SIR JOHN BOWRING.
The Chinese War of 1857 occupies an unique place in the events of the Victorian epoch, because it was a war which was provoked by a member of the Peace Society. In October, 1856, the Chinese authorities arrested twelve Chinamen on board a native lorcha called the Arrow, on a charge of piracy. The British Consul, asserting that the Arrow was a British ship, contended very properly that the accused should have been demanded from him. Nine of the Chinamen were released. Sir John Bowring thereupon insisted on the release of the other three, and an apology within forty-eight hours, on pain of immediate reprisals. The three men were released; but the Chinese Governor courteously refused to apologise, because, he said, as the Arrow was not a British ship, no wrong had been done to the British flag. This was literally true, for Sir J. Bowring, as everybody now admits, was utterly mistaken as to the nationality of the lorcha. The courtesy of the Chinese in surrendering the prisoners in deference to an illegal demand, which Bowring had couched in terms of offensive arrogance, was rewarded next day by the bombardment of the luckless commercial city of Canton—a barbarous act which could be justified by the laws neither of God nor of man. In fact, “a prancing pro-Consul,” to use a famous phrase of Sir William Harcourt’s, had virtually usurped the prerogative of the Crown, and levied war on a foreign Government on his own responsibility. Instead of recalling Bowring and the British Consul, Lord Palmerston, without giving the matter much thought, identified himself with their proceedings, though many Members of his Cabinet, notably Lord Granville and Mr. Labouchere, who afterwards were forced to defend Bowring in Parliament, personally disapproved of his conduct.[304] But Ministers virtually abandoned the case of the Arrow when the controversy grew hot. “As usual,” writes Mr. Morley, “they shifted the ground from the particular to the general; 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; Orientals mistake justice for fear; and so on through the string of well-worn sophisms, which are always pursued in connection with such affairs.”[305] The real truth, as the Tory leaders said in the debates in both Houses of Parliament, was that Bowring’s vanity had been hurt because the Chinese had refused to receive him in Canton. When he sent Admiral Sir M. Seymour to bombard the port he tacked on to his original ultimatum a demand that foreigners should be freely admitted to the city, on the ground that this privilege, though ceded by the Treaty of 1846, had never been granted. Admitting that his interpretation of this disputed point in the Treaty was correct, neither he nor Lord Palmerston had any right to force that interpretation on China by war. Their duty was to have acted in concert with the Governments of France and the United States, who were equally interested in the question, and in this way to exhaust the resources of diplomacy, before appealing to the arbitrament of the sword. Every Member of both Houses of Parliament who was not an infatuated partisan of Lord Palmerston’s took this view of the case; and when Mr. Cobden, on the 26th of February, brought forward a motion condemning the policy of the Government, he carried it, after a debate which lasted many nights, by a majority of sixteen.[306] In the House of Lords the Government repelled the attack, on the 27th of February, by a majority of thirty-six; and had the division been taken on the same night in the Commons, the majority, after Cobden’s and Russell’s speeches, would have been so enormous that Palmerston would hardly have dared to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament. But he adroitly delayed matters, held a meeting of his Party, harangued them, and threatened them with a dissolution, and so, by the 4th of March, when the division was taken, the majority against him dwindled to sixteen. On the 5th of March, Ministers announced that Parliament would be dissolved and the sense of the country taken on the issue. The antipathy of the Queen to “penal dissolutions,” indeed, to any dissolution of Parliament, if it can be avoided, was overcome by Lord Palmerston representing that the majority against him was exceedingly small—that it was made up of a coalition of factions, whose leaders, agreeing only on one point, could not possibly form a stable Government. On the other hand, from a General Election a Government of some kind would be evolved with a solid working majority, an advantage of supreme importance in the eyes of the Sovereign.
Then the game of intrigue began. Lord Malmesbury was sent to Mr. Sidney Herbert to negotiate an alliance between the Tories and the Peelites, his proposal being, says Lord Malmesbury, “that we should not take a hostile part towards each other’s candidates.” By this arrangement it was supposed that no personal enmities would be made, and the difficulty of organising an actual coalition, if such should be deemed necessary, would therefore be minimised.[307] Mr. Herbert rejected these overtures, because the Peelites had become so much divided in opinion and so weak in influence, that his desire was to see them dispersed. Lord Malmesbury then sounded Mr. Gladstone at the Carlton Club. “He had,” writes his lordship, “seen Sidney Herbert, who told him of our interview, and Gladstone said he quite disagreed with his views, and had told him so.... His leanings are apparently towards us, but he was quite of my opinion that no sort of agreement should be made beyond the one I had proposed.”[308] In fact, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Herbert had very nearly quarrelled over the matter. Writing to Sir George Lewis on the 16th of March, the late Mr. A. Hayward says, “Gladstone and S. Herbert have come to an explanation which has ended very like the lovers’ separation in Little’s poems:—
‘You may down that pathway rove,
While I shall take my way through this.’
Sidney Herbert takes the Liberal and Gladstone the Derbyite turn. I know no one who will follow Gladstone’s lead in the matter, except, perhaps, Lord A. Harvey.”[309]
As a rule in England, the Minister who dissolves Parliament and appeals to the country is beaten. The General Election of 1857 was a startling exception to that rule. For Palmerston it was a complete victory. For his opponents it was not a defeat—but a rout. Cobden, Bright, Gibson, Fox, and Miall were rejected by the very men whose fortunes they had made by their Free Trade policy. As Mr. Morley says, “nothing had been seen like it since the disappearance of the Peace Whigs in 1812, when Brougham, Tierney, Lamb, and Horner all lost their seats.”[310] The Peelites suffered almost as cruelly. The Conservative ranks were sadly thinned, for twenty-four counties were won by the Ministry; in fact, the Times declared, that the Tories would “never again, as a party, become candidates for office.”[311] The “Manchester School” lost its supporters, (1), because it had got the reputation of factiously opposing all Governments; (2), because the manufacturers, enriched by Free Trade, had ceased to be Radical; and (3), because they thought that when Palmerston forced Bowring into Canton at the point of the bayonet, cotton goods would go in with him. The Peelites were beaten (1), because they were divided among themselves; and (2), because they were a small faction, and in a General Election a small faction generally is crushed in the collision between the great parties. The Tories lost adherents (1), because the farmers resented their support of an amendment moved by their natural enemy, Mr. Cobden; and (2), because rumours were spread abroad by Lord Palmerston’s agents that they were about to coalesce with Mr. Gladstone, who represented the principles of “the traitor Peel.” Lord Palmerston triumphed (1), because his only Liberal rival, Lord John Russell, had alienated the country by his tortuous disloyalty to two Ministries, and incurred the hatred of the Dissenters by his defence of Church Rates; (2), because his personal popularity, after bringing the wars with Russia and Persia to an end, was unbounded; and (3), because he and his satellites poured forth speeches, inflated with cheap and vulgar “patriotic” claptrap, to such an extent that even Mr. Greville says in his “Memoirs” that he was “disgusted at the enormous and shameful lying with which the country is deluged.”[312] England, moreover, was involved in a war with China, and after all Palmerston was the only political leader who had proved that he could carry on a war with least discredit to the country.[313] The election was, therefore, a personal one. Constituents did not scrutinise closely the principles or capacity of candidates, so long as they promised to support Lord Palmerston,[314] and so numbers of Parliamentary Reformers crept unnoticed into the House. But in such cases the loyalty of a majority lasts no longer than the popularity of the leader. Let him make one false step that forfeits popularity, and then his supporters desert him, disinterring what they call their “principles” from buried election addresses to justify their “new departure.”
