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.
II. LORD ELGIN'S SECOND MISSION.
Invasion of Peking—Convention of Peking—Establishment of the British Legation—Russian and British, a contrast.
The Chinese perfidy at Taku had of course to be avenged. A formidable expedition was equipped by the Allied Powers, Lord Elgin and Baron Gros being reappointed as plenipotentiaries. The history of the famous Peking campaign of 1860, with its tragic incidents, has been impressed on the world by so many writers, military and civil, most of them actors in the scenes they depict, that the barest outline of events may suffice in this place.