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next knocked down a fort or two-a step which the Opposition by no means appeared to condemn. We next fired a shot at the Government House. This also failed. What further measures should then be taken ?

Before these could be resolved on, the hostility of the Chinese authorities was developed in all their innate barbarity. An official declaration by Commissioner Yeh offered rewards stimulating the dregs of the Chinese population to a massacre of all the British residents. These rewards were to vary with the rank of the murdered Englishmen. Chinese bakers were authorized-even commanded-to poison the bread of the Europeans. Eleven men were murdered in one vessel. British lives were only to be saved at the cost of abandoning British settlements. These crimes necessitated, in our view, an immediate change of policy. We had contracted sacred obligations with our countrymen in China to maintain their commercial rights. Not simply those rights, but their social rights, the safety of their very lives, were compromised.

Here, then, we see the distinction between our relations with European and with Asiatic states. We desire, with either, to maintain those relations on the broad basis of truth, integrity, and humanity. And if any one of these characteristics had applied to the Chinese Commissioner, in the degree in which they apply to European Governments, our relations with China would not be what they now are. The Admiral demanded personal communication with Yeh. This also was refused; and another means of a pacific settlement was thus repudiated by the Chinese. Such a demand could have been rejected by no European commander. There was no Minister at Pekin-no channel of diplomatic representation and arrangement.

And if we had here stopped short-if we had endured the contempt of the Chinese-if we had put up with a reputation for cowardice leading to fresh murders of European settlers-if we had disregarded our obligations towards our own countrymen to reinstate them in their rights-what could we have gained by relying on the influence exerted by moderation in such a country as China? How would such virtues, wise possibly in Europe, tell upon a Governor who had lately decapitated 70,000 men as a political demonstration? To hold such a doctrine is surely no less than an outrage upon common sense. It is clear, therefore, that we had no resource but in further measures. What, then, should they be?

Mr. Cobden has contrasted our measures, in this ultimate resort, with what the Americans would have pursued in a similar position. It was stated, however, by Lord Palmerston that the

United States' Commander, in the most closely parallel instance, in resenting a shot which the Chinese had fired upon one of his ship's boats, immediately destroyed the offending fort, and, after this summary retaliation, proceeded leisurely to demand explanations; and before the time had arrived at which they were to be forthcoming, renewed the work of desolation. Mr. Cobden, in his reply, did not dispute the accuracy of this description; and we may, therefore, at least be assured that our proceedings have been by much more measured than those of the American authorities.

What, however, independently of comparative moderation, is the positive judgment to be passed upon our final retaliation? It has been said, why spare Odessa and bombard Canton ? So far as the relative expeditions against the two Empires are concerned, the answer is very obvious. We spared Odessa because Russia had a Sebastopol. We had made war on Russia because the existence of Turkey was threatened by her; and we attacked Sebastopol, and not Odessa, because Turkey was threatened from the one and not from the other. In this instance we are repelling no military attack upon an allied Power, but bringing a foreign Government to reason for misconduct. If we were to take any measures of retaliation against an Empire possessing no great military arsenal, where could we dissociate public and private property more clearly than at Canton? Our ships directed their fire, first, upon the public buildings: our ships at Odessa, indeed, did the same; but in Canton there was no such clear separation of those buildings from the rest of the city as to have rendered an exact limitation possible in the directing of a naval attack, even if the Admiral had resolved in no event to touch private property.

That such an argument should have been sustained by Sir James Graham, will have surprised all those who remember the character he assumed as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1854. He was specially responsible for our naval campaign in the Baltic during that year. The Aberdeen Government, which was then in power, distributed to the Peelite party all the offices connected with the war, and to the Whigs those which were connected with pacific administration. In his capacity of Naval Minister of War, Sir James Graham directed all those attacks against the Finnish sailors on the Baltic coast* which were merely the infliction of so much wanton misery, and which

It may be observed that these attacks rested not simply on the responsibility of the naval officer in command. They were publicly approved by Sir J. Graham in the House of Commons, when no possible difficulty could have been occasioned by their repudiation.

Sir James Graham's Naval Policy in 1854.

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Lord Palmerston, on his accession to nearly absolute power, in 1855, clearly repudiated. For those attacks were never allowed to be renewed after Sir James had quitted the Admiralty and Lord Palmerston had been appointed Premier. Is it, then, by such a statesman, and by his colleagues in war-administration, that this charge is to be preferred?

Acknowledging, then, that ulterior operations were inevitable, it can hardly be denied that the land attack at Canton was marked by circumstances of moderation towards the Chinese soldiers themselves, which are certainly without a parallel in the attacks authorized by Sir James Graham upon the unoffending Finnish sailors. It may be observed with satisfaction, that when the cowardly Chinese officers fled in boats, leaving their men to fare as they might, our forces not only ceased firing, but sent boats to their rescue.

It need hardly be repeated that the case of the Arrow was but the last of many violations of Treaty rights. There has been evinced a strong disposition to make the least of those earlier wrongs; and it has been said with truth, indeed, that only five or six outrages are brought forward in the Blue-book, headed 'Insults in China.' We confess to some surprise-although we did not regard these precedents as by any means essential to an establishment of the present case that a greater number of instances have not been adduced; because we have ourselves heard, from private but unquestionable authority, that such a summary presents but a very small proportion of the outrages which British subjects and other Europeans have actually experienced. It must be remembered, however, that these Bluebooks are necessarily prepared in extreme haste; and that many questions, which have not officially reached this country, may have arisen between the native and consular authorities in the Eastern seas. This, at least, is the only inference consistent with our own information.

The right of entry and settlement at Canton is one of those grievances which a long course of moderation and forbearance on our part has by no means tended to alleviate. Mr. Cobden himself conclusively showed that the ground on which the authorities had resisted a fulfilment of this undertaking-that of apprehended disturbances on the part of the Chinese-was untenable; and the plea was scarcely less ridiculous than would have been a refusal on the part of the Turkish Government to allow our troops to be quartered in Scutari, on similar grounds. If we ourselves, in violation of a treaty, had persisted in refusing to the Chinese the right of entry into Hong-kong, the Chinese Commissioner would probably have ejected every British

subject from the Celestial territory, if he had not more effectually disposed of them through the medium of a poisoning baker.

On the whole, then, we cannot understand upon what grounds. of reason, moral or legal, the decision of the House of Commons was arrived at. It must be borne in mind, also, that the information which has at present reached us is necessarily more or less defective. In course of time we shall undoubtedly be in fuller possession of the proceedings which have finally brought about the present position of affairs in China.

In concluding this subject, two accusations yet call for observation. The one refers to the character of our merchants in China; the other to the personal honour of Sir John Bowring.

The charge, however, brought by Mr. Cobden against the English merchants may be dismissed with the remark that it not only contravened the authoritative statement of the American representative at Macao, but that it was a mere empty tirade, stated without a single particular, without a tittle of evidence, and without the slightest pretension to authority.

The accusation against Sir John Bowring, on the other hand, singularly evinces not only the malignity, but the strange want of logical perception with which the debate was maintained. Sir John was charged with deliberate deception on two distinct occasions. Upon the one, he is charged with duplicity for writing to Consul Parkes-The Arrow had no right to hoist the British flag; but the Chinese had no knowledge of the expiration of her licence.' On the other, he is charged with falsehood for asserting to the Chinese that the Arrow lawfully bore the British flag,'-thereby indicating that the vessel was entitled to protection. Now, it was at once replied by Lord Palmerston, that Sir John's remark in the former instance applied simply to the fact that the ignorance of the Chinese officials upon the point in question evinced an intention to insult the British flag, and was therefore an important element in the question of reparation. With regard to the latter charge, the assertion that the vessel was entitled to protection was made on a distinct occasion; and in all probability when Sir John had discovered that, after all, the vessel was -for reasons which we have stated above-entitled to protection, even if her licence had nominally run out.

Yet, in spite of these clear and obvious considerations, Sir John Bowring is compared by Sir James Graham to an attorney about to be struck off the rolls for falsehood;' and his despatch is stigmatized by Lord Ellenborough and Mr. Cobden as 'the most flagitious document they ever saw.' It was the consistent tenour, moreover, of Sir James Graham's argument, to throw the whole blame of the naval proceedings, in reference to the extent to which they

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were carried, upon Sir John Bowring, in exclusion of Sir Michael Seymour, when it is notorious that Sir John was not present on the principal occasion in question-that he possessed no authority to direct the Admiral independently of that officer's own responsibility-and that much was done in reference to which Sir John's opinion was not, and could not be, taken. We quit the subject with unaffected disgust, as illustrating a compound of weakness and bad feeling which we never before encountered in the annals of political debate.

It ought, then, to be clearly understood, what is the nature and scope of the question on which the verdict of the people of England is now demanded. On this head much misconception appears to prevail. In many of the addresses to the constituencies of this country, it has been asserted that we are about to elect a Septennial Parliament upon the single question of our Chinese policy, the issue of which may possibly be determined before that Parliament assembles, and to which it may only be required to record a retrospective sanction. Such an assertion is quite erroneous. The collision of the Executive and the Legislature upon a great question of immediate moment rendered their co-existence impossible: and so far, no doubt, the Chinese Question forms the definite ground of the present appeal. It will undoubtedly be the function of the New Parliament-if the existing dispute between the British authorities and the Chinese Commissioner should be still pending to determine whether our military honour and our commercial interests are to be maintained or not. But the policy of the recent dissolution of Parliament has a far wider scope. Whether there were a Chinese Question at issue or not, the then existing collocation of parties in the House of Commons threatened to make all Government impossible. The vote of that House upon our Chinese policy simply manifested a general distribution of party opinion, casually directed to a special question.

It is singular to observe that those very candidates for the New Parliament who utter this complaint regarding its election for the next seven years upon a possibly retrospective question, are the very men who are loudest in denying the fact of a preconcerted combination against Lord Palmerston's Ministry. Now, it is clear that that Ministry could only retain office in virtue of a Dissolution; and that the definite ground of the Dissolution was chosen by the Opposition, not selected by the Government. If, then, the parties represented by Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Glad stone had not yet prepared themselves for an interchange of official relations, it is probable that they could not have been in a position to form a Coalition Government; and it is very clear that,