The Press.
London, England, 1858-08-28 00:00:00

THE PRESS, AUGUST 28, 1858.

ail great State. Disclosures subsequent to the
debate confirmed their original view of the affair
of the Arrow, and even Lord PALmEitsTos found
himself driven to that intrepid sophism which
defended our attack on Canton by the malignant
attempts at revenge which it produced. All this
it may suit the Times to forget ; but lovers of
truth, justice, and mercy will long remember with
pride the noble array of statesmen who then
united in upholding a policy too straightforward
for a diplomatic Premier to relish, and too dis-
interested for the Times to appreciate.
How far this memorable debate, and the ap-
pointment of Lord ELGIN which was among its
practical consequences, has tended to mitigate the
character of the hostilities subsequently carried
on in China, and have led to the attainment of
their object with that "scarcely appreciable sa-
crifice of human life" of which our contempo-
rary speaks, we cannot accurately pronounce.
But the issue which the Times proposes, " whe-
" ther Lord DERBY or the limes were at that
" time the true advocates of an enlightened
" policy, and the advocates of the weak against
" the strong," we frankly accept, without claim-
ing, exclusively for the Conservative leaders the
honour of having upheld views which were also
maintained by the leading Whigs in defiance of
party considerations, and by the foremost men of
the Manchester school despite the bribe of pro-
mised conunercial advantages. No doubt, the
phrase "enlightened policy" requires some de-
finition. In the dialect of Printing-house-square
it may imply filibustering with a view to
commercial profit, or all those ingenious
devices of selfish cunning which are described
beyond the Atlantic as "playing the advan-
tages." But by what logical process the
questioner in the Times has persuaded himself,
or can hope to persuade his readers, that
Lord DERBY, in advocating the rights of China
against the aggressive violence of a pugnacious
official supported by an English fleet, was not
protecting the weak against the strong," we are
utterly at a loss to conceive. Surely the event
to which we owe his perversely elaborate article
only shows more clearly than ever how weak
the Chinese are, and how easy it is for England
to deal with them by the strono. hand. We
might imitate in China the system which we have
reprobated when pursued by the United States
in Central America; but the incapacity of the
Chinese to resist would not transmute violence
and pillage into protection. Our contemporary
must be careful, lest his morality should prove
contagious. Some future highwayman may
emulate the arrogant euphemisms of the article
which we have been reviewing, and may point
to the purse he has just taken as " the triumph
of his policy." In truth, both as logician and
moralist, the writer has failed outrageously.
His logic consists in the very summary process
of claiming to have had the best of an
argument because he has (possibly) proved
right as to a matter which was not in dispute
as thus :—" You said the ball was black
I maintained to be white. It went up to the
' ceiling, and I knew it would. Confess, then,
that you were utterly wrong !" His morality
is of a kind which the Jesuits used to be charged
with admiring; he takes it for granted that the
end sanctions the means. We know not who the
Pviiple were whom he speaks of as having held
the notion two years since "that the worst evil
• that could happen to a Pagan nation is to be
" brought into contact with a- Christian people ; "
hut we avow that we held at that time, and still
hold, that the greatest hindrance to the spread of
Christianity in Pagan realms arises from the
injustice and rapacity too often exhibited by its
professors.
So much for our contemporary's matter. Of
his manner it is needless to say much. The tone
of condescending patronage, the assumption of
recognized infallibility, are " much as usual."
The rhetorical ornament is "as well as can be
expected:,
In the blended or alternate exhorta-
tions to repentance and rejoicing, to blowing of
trumpets and wearing of sackcloth, there is, per-
haps, rather a short allowance of fun, with more
than the usual amount of metaphorical confusion.
Rut as under all this figurative disguise there
may be hidden some serious doubt as to the
View
.which the Conservative party will take
of this -
opening of China to the commerce of the
world, we beg to assure the Times that that view
Rill neither- be painful nor self-contradictory.

Having deprecated war, they will not lament
over peace ; opposed to robbery, they will re-
joice in opportunities of fair traffic. But they
will not be vehement in exultation. They will
not talk of the submission of a semi-barbarian
despot as the greatest event of the nineteenth
century. They will not see in.the Anglo-French
operations on the Peiho a special occasion for
glorifying Lord PALmEitsrox. They will leave
" harp" and " trumpet," sackbut, psaltery, dul-
cimer, and all other kinds of triumphal music to
blind worshippers of the brazen image which,
however, even the Times could not succeed in
setting up.

821

about carrying out that design in a more awk-
ward and ineffectual way, than by being lavish in
professions of his desire to preserve friendly rela-
tions between the two nations, and by hypocri-
tical civilities to the Queen of ENGLAND.
At the same time, confident as we feel that the
French Ruler and the French people do not
entertain these hostile designs, we by no means
should counsel our rulers to neglect ordinary
precautions. We by no means advocate the
reduction of our means of defence to anything
like so low an ebb as to leave our shores in that
defenceless state in which the Whig-Radical
Administrations left them at the period when the
late Duke of WELLINGTON placed on record his
protest against all absence of preparation to repel
an enemy. But, fortunately for us, aggression
requires a tenfold greater amount of prepa-
ration than defensive warfare. The arma-
ment which must sail from Cherbourg to
effect a landing on our coasts might be
thrown into hopeless confusion by one which
did not amount to one-tenth of its strength.
What constitutes the power and efficiency of an
invading armament on land—viz., the soldiers,
the horses, the artillery, the commissariat, &c.—
constitutes its weakness at sea. We think that
England ought always to be prepared at the
shortest notice to equip such a force as would
throw confusion into a hostile expedition, and
would either prevent its attempt to land, or
would insure its annihilation in the attempt.
Had the Russians thrown their Sebastopol fleet
into the midst of the Anglo-French Crimean
expedition, and had they opposed vigorously the
landing, after their attack by sea, we do not
believe that there is a military man of any.
authority but will acknowledge that that allied
army never would have reached the Alma.
Now, there is one thing very certain, and that
is, that England has no design of invading
France. All that it is therefore necessary for
England to do is to maintain always in
readiness a sufficient force to assail and
deal with a hostile armament, come it
from what quarter it may. Fortunately, in the
nature of things, as we have shown, that force
need not be of anything like the strength of the
force which it would have to oppose, for no
doubt there is a limit to the power, if not to
the amount of an invading force : addition be-
yond a certain quantity does not add to, but
detracts from, its efficiency; and its extent may
be increased so as to become utterly unwieldy
and unmanageable. Therefore the forces which
England need maintain can give no umbrage to
France, and can neither excite in her any alarm
nor justify her in increasing her military and
naval preparations. Thus that ruinous course of
rivalry between the two countries—the augmen-
tation of the armaments of one being made the
pretext for the augmentation of the armaments of
the other—ought to be wholly avoided ; and the
French Emperor, if he be as wise as we believe
him to be, will spend the vast resources at his
command in improvinc, the condition of his
people, and in great works of peace, rather than
wasting them in unproductive works, and in con-
structing navies which he can never want for
defence, and which assuredly will not serve him
for aggression.