The reception which awaited him at home was even warmer than that which he had met with two years before. What gratified him, perhaps, more than any of the many similar expressions of good-will was the cordial welcome with which he was greeted by his old friends and neighbours at Dunfermline: friends from whom he had been, as he told them, so long an unwilling absentee. His answer to their address was the simple and natural expression of this feeling.
It is pleasant (he said)—perhaps it is one of the sweetest flowers we cull on the path of this rugged life—to find ourselves among old friends after a long absence, and to find their hearts beat as true and warm as ever. I am deeply gratified by the flattering terms in which my public services have been referred to in this address, but I am still more gratified by the welcome which you have tendered to me to-day…. Gentlemen, I have been for many years very much, perhaps too much of a wanderer, and it has been my fortune to receive from our countrymen established in different parts of the world tokens of their regard and consideration. The very last address of felicitation I received before I landed at Dover the other day was from a body of my countrymen established in the Philippines—a group of Spanish islands in the far East, near the equator. But allow me to say that among all these tokens, those most grateful and agreeable to me are those which I receive from friends and neighbours at home. And, perhaps, I appreciate these tokens the more highly, because I am conscious that the very fact of my having been so much of a wanderer, has prevented me from acquiring some of those titles to their personal regard which I might have hoped to establish if I had been constantly resident among them.
[Sidenote: Royal Academy dinner.]
About the same time he was received with marked distinction at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy in London; and the words which he spoke on that occasion have more than a mere passing interest, as illustrating the speaker's frank and straightforward manner of dealing with a question of great delicacy, and also as containing some striking and suggestive remarks on certain mental and moral peculiarities of the Chinese people.
I am especially gratified (he said) by the great and very unexpected honour which you have done to me in drinking my health, because I trust that I may infer from it that in your judgment, Sir, and in that of this company, I am not so incorrigibly barbarous as to be incapable of feeling the humanising influences which fall upon us from the noble works of art by which we are surrounded. And, as I have ventured to approach so nearly to the margin of a burning question, I hope that I may be allowed to take one step more in the same direction, and to assure you that no one regretted more sincerely than I did the destruction of that collection of summer-houses and kiosks, already, and previously to any act of mine, rifled of their contents, which was dignified by the title of Summer Palace of the Chinese Emperor. But when I had satisfied myself that in no other way, except, indeed, by inflicting on this country and on China the calamity of another year of war, could I mark the sense which I entertained, which the British army entertained—and on this point I may appeal to my gallant friend who is present here this evening, and who conducted that army triumphantly to Pekin with so much honour to himself and to those under his command—and which, moreover, I make bold in the presence of this company to say, the people of this country entertained—of an atrocious crime, which, if it had passed unpunished, would have placed in jeopardy the life of every European in China, I felt that the time had come when I must choose between the indulgence of a not unnatural sensibility and the performance of a painful duty. The alternative is not a pleasant one; but I trust that there is no man serving the Crown in a responsible position who would hesitate when it is presented to him as to the decision at which he should arrive.[2] And now, Sir, to pass to another topic, I have been repeatedly asked whether, in my opinion, the interests of art in this country are likely to be in any degree promoted by the opening up of China. I must say, in reply, that I do not think that in matters of art we have much to learn from that country, but I am not quite prepared to admit that even in this department we can gain nothing from them. The distinguishing characteristic of the Chinese mind is this—that at all points of the circle described by man's intelligence, it seems occasionally to have caught glimpses of a heaven far beyond the range of its ordinary ken and vision. It caught a glimpse of the path which leads to military supremacy when it invented gunpowder, some centuries before the discovery was made by any other nation. It caught a glimpse of the path which leads to maritime supremacy when it made, at a period equally remote, the discovery of the mariner's compass. It caught a glimpse of the path which leads to literary supremacy when, in the tenth century, it invented the printing press; and, as my illustrious friend on my right (Sir E. Landseer) has reminded me, it has caught from time to time glimpses of the beautiful in colour and design. But in the hands of the Chinese themselves the invention of gunpowder has exploded in crackers and harmless fireworks. The mariner's compass has produced nothing better than the coasting junk. The art of printing has stagnated in stereotyped editions of Confucius, and the most cynical representations of the grotesque have been the principal products of Chinese conceptions of the sublime and beautiful. Nevertheless, I am disposed to believe that under this mass of abortions and rubbish there lie hidden some sparks of a diviner fire, which the genius of my countrymen may gather and nurse into a flame.
[Sidenote: Dinner at the Mansion House.]
A few days afterwards, at a dinner given at the Mansion House in his honour, he was again greeted with more than common enthusiasm. In responding, after giving an account of the objects that had been sought and the results that had been achieved in the East, he concluded his speech by impressing on the merchants of England, in words which may be regarded as his final and farewell utterance on the subject, that with them must now chiefly lie the responsibility of aiding or retarding the development of China, and thus of determining the place she shall hold in the commonwealth of nations.
My Lord Mayor (be said), I should be very much to blame if, having an opportunity of addressing an assembly in this place, I omitted to call attention to the fact that the occasional misconduct of our own countrymen and other foreigners in China is one of the greatest, perhaps the very greatest, difficulties with which the Queen's representatives there have to deal. We send out to that country honourable merchants and devout missionaries, who scatter benefits in every part of the land they visit, elevating and raising the standard of civilisation wherever they go. But sometimes, unfortunately, there slip out from among us dishonest traders and ruffians who disgrace our name and set the feelings of the people against us. The public opinion of England can do much to encourage the one class of persons and discourage the other. I trust that the moral influence of this great city will always be exerted in that direction. In addressing the merchants of Shanghai some three years ago, at the time when I announced to them that it was my intention to seek a treaty in Pekin itself if I could not get it before I arrived there, I made this observation—that when force and diplomacy should have effected in China all that they could legitimately accomplish, the work which we had to do in that empire would still be only in its commencement. I repeat that statement now. My gallant friend who spoke just now has returned his sword to the scabbard. The diplomatist, as far as treaty- making is concerned, has placed his pen on the shelf. But the great task of construction—the task of bringing China, with its extensive territory, its fertile soil, and its industrious population, as an active and useful member, into the community of nations, and making it a fellow-labourer with ourselves in diffusing over the world happiness and well-being—is one that yet remains to be accomplished. No persons are more entitled or more fitted to take a part in that work than the merchants of this great city. I implore them, then, to devote themselves earnestly to its fulfilment, and from the bottom of my heart I pray that their endeavours towards that end may be crowned with success.
[1] Vide supra, p. 310.
[2] It may not be out of place here to quote the words used later in the evening by Sir Hope Grant, in returning thanks for his own health: 'With regard (he said) to what Lord Elgin has said about the destruction of the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China, I must say that I do candidly think it was a necessary act of retribution for an abominable murder which had been committed, and the army, as Well as myself, entirely concurred with him in what he did.'