considered unsatisfactory. The Congress of Paris opened on February 26, 1856, and on March 30 the treaty of peace was signed by the plenipotentiaries of the Great Powers. Prussia had been admitted to the Congress, which therefore represented England, France, Russia, Austria, Prussia, Turkey and Sardinia.

By the treaty Kars was restored to the Sultan, and Sebastopol and all other places taken by the allies were given back to Russia. The Great Powers engaged to respect the independence and territorial integrity of Turkey. The Sultan issued a firman for ameliorating the condition of his Christian subjects, and no right of interference, it was distinctly specified, was given to the other Powers by this concession on the Sultan's part. The Black Sea was neutralised; its waters and its ports were thrown open to the mercantile marine of every nation, and formally and in perpetuity interdicted to the flag of war either of the Powers possessing its coasts or of any other Power, with the exception of the right of each of the Powers to have the same number of small armed vessels in the Black Sea to act as a sort of maritime police and to protect the coasts. The Sultan and the Emperor engaged to establish and maintain no military or maritime arsenals in that sea. The navigation of the Danube was thrown open. Moldavia and Wallachia, continuing under the suzerainty of the Sultan, were to enjoy all the privileges and immunities they already possessed under the guarantee of the contracting Powers, but with no separate right of intervention in their affairs. Out of Moldavia and Wallachia united, after various internal changes, there subsequently grew the kingdom of Roumania. The existing position of Servia was secured by the treaty. During time of peace the Sultan engaged to admit no foreign ships of war into the Bosphorus or the Dardanelles.

To guarantee Turkey from the enemy they most feared a tripartite treaty was afterwards agreed to between England, France and Austria. This document bears date in Paris April 15, 1856; by it the contracting parties guaranteed jointly and severally the independence and integrity of the Ottoman empire, and declared that any infraction of the general treaty of March 30 would be considered by them as casus belli. The Congress of Paris was remarkable for the fact that the plenipotentiaries before separating came to an agreement on the rules generally of maritime war by which privateering was abolished. It was agreed, however, that the rules adopted at the Congress of Paris

should only be binding on those States that had acceded or should accede to them. The United States raised some difficulty about renouncing the right of privateering, and the declarations of the Congress were therefore made without America's assenting to them. At the instigation of Count Cavour the condition of Italy was brought before the Congress; and there can be no doubt that out of the Congress and the part that Sardinia assumed as representative of Italian nationality came the succession of events which ended in the establishment of a King of Italy in the palace of the Quirinal. The adjustment of the condition of the Danubian principalities too engaged much attention and discussion, and a highly ingenious arrangement was devised for the purpose of keeping those provinces from actual union, so that they might be coherent enough to act as a rampart against Russia, without being so coherent as to cause Austria any alarm for her own somewhat disjointed, not to say distracted, political system. All these artificial and complex arrangements presently fell to pieces, and the principalities became in course of no very long time an united independent State under a hereditary Prince. But for the hour it was hoped that the independence of Turkey and the restriction of Russia, the security of the Christian provinces, the neutrality of the Black Sea, and the closing of the Straits against war vessels, had been bought by the war.

England lost some twenty-four thousand men in the war, of whom hardly a sixth fell in battle or died of wounds. Cholera and other diseases gave grim account of the rest. Forty-one millions of money were added by the campaign to the National Debt. England became involved in a quarrel with the United States because of our Foreign Enlistment Act. At the close of December 1854 Parliament hurriedly passed an Act authorising the formation of a Foreign Legion for service in the war, and some Swiss and Germans were recruited who never proved of the slightest service. Prussia and America both complained that the zeal of our recruiting functionaries outran the limits of discretion and of law. One of our consuls was actually put on trial at Cologne: and America made a serious complaint of the enlistment of her citizens. England apologised; but the United States were out of temper, and insisted on sending our minister, Mr. Crampton, away from Washington, and some little time passed before the friendly relations of the two States were completely restored.

M

There was a feeling of disappointment in this country at the close of the war. Our soldiers had done splendidly; but our generals and our system had done poorly indeed. Only one first-class reputation of a military order had come out of the war, and that was by the common consent of the world awarded to a Russian-to General Todleben, the defender of Sebastopol. No new name was made on our side or on that of the French; and some promising or traditional reputations were shattered. The political results of the war were to many minds equally unsatisfying. Lord Aberdeen estimated that it might perhaps secure peace in the East of Europe for some twenty-five years. His modest expectation was prophetic. Indeed it a little overshot the mark. Twenty-two years after the close of the Crimean campaign Russia and Turkey were at war again.

CHAPTER XII.

THE LORCHA 'ARROW.'-TRANSPORTATION.

AFTER the supposed settlement of the Eastern Question at the Congress of Paris, a sort of languor seems to have come over Parliament and the public mind in England. Lord John Russell proposed a series of resolutions to establish in England a genuine system of national education, which were of course rejected by the House of Commons. Public opinion, both in and out of Parliament, was not nearly ripe for such a principle then. One of the regular attempts to admit the Jews to Parliament was made, and succeeded in the House of Commons, to fail, as usual, in the House of Lords. The House of Lords itself was thrown into great perturbation for a time by the proposal of the Government to confer a peerage for life on one of the judges, Sir James Parke. Lord Lyndhurst strongly opposed the proposal, on the ground that it was the beginning of an attempt to introduce a system of life-peerages, which would destroy the ancient and hereditary character of the House of Lords. The Government, who had really no reactionary or revolutionary designs in their mind, settled the matter for the time by creating Sir James Parke Baron Wensleydale in the usual way, and the object they had in view was quietly

accomplished many years later, when the appellate jurisdiction of the Lords was remodelled.

Sir George Lewis was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was as yet not credited with anything like the political ability which he afterwards proved that he possessed. It was the fashion to regard him as a mere bookman, who had drifted somehow into Parliament, and who, in the temporary absence of available talent, had been thrust into the office lately held by Mr. Gladstone. The contrast indeed between the style of his speaking and that of Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Disraeli was enough to dishearten any political assembly. Sir George Lewis began by being nearly inaudible, and continued to the last to be oppressed by the most ineffective and unattractive manner and delivery. But it began to be gradually found out that the monotonous, halting, feeble manner covered a very remarkable power of expression; that the speaker had great resources of argument, humour, and illustration; that every sentence contained some fresh idea or some happy expression. After a while the capacity of Lewis ran the risk of being overrated quite as much as it had been undervalued before.

For the present, however, Sir George Lewis was regarded only as the sort of statesman whom it was fitting to have in office just then; the statesman of an interval, in whom no one was expected to take any particular interest. The attention of the public was a good deal distracted from political affairs by the failure and frauds of the Royal British Bank and other frauds, which gave for the time a sort of idea that the financial principles of the country were crumbling to pieces. The culmination of the extraordinary career of John Sadleir was fresh in public memory. This man was the organiser and guiding spirit of the Irish Brigade, a gang of adventurers who got into Parliament and traded on the genuine grievances of their country to get power and money for themselves. John Sadleir embezzled, swindled, forged, and finally escaped justice by committing suicide on Hampstead Heath. The brother of Sadleir was expelled from the House of Commons; one of his accomplices, who had obtained a Government appointment and had embezzled money, contrived to make his escape to the United States; and the Irish Brigade was broken up. It is only just to say that the best representatives of the Irish Catholics and the Irish national party, in and out of Parliament, had never from the first believed in Sadleir and his band, and had made persistent efforts to expose them.

About this same time Mr. Cyrus W. Field, an energetic American merchant, came over to this country to explain to its leading merchants and scientific men a plan he had for constructing an electric telegraph line underneath the Atlantic. He was listened to with polite curiosity. Mr. Field had, however, a much better reception on the whole than M. de Lesseps, who came to England a few months later to explain his project for constructing a ship canal across the Isthmus of Suez. His proposal was received with coldness, and more than coldness, by engineers, capitalists, and politicians.

The political world seemed to have made up its mind for a season of quiet. Suddenly a storm broke out. The Speech from the Throne at the opening of Parliament, on February 3, 1857, stated that acts of violence, insults to the British flag, and infraction of treaty rights, committed by the local Chinese authorities at Canton, and a pertinacious refusal of redress, had rendered it necessary for her Majesty's officers in China to have recourse to measures of force to obtain satisfaction. The alleged offences of the Chinese authorities at Canton had for their single victim the lorcha Arrow. The lorcha Arrow was a small boat built on the European model. The word 'Lorcha' is taken from the Portuguese settlement at Macao at the mouth of the Canton river. It often occurs in treaties with the Chinese authorities. On October 8, 1856, a party of Chinese in charge of an officer boarded the Arrow, in the Canton river. They took off twelve men on a charge of piracy, leaving two men in charge of the lorcha. The Arrow was declared by its owners to be a British vessel. Our Consul at Canton, Mr. Parkes, demanded from Yeh, the Chinese Governor of Canton, the return of the men, basing his demand upon the Treaty of 1843, supplemental to the Treaty of 1842. This treaty did not give the Chinese authorities any right to seize Chinese offenders, or supposed offenders, on board an English vessel. It merely gave them a right to require the surrender of the offenders at the hands of the English. The Chinese Governor, Yeh, contended, however, that the lorcha was a Chinese pirate vessel, which had no right whatever to hoist the flag of England. It may be plainly stated at once that the Arrow was not an English vessel, but only a Chinese vessel which had obtained by false pretences the temporary possession of a British flag. Mr. Consul Parkes, however, was fussy, and he