The Press. — London, England, 1857-02-28 00:00:00

19 The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER then formally moved a resolution, that the WY on income above Litit. a year should be 7d. in the pound for the next three years, and on incomes below that amount 31 in the pound. The resolution having been read a first time, Mr. DISRAELI moved that the chairman report progress. The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER did not object, and the house resumed. TRANSPORTATION, ETC., RILL. Sir G. GREY postponed the second reading of this bill until after the conclusion of the financial debates and the discussion on the army and navy estimates. TESTAMENTARY COURTS (IRELAND). Mt. J. FITZGERALD, in answer to Mr. Deasy, stated that it was the intention of the Government during the present session to introduce a measure for the reform of the testamentary• courts in Ireland. The Commons Inclosure Bill passed through com mittee. The lonian Subjects' Commissions Bill, and the Public Health Supplemental Bill (1857), were read a third time and passed. The Lighting of Towns (Ireland) Act Amendment Bill was read a second time. HOUSE OF LORDS.-TrESDAY. HOSTILITIES AGAINST CHINA. The Earl of DERnv, having presented a number of petitions protesting against the recent proceedings at Hong Kong, moved the following resolutions : That this house has hear,' with deep regret of the inter ruption of amicable relations between her Majesty's sub jects and the Chinese authorities at Canton, arising out of the measures adopted by her Majesty's Chief Superin tendent of Trade to obtain reparation for alleged infrac tions of the supplementary treaty of the Bth of October, 1813. T.iat in the opinion of this house the occurrence of differences on this subject rendered the time peculiarly unfavourable for pressing on the Chinese authorities a claim fur the admittance of British subjects into Canton, which had been left in abeyance since 1819, and for sup porting the same by force of arms. . . Phut in the opinion of this house operations of actual hostility ought not to have been undertaken without the express instructions, previously received, of her Majesty's Government, and that neither of the subjects adverted to in the foregoing resolutions afforded sufficient justification for such operations. The noble earl in eloquent terms invited the horse to dismiss from their minds every consideration con nected in the slightest degree with party ties or political obligation, and to consider the subject he brought under their notice in a judicial and impar tial spirit. They were aware that proceedings of a most violent character had occurred at Canton Not only is the trade stopped not only are the goods of our met chants at this moment sequestered to the extent, I bel.•eve, of something like 1,50.1,000 dollars—not only are all commercial operations put a stop to, but at this moment, without any warrant from the Crown, with. out any declaration, you are in a state of actual war with China—(Hear, hear)—and that war is carried on with a degree of aggravation and severity which do not uivally accompany civilised warfare. You have had seizures of merchant junks, you have had the capture and destruction of the forts of a friendly power, you have had a walled, but not a fortified, city battered with cannon, and stormed through what is termed a practicable breach ; you have had a whole fleet of war junks seized by the superior power of this country; you have had private residences fired upon by order of a British admiral—( Hear, hear)—you have had a defenceless town bombarded and shelled by British men-of-war. t Hear, hear.) I ask your lordships, is this a state of things which you can justify to yourselves, which Parliament can justify to the country, or which can be passed over in silence without demanding explanations, if they can be given, from the Ministry? and if no sufficient explanation be given, then I call upcn your lordships to stamp this st.tc of things with your strongest reprobation, sod to denounce such conduct as unworthy of officials of the British Crown. The question to be decided was whether the cause justified those events, and the first and chief point to be siuled was whether the lorcha, the Arrow, was a British vessel within the meaning of the treaty, an I legally entitled to carry the British flag. Now by the 9th and 17th articles of the supplementary treaty of the Bth of October, 1843, it WWI provided that any Chinese offenders, being in the colony of Hong Kong, or on board a British man-of-war, or on board a British merchant ship, were not to be seized by the Chinese authorities themselves, but should be demanded trom the British Consul, and by him be handed over to the native authorities. On the Bth of October last the affair of the Arrow occurred, and undoubtedly if that vessel was strictly and honestly a British vessel, the seizure of two persons on board her suspected of being guilty —as they subsequently were proved to have been—of acts of piracy, was a violation of the treaty, inasmuch as they ought to have been demanded of the British Consul, and not taken by force. The question therefore was, whether the Arrow was a vessel which came within the sense of the treaty, or, according to any reasonable or fair construction, was she a British vessel ? He con tended, on the e authority of Mr. Block, the Danish Consul at Hong Kong, whose explanations appear at p. 134 of the China Blue-book, that tho Arrow was a THE PRESS. China built ship, captured by pirates, recaptured by the Chinese, sold afterwards by the Chinese, and ultimately bought, owned, and manned by Chinese; and this was the British merchantman It was an essential characteristic of a British merchant ship that she must be wholly owned by British subjects— that was, by natural•born subjects or those that had become such by naturalisation. Now the Colonial Legislature of Hong Kong in March,lBss, passed an ordinance for the provisiJn to all vessels of certifi cates of registry. This ordinance was rejected by the home Board of Trade, as repugnant to the laws of England, for it could not have been passed except under the provisions of 17 and 18 Viet. cap. 104, which did not come into operation before May, 1855, and though authorised by the Secretary of State in Decembe:, 1855, it did not arrive in the colony till 1858; it had never to this day been confirmed by the Queen in council, or proclaimed iu the colony ac cording to Act of Parliament ; and in point of law was just so much waste paper : You will say, perhaps (observed the noble earl), that these are technical ties. They are ILA technicalities. They are matters of substance and matters of importance. You have dispensed with the checks which Parliament thought fit to impose upon the exercise of a most dangerous power by the Colonial Legislature, and we are here discussing the question as it it were a criminal indictment against the Chinese for violating the treaty. I have told you that the treaty would not be violated unless the Arrow was a Iftitish vessel, and that it was not a British vessel. But look at the substance of this colonial ordinance, and let us see whether it is one which ought to be approved by those pro fessing any consideration for the rights of an independent Government. Grant that it may be proved possible and legitimate to give to colonial ships a register for the purpose 01 trading to Hong Kong. Allow that within your own limits you may confer what privileges you think fit. No man will venture to contend that you had a right to confer such a privilege upon Chinese, not being naturalised Eng lish subjects, in opposition to the inalienable rights pos sessed over them by the Chinese Government. These Chinese had never abandoned, if even they can abandon, their allegiance to Niue. They had never taken the oath of allegiance to England; they had never become natu ralised subjects of this country. They were day by day carrying on a coasting trade in the Chinese waters, and what did you do? You pass an ordinance in Hong Kong which says, in utter abrogation of Chinese rights, these Chinese subjects shall be absolved from their natural alle giance; they shall be at liberty to trade here and there, elrry on what trade they please, laugh to scorn the Chinese officials who attempt to arrest them in their unlawful courses, pleading. forsooth, the protection of the British flag, and that they possess a colonial register. Now, would you venture to pass such an enactment with regard to any nation that had the slightest balance of power with your selves ? (Hear, hear ) Apply the case to any European country. Would you dare to pass au enactment relieving the vessels of subjects properly belonging to that country and trading upon the coast of that country from any lia bility to its laws? ( Heir, hear.) Unless you are pre. pared to justify such an instance as this—unless you are prepared to say that this ordinance is not only good in law but is sound in justice, you cannot maintain that there has been any violation of the treaty, you cannot hold that this is iu any sense of the word a British vessel. But, supposing the Arrow to have been a British vessel, had she at the time of seizure a British flag actually flying on board, and, if so, was it legally flying ! He contended that, whatever doubt there might be as to whether the flag was flying in the Arrow at the time of the seizure of the crew, there could be no doubt that the Arrow had no legal right to carry that flag, and in support of that view he adduced the two following statements of Sir J. Bow ring allowing that the licence bad expired before the seizure. In a letter dated Hong Kong, October 11, to Consul Parkes, Sir J. Bowriug says:— It appears, on examination, that the Arrow had no right to hoist the British dig; the licence to do so expired on the z:th of September. from which period she has not been entitled to protection. You will send back the register to be delivered to the Colonlal-office. And again, in a letter dated October 13, he says : I will consider the regrantiug the register of the Arrow, if applied for; but there can be no doubt that after the expiry of the licence protection could not be legally granted. In the same letter, also, Sir John Bowring admitted that the provisions of the registry ordinance bad not been complied with iu the case of the Arrow, for he writes : I find, on inquiry at the harbour-roaster's, that the register of the Arrow has not been regulariy yreseuted at his oitice ac• cording to the regulations. Now, my lords (observed the noble earl), how steads the case ? The ordinance provides that any in fringement of its provisions shall render the vessel carrying a licence under it ipso facto liable to forfei ture, and shall forfeit all its claim to protection, and in the case of the Arrow—we have it under Sir J. Bow ring's own hand—not only that the registry had expired, and that the vessel could no longer claim protection as a British vessel, but that it had been guilty of an infringe ment of the provisions of the ordinance in not depositing its register with the harbour-master in the manner re quired, and had :actually thus incurred the risk of forfeiture. Now, my lords, I should like to know, in the face of these declarations of Sir J. Bowring, what honourable or honest man could sanction or could have written or put forward claims such as those advanced by Sir J. Bowring in his letter to the Imperial Commissioner Yell, dated Nov. 14. In that letter he stews:— SATURDAY, Whatever representations may have been made to your Ex. celleney, there is no doubt that the lorcha Arrow lawfully bore the British flag u• der a register granted by me, and that treaty obligations were violated by the seizure of her crew without the intervention of the consul by your officers, and that this viola tion required a reparation as public as the outrage. I have un doubted evidence that the British flag was flying when IL was pulled down by your officer, and I quite approve the conduct of the consul in the whole of this affair. So that, on the one hand, we have Sir J. Bowring writing to Consul Parkes that the Arrow was not entitled to pro tection ; while, on the other hand, he writes to the Imperial Commissioner Yeh that whatever representations had been made to him there was no doubt that the lorcha Arrow lawfully bore the British flag. Is that the open, straightforward method of dealing which should characterise British officials in our distant colonies, and particularly in treating with a nation pecu liarly suspicious ? Is it upon grounds like these, which are contradicted by his own letters to Mr. Parkes, that this country should be dragged into a destructive and expensive war? Now, my lords, what is the defence to this case ? Sir J. Bowring says it is quite true that the licence of the Arrow had expired, but the Chinese did not know that. What, because your adversary may be igno rant, are you to suppress facts, and, acting as if you had a claim, which you know you have not, to hold out a hostile threat to another nati.in for their infraction of a treaty which you know they have never infringed at all? The Chinese authorities didn't know it. No; but Sir John Bowring knew it, and Mr. Consul Parkes knew it; and if Mr. Consul Parkes had done 114 duty the Chinese Go vernment ought to have known it; because when that vessel arrived and deposited her register in the hands of Mr. Parkes he was bound to notify that -she had come in with her sailing licence expired, and he ought not to have given her a sailing licence again until she had applied for a fresh register, which she might have done during any part of the time that she was lying in the harbour of Canton, because Hong Kong was within twelve hours' distance by steam. I therefore sum up this part of the case thus :—That the vessel to all intents and purposes was a Chinese vessel, Chinese owned and Chinese manned, and was in no respects a British vessel under any interpre tation which could have been put upon it by either of the parties to the treaty at the time of making the treaty ; that if she ever had been entitled to protection, that protection had been forfeited by her own act, by the cessation of the register and the infringement of the ordinance ; but that the ordinance itself was a piece of waste paper, null and void, and that the register was utterly valueless, giving no claim to the character which was impudently assumed of being a British vessel. (Hear, hear.) Passing on to the claim of British subjects to free admission into the city of Canton, he admitted that the treaty of 1840 conferred that right; and, al though it bad been entered into under considerable duresse on the part of the Chinese authorities, he bad no doubt that throughout this part of the trans action our plenipotentiary had taken a correct view, while the Chinese officers had been altogether in error. The only question that could arise was as to the policy of pressing the right at that particular moment. The noble earl read a variety of extracts from the papers now before Parliament, including despatches from Sir G. Bonham, of 20th July, 1848, despatches from Lord Palmerston, Oct. 7, and Dec. 30, 1848, to show that in 1849 the Government, upon the authority of Sir G. Bonham, came to the con clusion that it was not expedient to press the claim for admission to Canton, and be quoted a proclama.• tion, issued by Sir George in 1849, prohibiting British subjects from entering that city. The noble earl argued that the reason assigned by the Chinese authorities for refusing admission had always been the same—a fear of collision between the halves and the English, and that such reason was not a mere pretext, but was shared by Sir G. Bonham himself. In 1819 a new actor appeared upon the stage in the person of Sir John Bowring, who was possessed with a monomania on the subject of his own admission to Canton, and who would not con sider any sacrifice too great to effect that object:— It is amusing to observe that, while the Chinese com missioners are always looking forward to a more favour. able season, and while they never find that that favourable season and fortunate hour has arrived, there are no possi ble circumstances or combination of circumstances which, to the mind of Sir John 13owring, are not favourable for the agitation of this question. At one time it is because unbroken tranquillity reigns throughout the whole country; at another because there are disorders, disturbances, and revolutions, and the Chinese authorities would require oar sanction and support for their defence. At one time it is because they are quiet, at another because they are turbu lent ; but every• time is, according to Dr. Bowling, the very best time fur pressing this eternal chum upon which he rests the maintenance of peace between the Chinese and ourselves. Lard Derby then came to the correspondence which ensued upon the seizure of the lorcha, and apart from the merits of the question observed that there was much reason to complain of the manner in which this correspondence had been conducted by the British officials ; while the tone of the Chinese was throughout forbearing, courteous, and gentle manlike, that of our representatives was, with hardly an exception, menacing, disrespectful, and arrogant. This condemnation Lord Derby admitted to be severe, but he supported it by numerous references to the correspondence between Sir J. Bowring, Mr. Consul Parkes, and Commissioner Yeh. He con-