governor, Pikwei, to resume his functions and administer the affairs of the city, under supervision, order was partially established, and the chiefs, diplomatic and military, withdrew—much too abruptly, it was generally thought—to prepare an expedition to the north.
But the commissioners were left with inadequate forces to maintain order, fettered as they were by instructions which rendered them immobile. The British admiral, after nearly a year and a half's experience in the river, might have known something of the Canton problem, while the Allied plenipotentiaries apparently understood nothing of it. This was shown by what contemporary opinion designated Lord Elgin's "first symptom of weakness." When the figurehead Pikwei was brought from his prison to be invested with authority under the Allied commanders he coolly claimed precedence of the English admiral and general, and Lord Elgin, contrary to his own pre-arrangement of seats, &c., conceded the claim, thereby striking the keynote of the relations which were to exist between the Allied commissioners and the Chinese officials. Lord Elgin had occasion to remember this when, in 1860, Prince Kung tried to lead him into a similar trap, whereby he himself would have been relegated to a second place. The result of these arrangements was very much what might have been expected. Finding the foreign garrison passive, the turbulent elements in the city and the surrounding villages soon began to fan the embers of their former fires. They refused to consider themselves conquered, and set about reorganising their forces as they had done on previous occasions, and, beginning with secret schemes of assassination, they became emboldened by impunity, and by-and-by mustered courage to attack and annoy the garrison of the city, which was as helpless to repel insults as the mounted sentries at the Horse Guards. The army of occupation was besieged, the prestige of the capture of the city was in a few months wholly dissipated, and the officials and gentry affected to believe that the barbarians were only in the river, their presence in the city being ostentatiously ignored in public correspondence. During the whole of the year 1858 the cry went up continuously from the commissioners and military commanders, but it remained practically unheeded by the chiefs in the far north, except in so far that they drew still shorter the tether of the beleaguered force, in order that they might avoid all possible collision with their Chinese assailants. Lord Elgin at first deemed the turbulence at Canton a good reason for effecting a speedy settlement with the Imperial Government; but, as we shall see presently, that settlement when made had no influence at all upon either the Government officials or the gentry and populace of that city. The solution of the Canton problem was found in an entirely different direction.
It may be mentioned here that besides the administration of the city, several important matters of business were arranged during the commissionership of Mr Parkes. There was the question of the site at Shameen for the future residence of foreigners; and the regulation of coolie emigration, which had been carried on in an unsatisfactory manner; and last, not least, the first lease of Kowloon, on the mainland facing Hongkong, and forming one side of the harbour. This important concession, as already said, was negotiated on the sole initiative of Mr Parkes, the military authorities being talked into it afterwards. It was the first response to the demand of Wingrove Cooke, Why we had not taken possession of the peninsula of Kowloon, for "if any other Powers should do so—and what is to prevent them—the harbour of Hongkong is lost to us." Several important exploratory expeditions were also undertaken in 1859, in which Parkes was everywhere warmly received by officials and people, one of these excursions being far up the West river, the opening of which, however, to foreign trade remained in abeyance for forty years thereafter.
ROADS AND WATERWAYS BETWEEN PEKING AND TIENTSIN.
The next object of the plenipotentiaries, of course, was to negotiate at Peking, or wherever properly accredited negotiators could be met with, Canton being held in pledge. Progress was slow, because the fleet was so largely composed of sailing-vessels, which must wait for the fair monsoon; and the plenipotentiaries did not assemble within the river Peiho—the forts at its mouth having been silenced and the guns captured—until June. There followed Lord Elgin to Tientsin the French, American, and Russian Ministers, all bent on making treaties and on observing each other. The resources of Chinese resistance having been provisionally exhausted, imperial commissioners came to arrest the further progress of the foreigners by negotiations, or, to speak with strict accuracy, to concede the minimum that was necessary to induce them to depart. Such, we may be sure, was the beginning and the end of their instructions then, as it was afterwards. The work of negotiation, so far as the form went, seems to have fallen to Mr H. N. Lay, whose place was very soon to know him no more; but, in the words of Lord Elgin, "anybody could have made the treaty."
The contents of the treaty, signed June 26, 1858, fulfilled the instructions of Lord Clarendon, and the commercial articles which constituted its main body corresponded substantially with the desiderata of the merchants as set forth in their memorials in response to the invitation of Lord Elgin, the treaty going in advance of their demands on certain points and falling short of them on others. Opium was not mentioned, but was afterwards placed on the tariff; and a toleration clause for the Christian religion was inserted, without much apparent consideration for the consequences involved in it. A special memorandum from Consul Alcock, called for by the Foreign Office, had dwelt mainly on the precautions which should accompany the exercise of such new privileges as promiscuous residence in the interior; but, excepting in the case of merchants, where little or no risk was involved, the warnings of Mr Alcock were unheeded alike in the text of the treaty and in the subsidiary regulations.
"The most important matter gained by the treaty," however, in the opinion of Lord Elgin, was "the resident Minister at Peking," "without which," wrote Mr Parkes, "the treaty was not worth a straw." And substituting "lost" for "gained," such was also the opinion of the Chinese negotiators. It was, indeed, the universal opinion. Diplomatic representation at Peking might be fairly considered to have been the primary object of the war of 1857-58, as commercial extension and access to Canton had been that of 1839-42. And when "the miserable war was finished" and "his liberty regained" Lord Elgin cleared out his force, bag and baggage, as if he had been escaping from something, leaving not a trace behind.
As this move constituted a veritable crisis in Anglo-Chinese relations, it seems advisable for a moment to consider its bearings. Judging after the event, it is of course easy to perceive the fatal error of Lord Elgin in hurrying away from the Peiho. A fair criticism of his policy will confine itself strictly to the circumstances as known at the time. His experience had so closely resembled that of his predecessors, that he was aware that the Chinese were "yielding nothing to reason and everything to fear." He had seen with his own eyes the Queen's ratifications of previous treaties exhumed from a collection of miscellaneous papers in Canton, they being, as Commissioner Yeh remarked, not worth sending to Peking; he knew that the treaty of Nanking had been observed by the Chinese only as far as force or fear compelled them, and that its crucial stipulation had been for many years evaded, and then with unmasked arrogance repudiated; he knew that the very war in which he had been engaged, and his whole mission to China, were caused and provoked by the refusal of the provincial authorities to admit his predecessors or himself within the walls of Canton. In his own ultimatum to Commissioner Yeh, Lord Elgin had asked no more than the execution of the treaty of Nanking, which included access to the city of Canton, and compensation for damage to British property. Yet the Chinese Government, dreading war as they did, had notwithstanding incurred its hazards rather than open the gates of a distant provincial city. How, then, were they likely to regard the, to them, infinitely greater outrage of resident foreign Ministers in the sacred capital itself? This demand was practically the only one against which the Chinese commissioners made a stand. When everything had been written down ready for signature they drew back, saying it was as much as their heads were worth to subscribe such a condition. The answer was a peremptory threat to march on Peking, whereupon the commissioners signed the paper without another word. The crisis did not last twenty-four hours. No one could believe that a miracle of conversion had been wrought in that time, or that the enforced signature of the Imperial Commissioners had changed a fundamental principle of Chinese policy. What, under these circumstances, was the "present value" of the treaty? Was it so much as conceivable that it would be voluntarily carried out? Was it not evident rather that it was signed under duresse solely with the immediate view of getting the barbarians out of doors and leaving the key within? What said the imperial decree published in the 'Peking Gazette'? "The barbarians[39] had come headlong with their ships to Tientsin. Moved by the commands of Kweiliang and his colleagues, they have now weighed anchor and stood out to sea." If our former treaty needed a material guarantee for its execution, how much more this one? The test of good faith was in Lord Elgin's own hands; he should clearly have applied it, and presented himself at Peking for audience of the emperor. Perhaps it would have been refused, in which case he would have at least known where he stood. A campaign against Peking would have been easy with the handy force he possessed, or at the worst he could have occupied Tientsin and the Taku forts until all questions were settled.
This was the view generally held at the time both by officials and the lay community in China, before any untoward consequences had revealed themselves. It was strongly expressed by Parkes, who deplored "the ominous omission that Lord Elgin had gone away to Japan without entering Peking or having an audience with the emperor." We have not the advantage of knowing what Wingrove Cooke would have said of it, but we may infer the prevailing opinion by what another newspaper correspondent wrote from Shanghai on the receipt of the first news of the signing of the treaty:—
Shanghai, July 13, 1858.[40]
The "Chinese War," properly so called, has now reached its termination, and the fleet in the Gulf of Pechili is dispersing. Lord Elgin arrived here yesterday with the new treaty, which his brother, the Hon. F. Bruce, carries home by the present mail. The document will not be published until it is ratified by the Queen, but in the mean time the chief points of it may be tolerably well guessed at. The diplomatists are confident that the new treaty will "give satisfaction." That is saying a good deal, but how could it be otherwise than satisfactory? The emperor was so terror-struck by our audacious advance on Tientsin, that he was ready to concede everything we wanted rather than see us approach any nearer to his capital. There could have been but little discussion—the ambassadors had simply to make their terms. The new treaty, then, provides for indemnification for losses at Canton, a contribution towards the expenses of the war (for which Canton is held as a guarantee), the opening of more ports for trade, freedom of access to the interior, toleration for Christians, and a resident Minister at Peking. The only omission seems to be that Lord Elgin did not himself go to Peking; for unless the right of residence at the capital receives a practical recognition from the Chinese Government at once, it will certainly lead to vexatious discussion whenever we wish to exercise it. The right of entry into Canton, conceded by the treaty of Nanking, but not insisted on through the timidity of our representatives, ought to have taught us a useful lesson. While the emperor is in a state of alarm anything may be done with him, but when the pressure is removed and the fleet dispersed, Pharaoh's heart will certainly be hardened, and then Chinese ingenuity will be employed in evading as many of the provisions of the treaty as they dare. Let us hope, however, that when the weather cools a little and the thing can be done comfortably, Lord Elgin may still pay a friendly visit to his new allies at their headquarters [which he more than once threatened to do].
Such was contemporary opinion unbiassed as yet by visible effects. When the tragedy took place a year later, of course people spoke out more clearly. Parkes then wrote:—
The Chinese Government never intended, nor do they intend, if they can avoid it, to carry out the Elgin treaty. It was granted by them against their will, and we omitted all precautions necessary to ensure its being carried out—I mean, in quitting Tientsin as we did in July 1858, instead of remaining there until the treaty had been actually carried into effect. You will recollect in what a hurry the admiral and Lord Elgin, one and all, were to leave and run off to recreate in Japan and elsewhere. By that step they just undid all they had previously done.
Writing eighteen months after the event, and six months after the Taku repulse, Laurence Oliphant fully confirmed the views of Parkes. "The political importance," he observed, "of such an achievement"—i.e., a march to Peking—"it is impossible to overestimate. The much-vexed question of the reception of a British Minister at the capital would have been set at rest for ever." He then goes on to give a number of exculpatory reasons for the omission, which would have been more convincing had they been stated by Lord Elgin himself in despatches written at the time.
Nor was Lord Elgin's own explanation to the House of Lords any more satisfying. "In point of fact," he said, "I was never charged with the ratification of the treaty. The treaty was never placed in my possession. I never had the option of going to Peking." If his lordship had had a better case he would never have elected to rest his vindication on a piece of verbal finesse. Yet this speech gave their Lordships for the moment "wonderful satisfaction."[41]
The omission to consummate the treaty was followed a few months later by an act of commission of which it is difficult to render any clear account, and which Oliphant in his 'Narrative' makes no attempt to explain, merely reproducing the official despatches. Before leaving China Lord Elgin pulled the key-stone from the arch of his own work, reducing the treaty to that condition which Parkes had described as "not worth a straw." At the instance of the Chinese commissioners he moved her Majesty's Government to suspend the operation of "the most important" article in it, the residence of a British Minister in Peking. It is needless to follow the arguments, utterly unreal and having no root either in history or in experience, by which this fatal course was urged upon the Government, for they were of the same species as those which had induced her Majesty's Ministers to tolerate for fourteen years the exclusion of their representatives from Canton, the right to enter which city had just been recovered by force. It is most instructive to mark, as the key to many failures, how, like successive generations of youth, successive British agents in China have failed to profit by the experience of their predecessors, and have had in so many cases to buy their own at the expense of their country; for we see still the same thing indefinitely repeating itself, like a recurring decimal. Even at this the end of the nineteenth century we seem as far off as ever from laying hold of any saving principle, though it stares at us out of the whole panorama of our intercourse. Lord Elgin's procedure afforded at once the best example what to do and the clearest warning what to avoid in China, and it is the most useful for future guidance for the reason that effect followed cause as closely as report follows flash. It was his fate, much against his will apparently, to wage war on China in order to revindicate a right which had lapsed through the weakness and wrong-headedness of certain British representatives; yet in the closing act of a perfectly successful war he commits the self-same error on a more comprehensive scale, entailing on some future Government and plenipotentiary the necessity of making yet another war on China to recover what he was giving away. What is the explanation of this continuous repetition of the same mistake? It would seem that, knowing nothing of the Chinese, yet imagining they know something, the representatives of Great Britain and of other Powers, notably the United States, have been in the habit of evolving from their own consciousness and keeping by them a subjective Chinaman with whom they play "dummy," and of course "score horribly," as the most recent diplomatic slang has it. Their despatches are full of this game—of reckoning without their host, who, when brought to book, turns out to be a wholly different personage from the intelligent automaton kept for Cabinet use. Then, under the shock of this discovery, denunciations of treachery—black, base, and so forth—relieve the feelings of the foiled diplomat, while the substance of his previous triumph has quite eluded him. To this kind of illusion Lord Elgin was by temperament more predisposed than perhaps any of his predecessors save Captain Elliot. Though convinced by his first encounter that Chinese statesmen were "fools and tricksters," the simulacrum soon asserted supremacy over the actuality of experience, and to the honour of the very persons so stigmatised he committed the interests of his country, abandoning all the securities which he held in his hand.
But what, then, is the secret of dealing with the Chinese which so many able men, not certainly intending to make failures, have missed? This interesting question is thus partially answered by Wingrove Cooke. "The result of all I hear and see," he wrote, "is a settled conviction that at present we know nothing—absolutely nothing—of the nature of those elements which are at work inside China. Crotchets, &c., are rife, but they are all the offspring of vain imaginings, not sober deductions from facts.... Treat John Chinaman as a man, and exact from him the duties of a civilised man, and you will have no more trouble with him." Which is but a paraphrase of Lord Palmerston's prescription to consider the Chinese as "not greatly different from the rest of mankind." Such, however, has always been too simple a formula for the smaller minds. They would complicate it by trying, with ludicrous effect, to get behind the brain of the Chinese and play their opponent's hand as well as their own. Probably it matters less on what particular footing we deal with the Chinese than the consistency with which we adhere to it. To treat them as protégés, and excuse them as minors or imbeciles while yet allowing them the full licence and privileges of the adult and the sane, is manifestly absurd. To treat them as dependent and independent at the same time can lead to nothing but confusion and violent injustice. To allow engagements with them to become waste paper is the surest road to their ruin and our discomfiture. To let our Yea be Yea, and our Nay, Nay, is as much the Law and the Prophets in China as it is throughout the world of diplomacy. To this simplicity Lord Elgin had attained, at least in theory, when he told the merchants of Shanghai that in dealing with Chinese officials he had "been guided by two simple rules of action. I have never preferred a demand which I did not believe to be both moderate and just, and from a demand so preferred I have never receded."
What misgiving troubled the repose of Lord Elgin as to the good faith of the Imperial Government on which he had ventured so much, may be partly inferred from his avidity in catching at any straw which might support his faith. Hearing that "his friends the two Imperial Commissioners" who had signed the treaty were appointed to meet him in Shanghai to arrange the tariff, Lord Elgin welcomed the news as "proof that the emperor has made up his mind to accept the treaty." But as the emperor had already, by imperial decree dated 3rd July, and communicated in the most formal manner to Lord Elgin, expressly sanctioned the treaty before the plenipotentiary left Tientsin, wherefore the anxiety for further proofs of his good intentions? "This decree was forced out of the emperor," Mr Oliphant tells us, "by Lord Elgin's pertinacity"—and the threat of bringing up to Tientsin a regiment of British soldiers then at the mouth of the river! As a matter of fact, the mission of the two Imperial Commissioners was of quite another character from that assigned to it by Lord Elgin. The two men were sent to complete their task of preventing by every means the advent of the barbarians to Peking, just as Lord Elgin himself was, two years later, sent back to China to finish his work, which was to bring the said barbarians into the imperial city. Between two such missions there could be neither reconciliation nor compromise.
There is authority for stating that the Imperial Commissioners were expressly sent by the emperor to Shanghai (1) to annul the whole treaty of Tientsin, and (2) failing the whole, as much of it as possible, but especially the article providing for a Minister at Peking. The ostensible purpose of the mission, from the foreign point of view, was the settlement of the tariff and trade regulations,—about which, however, the Chinese cared very little,—and delegates were appointed for this purpose. The labour was conscientiously performed, on one side at any rate, and the result was highly creditable to the delegates. It was by insertion in the tariff of imports that opium became recognised, chiefly, it would appear, at the instance of the United States Minister, Mr W. B. Reed, who was on the spot.
Apart from the tariff two principal questions occupied the minds of the negotiators of the treaty—the actual situation at Canton on the part of the English, and the prospective residence in Peking on the part of the Chinese. Lord Elgin hoped, by an appeal to the treaty of peace, to put an end to the hostile proceedings of officials and people which had harassed the occupying force in Canton with impunity for nine months. But it was the treaty itself against which officials, gentry, and braves were making war, just as they had done in the case of the treaty of 1842. There was no ambiguity about the movement. The Government was carried on not in Canton but in the neighbouring city of Fatshan, where the Governor-General Huang, who had been appointed to succeed Yeh, held his court and issued his decrees. Two months after the occupation of Canton the puppet whom the Allies had installed there admitted that the object of the assemblage of braves was to retake the city. Two months after the signature of the treaty and its acceptance by the emperor the Governor-General Huang was publicly offering a reward of $30,000 for the head of Parkes, and was stimulating the people in every way to expel the foreigners from the city. All this was in perfect accord both with imperial policy and with Chinese ethics. It had the full sanction of the emperor, just as similar operations had formerly had of his father. For the grand purpose of destroying or impairing the treaty there was no distinction in the Chinese mind between legitimate and illegitimate, honourable or treacherous, methods.
Lord Elgin, who had returned from Japan to Shanghai to meet the Imperial Commissioners in September, disappointed at their non-arrival, opened communications with them by a threat of returning to Tientsin and thus saving them the trouble of completing their slow journey to Shanghai. On their eventual arrival there he opened a diplomatic campaign against Canton by a demand (October 7) to know under what authority Huang and the military committees were organising attacks on the Allies. In reply the Imperial Commissioners naïvely proposed to promulgate the treaty. This frivolous answer provoked the rejoinder (October 9) that the treaty had been three months before publicly sanctioned by imperial decree, that something more than "documents and professions" were required to satisfy Lord Elgin on a question of "peace or war," and he demanded the removal of the Governor-General Huang. The commissioners then said they had denounced Huang to the throne, and hoped for his removal at no very distant date. They would also move his Majesty the Emperor to withdraw his authority from the hostile militia. Canton being thus disposed of, as he supposed, Lord Elgin proceeded to other business. But the hostilities at Canton continued without the least abatement for three months longer, until something more strenuous than diplomatising with the Imperial Commissioners was resorted to. The British Government had at last become exasperated, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Malmesbury, wrote on October 14 to Lord Elgin, "The most severe measures against the braves are the only ones which will obtain the recognition by the Cantonese of the treaty of Tientsin." It was not long before Lord Elgin himself became converted to the same belief, for on January 20, 1859, he wrote to General van Straubenzee, after some successful reprisals he had made on the village braves, that "advantage should be taken of the cool weather to familiarise the rural inhabitants of the vicinity of Canton with the presence of our troops, and to punish severely braves or others who venture to attack them." By this time also he had realised that the promise on which he relied in October had been evaded, and he told the Imperial Commissioners on January 22 that he would "have nothing more to say to them on Canton matters,—that our soldiers and sailors would take the braves into their own hands."
The effect of the new tactics was immediate and satisfactory. When the Allied troops began to move about they were welcomed in the very hotbeds of hostility. "At Fatshan," writes General van Straubenzee on January 28, "we were received most courteously by the authorities and respectfully by the people." A five-days' excursion to Fa Yuen, the headquarters of the anti-foreign committee, was likewise a perfect success; and so everywhere throughout the Canton district. Lord Elgin was now able to assume a bolder tone with the Imperial Commissioners and address them in still plainer terms.
"The moderation of the Allies," he wrote to them in February, "has been misunderstood by the officials and gentry by whom the braves are organised.... This habit of insult and outrage shall be put down with the strong hand.... It shall be punished by the annihilation of all who persist in it." There was no need for any such extreme remedy, for as soon as the burglars realised that the watch-dog had been loosed they ceased from troubling the household, and fell back on peaceful and respectable ways of life. "With the cessation of official instigation," Lord Elgin wrote in March, "hostile feeling on the part of the inhabitants appears to have subsided," thus falling into line with Consul Alcock, who wrote: "Clear proof was furnished that the long-nurtured and often-invoked hostility of the Cantonese was entirely of fictitious growth, due exclusively to the inclinations of the mandarins as a part of the policy of the Court of Peking." And then, too, the difficulty of removing the Governor-General Huang disappeared. He had, in fact, been unsuccessful in expelling the barbarians, just as Yeh had been, and the imperial decree superseding him naturally followed. His presence or absence had then become of no importance to the Allies, as, had he remained, he would have accepted the accomplished fact of the foreign supremacy with as good a grace as the gentry and their braves had done, for they never contemplated endangering their lives by fighting. Outrages on stragglers, assassination, kidnapping, and bravado filled up the repertory of their militant resources, and when these were no longer effective they retired into private life as if nothing had happened. The officials were no less acquiescent once they realised that they had a master.
The interest of this Canton episode lies in its relation to the Chinese question generally. Foreign intercourse with China is marked by a rhythm so regular that any part of it may be taken as an epitome of the whole, like a pattern of wall-paper. From Canton we learn that calculation of national advantage or danger, argument from policy, even threats which are not believed, are so much "clouds and wind," not profitable even as mental exercises. What alone is valid is concrete fact; not treaties, but the execution of them.
The Imperial Commissioners had in good time presented their own demand on Lord Elgin, and in most becoming terms, for between preferring and meeting a request there is all the difference in the world. The two Chinese signatories of the treaty frankly avowed that they had signed without scrutiny under military pressure, and that certain stipulations were highly inconvenient to the Imperial Government, particularly the right of keeping a Minister in residence in Peking. Lord Elgin agreed to move his Government, and the Government consented to waive the right, conditionally. Lord Elgin laid stress on the retention of the right as a right, forgetting that in China a right conditionally waived is a right definitely abandoned. Nor only so, but so far from consolidating what remains, it constitutes a vantage-ground for demanding further concessions, and in other fields of international relations besides that of China. Nothing therefore could have been wider of the mark than any expectation that "the decision of her Majesty's Government respecting residence in Peking would induce the Chinese Government to receive in a becoming manner a representative of her Majesty when he proceeds to the Peiho to exchange the ratification." Experience pointed to quite the opposite effect.
These critical remarks are by no means intended either to belittle Lord Elgin's good work, to depreciate his real statesmanship, or to scoff at his sensibility and high-mindedness. But his errors being like a flaw in a steel casting, pregnant with destruction, and as the same kind of flaw continues to vitiate many of our smaller diplomatic castings, the China question could not really be understood without giving proper consideration to them. For the rest, as a despatch writer Lord Elgin was both copious and able—he did not take a double first at Oxford for nothing. Still, his writings and orations are scarcely the source whence one would seek for light and leading on the Chinese problem. They are vitiated by self-vindication. Many of them are elaborate efforts to make the worse appear the better reason, while their political philosophy is based too much on speculative conceptions where ascertained data were available.
On the last day of July 1858 Lord Elgin with his suite set out on their memorable voyage to Japan, the narrative of which has been so skilfully woven by Laurence Oliphant. This episode will claim our attention later. His lordship came, saw, and conquered—returned to China in a month crowned with fresh laurels. At Shanghai he saw the tariff settled, and then performed another pioneer voyage of prodigious significance. This was up the Yangtze as far as the great central emporium Hankow. Captain Sherard Osborn was the Palinurus of that original and venturesome voyage. After that, Lord Elgin bent his steps towards England; but before leaving China the ghosts of things done and undone haunted him. "A variety of circumstances lead me to the conclusion that the Court of Peking is about to play us false," was the melancholy epitaph he wrote on his mixed policy, on his honest attempt to make war with rose-water, and his subordination, on critical occasions, of judgment to sentiment.
Meantime his brother Frederick, who had carried the Tientsin treaty to London, was returning with it and the Queen's ratification and his letter of credence as British Minister to China. The dénoûment of the plot was now at hand. The real mind of the Chinese Government was finally declared in the sanguinary reception the new envoy met with at the entrance of the Peiho in June 1859. Frederick Bruce was generally considered a man of larger calibre than his elder brother. "In disposition he was a fine, upright, honourable fellow," writes Sir Hope Grant, "and in appearance tall and strong made, with a remarkably good expression of countenance." But it took even him a long time to fathom the new situation. After his disastrous repulse from the Taku forts he wrote in August, "I regret much that when the permanent residence was waived it was not laid down in detail what the reception of the Minister at Peking was to be." But it was no question of detail that barred his passage to Peking. It was the settled determination never to see the face of any foreign Minister; and it seems strange that it should have taken not only another year but another war finally to convince the British plenipotentiaries and their Government that the message of China from first to last, from Peking and Canton, had been to fling the treaty in their face.
SIR FREDERICK BRUCE.