Therefore in 1856 Lord Palmerston declared war against Persia remarking that “we are beginning to reveal the first openings of trenches against India by Russia.”[[1]]
This policy proved a winning one. The Indian Mutiny of 1857, however, scarcely gave Palmerston time to mature his Afghan Frontier scheme, consequently his views with regard to that country were to a great extent frustrated by Russia.
In the autumn of 1856, the Arrow dispute gave Palmerston his long-wished for opportunity of gaining a stronghold in the South China Sea. He declared war on China. The causes of this dispute on the English side were morally unjust and legally untenable. Cobden brought forward a resolution to this effect—that “The paper laid on the table failed to establish satisfactory grounds for the violent measure resorted to.” Disraeli, Russell, and Graham all supported Cobden’s motion. Mr. Gladstone, who was also in favour of the motion, said, at the conclusion of his speech, “with every one of us it rests to show that this House, which is the first, the most ancient, and the noblest temple of freedom in the world, is also the temple of that everlasting justice without which freedom itself would only be a name, or only a curse, to mankind. And I cherish the trust that when you, sir, rise in your place to-night to declare the numbers of the division from the chair which you adorn, the words which you speak will go forth from the halls of the House of Commons as a message of British justice and wisdom to the farthest corner of the world.”
Mr. Gladstone, it certainly seems to me, only viewed the matter from a moral point of view. If we look at it in this light, then the British occupation of Port Hamilton was a still more striking example of English “loose law and loose notion of morality in regard to Eastern nations.”
Palmerston was defeated in the House by sixteen votes, but was returned at the general election by a large majority backed by the aggressive feelings of the English nation.
He contended that “if the Chinese were right about the Arrow, they were wrong about something else; if legality did not exactly justify violence, it was at any rate required by policy.”[[2]] He described this policy in the following way—“To maintain the rights, to defend the lives and properties of British subjects, to improve our relations with China, and in the selection and arrangement of those objects to perform the duty which we owed to the country.”
This is easy to understand, and showed at any rate a disposition, in fact a wish, for the Anglo-Chinese alliance.
The Treaty of Pekin was finally concluded in 1860, the terms of which were—Toleration of Christianity, a revised tariff, payment of an indemnity, and resident ambassadors at Pekin.
Whatever might have been the policy of Palmerston in the Chinese War, Russia took it as indirectly pointed at herself.
General Ignatieff[[3]] was sent to China immediately as Russian Plenipotentiary. It is said that he furnished maps to the allies, in fact did his very best to bring the negotiations to a successful and peaceful close, and immediately after the signing of the agreement, he commenced overtures for his own country, and succeeded in obtaining from China the cession of Eastern Siberia with Vladivostock and other seaports on the Pacific (1858).