In England King George IV. had rendered only one service to the people,—he had brought royalty into contempt, and so strengthened the feeling which resulted in the passage of many necessary measures which his father and brothers had opposed. But the selfish interests of the merchants and land-owners of England were still in the way of many reforms. Benjamin Disraeli, who did his worst to prevent the starving people from having cheap bread, became the flunkey and afterward the master of the Tory squires; and it was not until thousands had died of famine in Ireland that the selfish land-owners agreed to that reduction of duty on grain which made free trade so popular in England.
Now, by a wise colonization policy, the government might have helped both Ireland and Newfoundland.
By passing a law to the effect that, so long as the French gave a bounty on the export of salt fish, the English government would give their own fishermen exactly the same amount of protection, the French would soon have been brought to terms; and, by opening up Newfoundland to settlement by roads and railways, many of the starving Irish would have been provided with homes under the British flag far more comfortable than any that they could find in their native land. So a more prosperous Ireland would have risen on this side of the Atlantic, and England would have gained thereby. The Irish and the Catholic were really quite as loyal to the empire as any others. The difference was that the English High Churchman and the Scotch Presbyterian got all the privileges; and the Irishman and the Catholic were taught by the action of the British government that insurrection was their only hope of getting simple justice.
India, China, Newfoundland, Ireland, were simply sweaters' dens for the profit of England and Scotland.
Just as in Newfoundland the British merchant insisted on keeping out every trace of free trade that would enable the poor fisherman to sell his fish in the highest market and buy his provisions in the lowest, so in China the British in 1838 insisted on forcing the Chinaman to buy the poisonous opium of India, although in 1834 the China government had warned the British of their intention to prohibit the infamous traffic. The war that England thereupon proclaimed against China was one of the most infamous and cowardly of the century, and made British Christianity more hateful even than its opium to the rulers of the Celestial Empire. £4,375,000 was extorted from the Chinese emperor for the expenses of the war ($20,000,000), and £1,250,000 ($5,000,000) for the opium which, with perfect justice, he had confiscated from the smugglers. The mob of London cheered the wagons which brought the ill-gotten treasure through the streets; and the mob in Parliament thanked the officers who had murdered the helpless and unoffending Chinese, while the parsons congratulated the people on the opening of China to British commerce, British civilization, and British religion.
The brutalizing influence of this method of carrying on the foreign trade of England was shown by a later altogether unnecessary war with China about the Lorcha "Arrow." This was a Chinese pirate vessel, which had obtained, by false pretences, the temporary possession of the British flag. On Oct. 8, 1856, the Chinese police boarded it in the Canton River, and took off twelve Chinamen on a charge of piracy. This they had a perfect right to do; but the British consul, Mr. Parkes, instead of thanking them, demanded the instant restoration of men who had been flying a British flag under false pretences. He applied to Sir John Bowring, the British plenipotentiary at Hong Kong, for assistance. Sir John was an able and experienced man. He had been editor of the Westminster Review, had a bowing, if not a speaking acquaintance with a dozen languages, had been one of the leaders of the free trade party, and had a thorough acquaintance with the Chinese trade. For many years he had been secretary of the Peace Society.
He was the author of several hymns. In fact, an American hymn-book contains not less than seventeen from his pen. One of them, found in most modern hymn-books, was that commencing,—
"In the cross of Christ I glory";
and its author proceeded to glory in the cross of the Prince of Peace by making war on the Chinese, although the governor, Yeh, had sent back all the men whose return was demanded by Mr. Parkes.
Mr. Justin McCarthy, in his "History of our own Times," says, "During the whole business Sir John Bowring contrived to keep himself almost invariably in the wrong; and, even where his claim happened to be in itself good, he managed to assert it in a manner at once untimely, imprudent, and indecent."