354

THE WAR WITH CHINA.*

APRIL 7, 1840.

IF the right hon. Baronet (Sir J. Graham), in rising as the proposer of an attack, owned that he felt overpowered with the importance of the question, one who rose in defence, might certainly, without any shame, make a similar declaration. And he must say, that the natural and becoming anxiety which her Majesty's Ministers could not but feel as to the judgment which the House might pass upon the papers which had been presented to them, had been considerably allayed by the terms of the motion of the right hon. Baronet. It was utterly impossible to doubt the power of the right hon. Baronet, or his will to attack the proceedings of the present Administration; and he must think it a matter on which her Majesty's Ministers might congratulate themselves, that, on the closest examination of a series of transactions so extensive, so complicated, and on some points so disastrous, such an assailant could produce only such a resolution. In the first place, the terms of the resolution were entirely retrospective, and not only so, but they related to no point of time more recent than a year ago; for he conceived that the rupture between this country and China must date from the month of March, 1839, and there had been no omission and no despatch of a later date that could have been the cause of the rupture of our friendly relations. conceived, therefore, that the present resolution was one which related entirely to past transactions, and while he did not dispute the right of the right hon. Baronet to found a motion, or the right of the

*Hansard, 3d Series, vol. liii. p. 704-720.

He

House to pass any vote censuring any bygone misconduct on the part of her Majesty's Ministers, he must at the same time feel gratified that the right hon. Baronet did not censure any portion of the present policy of the Government, and that he did not think fit in the present motion to raise any question as to the propriety of the measures, which, since the year 1839, her Majesty's Ministers had adopted. He saw, also, with pleasure that the right hon. Gentleman charged the Administration with no offence of commission; that he imputed to them no impropriety of conduct, no indiscretion, no step which had either lowered the national honour or given to China any just cause of offence. All the complaint was, that they had not foreseen what circumstances might by possibility arise, and that they had not given power to the representative of her Majesty to meet any such unforeseen circumstances; and he must say that such a charge was one which required, and which ought to receive, the most distinct, the fullest, and the most positive proof, because it was of all charges the easiest to make, and the easiest to support by specious reasoning, and, at the same time, it was one of the most difficult to refute. A man charged with a culpable act might defend himself from that act, but it was not possible in any series of transactions that an objection might not be made, that something might not have been done which, if done, would have made things better. The peculiarity of the case then before them was, that a grave charge had been brought against her Majesty's Ministers, because they had not sent sufficient instructions, and because they had not given sufficient power to a representative at a distance of fifteen thousand miles from them; that they had not given instructions sufficiently full, and sufficiently precise, to a person who was separated from them by a voyage of five months. He was ready to admit, that if the papers then on the table of the House related to important negotiations with a neighbouring state, that if they related, for instance, to negotiations carried on in Paris, during which a courier from Downing-street

could be dispatched and return in thirty-six hours, and could be again dispatched and again return in as short a period; if such were the nature of the facilities for the parties negotiating, he would say without hesitation that a foreign secretary giving instructions so scanty and so meagre to the representative of the British Government was to blame. But he said, also, that the control which might be a legitimate interference with functionaries that were near, became an useless and a needless meddling with the functionaries at a distance. He might with confidence appeal to Members on both sides of the House who were conversant with the management of our Indian empire, for a confirmation of what he had stated. India was nearer to us than was China; with India, we were better acquainted than we were with China, and yet he believed that the universal opinion was, that India could be governed only in India. Indeed, the chief point which occupied the attention of the authorities at home was to point out the general line of conduct to be pursued; to lay down the general principles, and not to interfere with the details of every measure. If hon. Members only thought in what a state the political affairs of that country would be if they were placed under the sole guidance of a person at a distance of even less than 15,000 miles, they would at once see how absurd such a proposition was. They would see a dispatch written during the first joy at the news of the peace of Amiens received while the French invading army was encamped at Boulogne. They would find a despatch written while Napoleon was in Elba, arriving when he was the occupant of the Tuilleries; and they would have positive instructions sent whilst he was in the Tuilleries to come into operation when he was removed to St. Helena. In India, also, occurrences were continually and rapidly taking place, so that the state of things in Bengal or in the Carnatic would have changed long before the specified instructions could have arrived, and they all knew that the great men who had retained for us that country, Lord Clive and Lord Hastings, had

done so by treating particular instructions from a distance as so much waste paper; if they had not had the spirit so to treat them, we should now have no empire in India. But the state of China made a stronger case still. Nor was this all. With regard to India, a politician sitting in Leadenhall-street, or in Cannonrow, might not know the state of things at the distance of India, but he might be acquainted with the general state of the country, its wants, its resources; but with regard to China it should be recollected that that country was not only removed from us by a much greater distance than India, but that those who were permitted to go nearest knew but little of it; for over the internal policy of China a veil was thrown, through which a slight glimpse only could be caught, sufficient only to raise the imagination, and as likely to mislead as to give information. The right hon. Baronet had honourably told the House that the knowledge of Englishmen residing at Canton resembled the notions which might be acquired of our government, our army, our resources, our manufactures, and our agriculture, by a foreigner, who, having landed at Wapping, was not allowed to go further. The advantages of literature even, which in other cases presented an opportunity of holding personal intercourse as well as looking into the character and habits of remote ages, afforded but little help in the case of China. Difficulties unknown in other countries there met the student at the very threshold; so that they might count upon their fingers those men of industry and genius, one of whom had been referred to that night, who had surmounted those difficulties, which were unequalled in the study of any other language which had an alphabet. And under these circumstances, with a country so far removed, and yet as little known to the residents at Canton itself as the central parts of Africa-under these circumstances, he said, in spite of the jeers of hon. Gentlemen opposite, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs could not be expected to give the same precise instructions to the representative of his Sove

reign as he could to our Ministers at Brussels or the Hague. This was evidently the feeling of the Government of Earl Grey, of that Government to which the right hon. Baronet belonged, and for the acts of which he claimed, and rightly claimed, a full share of responsibility. The instructions, to which the right hon. Baronet was a party, did not go into detail—they laid down the broadest general principles-they simply told the representative of her Majesty to respect the usages of China, and to avoid by all means giving offence to the prejudices or the feelings of the Chinese. As for precise instructions, they never gave any. When the Duke of Wellington came into office, that great man, well versed as he was in great affairs, and knowing as he did, that even a man of inferior ability on the spot could judge better than the ablest man at a distance of 15,000 miles, in the only despatch which he addressed to a resident at Canton, contented himself with referring the Superintendent to the instruction of Lord Palmerston. Now, what he wished to impress on hon. Gentlemen was, that when charges were brought against the Government of omitting to give instructions, or omitting to empower our representative, or that by this omission had been produced a great and formidable crisis in the relations between this country and China, this charge ought to be sustained by the clearest, by the fullest, and by the most precise proof that such was one of the causes, if not the principal cause of such a crisis, and that proof the right hon. Baronet in the course of his long and elaborate speech had altogether failed to give. He had selected from the evidence on the table a great mass of information that was interesting, and much that was by no means applicable to the only point on which the present motion could rest. What were the omissions in the instructions and in the power given to our representative? The right hon. Baronet had read some despatches of the East India Company in 1832; and he had also discussed the conduct of Captain Elliott subsequent to the rupture; but he conceived that neither the one nor