it was not necessary or possible to keep on issuing frequent instructions to agents so far away as our representatives in China. Mr. Macaulay actually drew, from our experience in India, an argument in support of his position. We cannot govern India from London, he insisted; we must, for the most part, govern India in India. One can imagine how Macaulay would, in one of his essays, have torn into pieces such an argument coming from any advocate of a policy opposed to his own. The reply, indeed, is almost too obvious to need any exposition. In India the complete materials of administration were in existence. There was a Governorgeneral; there were councillors; there was an army. The men best qualified to rule the country were there, provided with all the appliances and forces of rule. In China we had an agent with a vague and anomalous office dropped down. in the middle of a hostile people, possessed neither of recognized authority nor of power to enforce its recognition. It was probably true enough that we could not have put down the opium trade; that even with all the assistance of the Chinese Government we could have done no more than to drive it from one port in order to see it make its appearance at another. But what we ought to have done is, therefore, only the more clear. We ought to have announced from the first, and in the firmest tone, that we would have nothing to do with the trade; that we would not protect it; and we ought to have held to this determination. As it was, we allowed our traders to remain under the impression that we were willing to support them, until it was too late to undeceive them with any profit to their safety or our credit. The Chinese authorities acted after awhile with a highhanded disregard of fairness, and of anything like what we should call the responsibility of law; but it is evident that they believed they were themselves the objects of lawless intrusion and enterprise. There were on the part of the Government great efforts made to represent the motion as an attempt to prevent the ministry from exacting satisfaction from the Chinese Government, and from protecting the lives and interests of Englishmen in China. But it is unfortunately only too often the duty of statesmen to recognize the necessity of carrying on a war, even while they are of opinion that they whose mismanagement brought about the war

deserve condemnation. When Englishmen are being impris oned and murdered, the innocent just as well as the guilty, in a foreign country-when, in short, war is actually going on-it is not possible for English statesmen in opposition to say, "We will not allow England to strike a blow in defence of our fellow-countrymen and our flag, because we are of opinion that better judgment on the part of our Government would have spared us the beginning of such a war." There was really no inconsistency in recognizing the necessity of carrying on the war, and at the same time censuring the ministry who had allowed the necessity to be forced upon

us.

Sir Robert Peel quoted with great effect, during the debate, the example of Fox, who declared his readiness to give every help to the prosecution of a war which the very same day he proposed to censure the ministry for having brought upon the country. With all their efforts, the ministers were only able to command a majority of nine votes as the result of the three days' debate.

The war, however, went on. It was easy work enough so far as England was concerned. It was on our side nothing but a succession of cheap victories. The Chinese fought very bravely in a great many instances; and they showed still more often a Spartan-like resolve not to survive defeat. When one of the Chinese cities was taken by Sir Hugh Gough, the Tartar general went into his house as soon as he saw that all was lost, made his servants set fire to the building, and calmly sat in his chair until he was burned to death. One of the English officers writes of the same attack, that it was impossible to compute the loss of the Chinese, "for when they found they could stand no longer against us, they cut the throats of their wives and children, or drove them into wells or ponds, and then destroyed themselves. In many houses there were from eight to twelve dead bodies, and I myself saw a dozen women and children drowning themselves in a small pond the day after the fight." We quickly captured the island of Chusan, on the east coast of China; a part of our squadron went up the Peiho River to threaten the capital; negotiations were opened, and the preliminaries of a treaty were made out, to which, however, neither the English Government nor the Chinese would agree, and the war was reopened. Chusan was again taken by us; Ning

po, a large city a few miles in on the main-land, fell into our hands; Amoy, farther south, was captured; our troops were before Nankin when the Chinese Government at last saw how futile was the idea of resisting our arms. Their women or their children might just as well have attempted to encounter our soldiers. With all the bravery which the Chinese often displayed, there was something pitiful, pathetic, ludicrous, in the simple and childlike attempts which they made to carry on war against us. They made peace at last on any terms we chose to ask. We asked, in the first instance, the cession in perpetuity to us of the island of HongKong. Of course we got it. Then we asked that five ports -Canton, Amoy, Foo-Chow-Foo, Ningpo, and Shanghaishould be thrown open to British traders, and that consuls should be established there. Needless to say that this, too, was conceded. Then it was agreed that the indemnity already mentioned should be paid by the Chinese Government--some four millions and a half sterling, in addition to one million and a quarter as compensation for the destroyed opium. It was also stipulated that correspondence between officials of the two Governments was thenceforth to be car

ried on upon equal terms. The war was over for the present, and the thanks of both Houses of Parliament were voted to the fleet and army engaged in the operations. The Duke of Wellington moved the vote of thanks in the House of Lords. He could hardly help, one would think, forming in his mind as he spoke an occasional contrast between the services which he asked the House to honor, and the sort of warfare which it had been his glorious duty to engage in so long. The Duke of Wellington was a simple-minded man, with little sense of humor. He did not, probably, perceive himself the irony that others might have seen in the fact that the conqueror of Napoleon, the vietor in years of warfare against soldiers unsurpassed in history, should have had to move a vote of thanks to the fleet and army which triumphed over the unarmed, helpless, childlike Chinese.

The whole chapter of history ended, not inappropriately perhaps, with a rather pitiful dispute between the English. Government and the English traders about the amount of compensation to which the latter laid claim for their destroyed opium. The Government were in something of a

difficulty; for they had formally announced that they were resolved to let the traders abide by any loss which their violation of the laws of China might bring upon them. But, on the other hand, they had identified themselves by the war with the cause of the traders; and one of the conditions of peace had been the compensation for the opium. The traders insisted that the amount given for this purpose by the Chinese Government did not nearly meet their losses. The English Government, on the other hand, would not admit that they were bound in any way further to make good the losses of the merchants. The traders demanded to be compensated according to the price of opium at the time the seizure was made; a demand which, if we admit any claim at all, seems only fair and reasonable. The Government had clearly undertaken their cause in the end, and were hardly in a position, either logical or dignified, when they afterward chose to say, "Yes, we admit that we did undertake to get you redress, but we do not think now that we are bound to give you full redress." At last the matter was compromised; the merchants had to take what they could get, something considerably below their demand, and give in return to the Government an immediate acquittance in full. It is hard to get up any feeling of sympathy with the traders who lost on such a speculation. It is hard to feel any regret even if the Government which had done so much for them in the war treated them so shabbily when the war was over; but that they were treated shabbily in the final settlement seems to us to allow of no doubt.

The Chinese war, then, was over for the time. But as the children say that snow brings more snow, so did that war with China bring other wars to follow it.

CHAPTER IX.

DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTRY.

THE Melbourne Ministry kept going from bad to worse. There was a great stirring in the country all around them, which made their feebleness the more conspicuous. We sometimes read in history a defence of some particular sov

ereign whom common opinion cries down, the defence being a reference to the number of excellent measures that were set in motion during his reign. If we were to judge of the Melbourne Ministry on the same principle, it might seem, indeed, as if their career was one of extreme activity and fruitfulness. Reforms were astir in almost every direction. Inquiries into the condition of our poor and our laboring classes were, to use a cant phrase of the time, the order of the day. The foundation of the colony of New Zealand was laid with a philosophical deliberation and thoughtfulness which might have reminded one of Locke and the Constitution of the Carolinas. Some of the first comprehensive and practical measures to mitigate the rigor and to correct the indiscriminateness of the death punishment were taken during this period. One of the first legislative enactments which fairly acknowledged the difference between an English wife and a purchased slave, so far as the despotic power of the master was concerned, belongs to the same time. This was the Custody of Infants Bill, the object of which was to obtain for mothers of irreproachable conduct, who through no fault of theirs were living apart from their husbands, occasional access to their children, with the permission and under the control of the Equity Judges. It is curious to notice how long and how fiercely this modest measure of recognition for what may almost be called the natural rights of a wife and a mother was disputed in Parliament, or at least in the House of Lords.

It is curious, too, to notice what a clamor was raised over the small contribution to the cause of national education which was made by the Melbourne Government. In 1834 the first grant of public money for the purposes of elementary education was made by Parliament. The sum granted was twenty thousand pounds, and the same grant was made every year until 1839. Then Lord John Russell asked for an increase of ten thousand pounds, and proposed a change in the manner of appropriating the money. Up to that time the grant had been distributed through the National School Society, a body in direct connection with the Church of England, and the British and Foreign School Association, which admitted children of all Christian denominations without imposing on them sectarian teaching. The money