1857.

LORD DERBY'S MOTION.

13

John Bowring was accused by Lord Derby and Mr. Cobden of having a sort of monomania about getting into Canton. Curiously enough, in his autobiographical fragment Sir John Bowring tells that when he was a little boy he dreamed that he was sent by the King of England as ambassador to China. In his later days he appears to have been somewhat childishly anxious to realise this dream of his infancy. He showed all a child's persistent strength of will and weakness of reason in enforcing his demand, and he appears, at one period of the controversy, to have thought that it had no other end than his solemn entry into Canton. Meanwhile Commissioner Yeh retaliated by foolishly offering a reward for the head of every Englishman. Throughout 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.

This news from China created a considerable sensation in England, although not many public men had any idea of the manner in which it was destined to affect the House of Commons. On February 24, 1857, Lord Derby brought forward in the House of Lords a motion, comprehensively condemning the whole of the proceedings of the British authorities in China. The debate would have been memorable if only for the powerful speech in which the venerable Lord Lyndhurst supported the motion, and exposed the utter illegality of the course pursued by Sir

John Bowring. Lord Lyndhurst declared that the proceedings of the British authorities could not be justified upon any principle, either of law or of reason; that the Arrow was simply a Chinese vessel, built in China, and owned and manned by Chinamen; and he laid it down as a ' principle which no one will successfully contest' that you may give any rights or any privileges to a foreigner or a foreign vessel as against yourself, but you cannot grant to any such foreigner a single right or privilege as against a foreign state.' In other words, if the British authorities chose to give a British licence to a Chinese pirate boat which would secure her some immunity against British law, that would be altogether an affair for themselves and their Government; but they could not pretend by any British register or other document to give a Chinese boat in Chinese waters a right of exemption from the laws of China. Perhaps the whole question never could have arisen if it were not for the fact on which Lord Lyndhurst commented that, 'when we are talking of treaty transactions with Eastern nations, we have a kind of loose law and loose notion of morality in regard to them.' The question as to the right conferred by the licence, such as it was, to hoist the British flag, could not have been disposed of more effectually than it was by the Chinese Governor Yeh himself, in a single sentence. 'A lorcha,' as Yeh put it, 'owned by a Chinese, purchased a British flag; did that make her a British vessel?' The Lord Chancellor was actually driven to answer Lord Lynd

1857.

MR. COBDEN'S MOTION.

15

hurst by contending that no matter whether the lorcha was legally or illegally flying the British flag, it was not for the Chinese to assume that she was flying it illegally, and that they had no right to board the vessel on the assumption that she was not what she pretended to be. To show the value of that argument, it is only necessary to say that if such were the recognised principle, every pirate in the Canton river would have nothing further to do than to hoist any old scrap of British bunting, and sail on, defiant, under the very eyes of the Chinese authorities. The Governor of Canton would be compelled to make a formal complaint to Sir John Bowring, and trust meanwhile that a spirit of fair play would induce the pirates to wait for a formal investigation by the British authorities. Otherwise neither Chinese nor British could take any steps to capture the of fenders.

The House of Lords rejected the motion of Lord Derby by a majority of 146 to 110. On February 26, Mr. Cobden brought forward a motion in the House of Commons, declaring that 'the papers which have been laid upon the table fail to establish satisfactory grounds for the violent measures resorted to at Canton in the late affair of the Arrow,' and demanding 'that a select committee be appointed to inquire into the state of our commercial relations with China.' This must have been a peculiarly painful task for Mr. Cobden. He was an old friend of Sir John Bowring, with whom he had always supposed himself to have many or most opinions in common. But he followed his

convictions as to public duty in despite of his personal friendship. It is a curious evidence of the manner in which the moral principles become distorted in a political contest, that during the subsequent elections it was actually made a matter of reproach to Mr. Cobden, that while acknowledging his old friendship for Sir John Bowring he was nevertheless found ready to move a vote of censure on his public conduct. The debate was remarkable more for the singular political combination which it developed as it went on, than even for its varied ability and eloquence. Men spoke and voted on the same side who had probably never been brought into such companionship before and never were afterwards. Mr. Cobden found himself supported by Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, by Mr. Roebuck and Sir E. B. Lytton, by Lord John Russell and Mr. Whiteside, by Lord Robert Cecil, afterwards the Marquis of Salisbury, Sir Frederick Thesiger, Mr. Roundell Palmer, afterwards Lord Selborne, Mr. Sidney Herbert, and Mr. Milner Gibson. The discussion lasted four nights, and it was only as it went on that men's eyes began to open to its political importance. Mr. Cobden had probably never dreamed of the amount or the nature of the support his motion was destined to receive. The Government and the Opposition alike held meetings out of doors to agree upon a general line of action in the debate and to prepare for the result. Lord Palmerston was convinced that he would come all right in the end, but he felt that he had made himself obnoxious to the advanced Liberals by his indifference, or rather hosti

1857.

THE VOTE OF CENSURE,

17

lity, to every project of reform, and he persuaded himself that the opportunity would be eagerly caught at by them to make a combination with the Tories against him. In all this he was deceiving himself, as he had done more than once before. There is not the slightest reason to believe that anything but a growing conviction of the insufficiency of the defence set up for the proceedings in Canton influenced the great majority of those who spoke and voted for Mr. Cobden's motion. The truth is, that there has seldom been so flagrant and so inexcusable an example of high-handed lawlessness in the dealings of a strong with a weak nation. When the debate first began it is quite possible that many public men still believed some explanation or defence was coming forward, which would enable them to do that which the House of Commons is always unwilling not to do-to sustain the action of an English official in a foreign country. As the discussion went on it became more and more evident that there was no such defence or explanation. Men found their consciences coerced into a condemnation of Sir John Bowring's conduct. It was almost ludicrous when the miserable quibblings and evasions of the British officials came to be contrasted with the cruelly clear arguments of the Chinese. The reading of these latter documents came like a practical enforcement of Mr. Cobden's description of the Chinese Empire as a State' which had its system of logic before the time of Aristotle, and its code of morals before that of Socrates.' The vote of censure