Chapter XVII: The Arrow War, 1856-1860 (2)

What misgiving troubled the repose of Lord Elgin as to the good faith of the Imperial Government on which he had ventured so much, may be partly inferred from his avidity in catching at any straw which might support his faith. Hearing that "his friends the two Imperial Commissioners" who had signed the treaty were appointed to meet him in Shanghai to arrange the tariff, Lord Elgin welcomed the news as "proof that the emperor has made up his mind to accept the treaty." But as the emperor had already, by imperial decree dated 3rd July, and communicated in the most formal manner to Lord Elgin, expressly sanctioned the treaty before the plenipotentiary left Tientsin, wherefore the anxiety for further proofs of his good intentions? "This decree was forced out of the emperor," Mr Oliphant tells us, "by Lord Elgin's pertinacity"--and the threat of bringing up to Tientsin a regiment of British soldiers then at the mouth of the river! As a matter of fact, the mission of the two Imperial Commissioners was of quite another character from that assigned to it by Lord Elgin. The two men were sent to complete their task of preventing by every means the advent of the barbarians to Peking, just as Lord Elgin himself was, two years later, sent back to China to finish his work, which was to bring the said barbarians into the imperial city. Between two such missions there could be neither reconciliation nor compromise.

There is authority for stating that the Imperial Commissioners were expressly sent by the emperor to Shanghai (1) to annul the whole treaty of Tientsin, and (2) failing the whole, as much of it as possible, but especially the article providing for a Minister at Peking. The ostensible purpose of the mission, from the foreign point of view, was the settlement of the tariff and trade regulations,--about which, however, the Chinese cared very little,--and delegates were appointed for this purpose. The labour was conscientiously performed, on one side at any rate, and the result was highly creditable to the delegates. It was by insertion in the tariff of imports that opium became recognised, chiefly, it would appear, at the instance of the United States Minister, Mr W. B. Reed, who was on the spot.

Apart from the tariff two principal questions occupied the minds of the negotiators of the treaty--the actual situation at Canton on the part of the English, and the prospective residence in Peking on the part of the Chinese. Lord Elgin hoped, by an appeal to the treaty of peace, to put an end to the hostile proceedings of officials and people which had harassed the occupying force in Canton with impunity for nine months. But it was the treaty itself against which officials, gentry, and braves were making war, just as they had done in the case of the treaty of 1842. There was no ambiguity about the movement. The Government was carried on not in Canton but in the neighbouring city of Fatshan, where the Governor-General Huang, who had been appointed to succeed Yeh, held his court and issued his decrees. Two months after the occupation of Canton the puppet whom the Allies had installed there admitted that the object of the assemblage of braves was to retake the city. Two months after the signature of the treaty and its acceptance by the emperor the Governor-General Huang was publicly offering a reward of $30,000 for the head of Parkes, and was stimulating the people in every way to expel the foreigners from the city. All this was in perfect accord both with imperial policy and with Chinese ethics. It had the full sanction of the emperor, just as similar operations had formerly had of his father. For the grand purpose of destroying or impairing the treaty there was no distinction in the Chinese mind between legitimate and illegitimate, honourable or treacherous, methods.

Lord Elgin, who had returned from Japan to Shanghai to meet the Imperial Commissioners in September, disappointed at their non-arrival, opened communications with them by a threat of returning to Tientsin and thus saving them the trouble of completing their slow journey to Shanghai. On their eventual arrival there he opened a diplomatic campaign against Canton by a demand (October 7) to know under what authority Huang and the military committees were organising attacks on the Allies. In reply the Imperial Commissioners naïvely proposed to promulgate the treaty. This frivolous answer provoked the rejoinder (October 9) that the treaty had been three months before publicly sanctioned by imperial decree, that something more than "documents and professions" were required to satisfy Lord Elgin on a question of "peace or war," and he demanded the removal of the Governor-General Huang. The commissioners then said they had denounced Huang to the throne, and hoped for his removal at no very distant date. They would also move his Majesty the Emperor to withdraw his authority from the hostile militia. Canton being thus disposed of, as he supposed, Lord Elgin proceeded to other business. But the hostilities at Canton continued without the least abatement for three months longer, until something more strenuous than diplomatising with the Imperial Commissioners was resorted to. The British Government had at last become exasperated, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Malmesbury, wrote on October 14 to Lord Elgin, "The most severe measures against the braves are the only ones which will obtain the recognition by the Cantonese of the treaty of Tientsin." It was not long before Lord Elgin himself became converted to the same belief, for on January 20, 1859, he wrote to General van Straubenzee, after some successful reprisals he had made on the village braves, that "advantage should be taken of the cool weather to familiarise the rural inhabitants of the vicinity of Canton with the presence of our troops, and to punish severely braves or others who venture to attack them." By this time also he had realised that the promise on which he relied in October had been evaded, and he told the Imperial Commissioners on January 22 that he would "have nothing more to say to them on Canton matters,--that our soldiers and sailors would take the braves into their own hands."

The effect of the new tactics was immediate and satisfactory. When the Allied troops began to move about they were welcomed in the very hotbeds of hostility. "At Fatshan," writes General van Straubenzee on January 28, "we were received most courteously by the authorities and respectfully by the people." A five-days' excursion to Fa Yuen, the headquarters of the anti-foreign committee, was likewise a perfect success; and so everywhere throughout the Canton district. Lord Elgin was now able to assume a bolder tone with the Imperial Commissioners and address them in still plainer terms.

"The moderation of the Allies," he wrote to them in February, "has been misunderstood by the officials and gentry by whom the braves are organised.... This habit of insult and outrage shall be put down with the strong hand.... It shall be punished by the annihilation of all who persist in it." There was no need for any such extreme remedy, for as soon as the burglars realised that the watch-dog had been loosed they ceased from troubling the household, and fell back on peaceful and respectable ways of life. "With the cessation of official instigation," Lord Elgin wrote in March, "hostile feeling on the part of the inhabitants appears to have subsided," thus falling into line with Consul Alcock, who wrote: "Clear proof was furnished that the long-nurtured and often-invoked hostility of the Cantonese was entirely of fictitious growth, due exclusively to the inclinations of the mandarins as a part of the policy of the Court of Peking." And then, too, the difficulty of removing the Governor-General Huang disappeared. He had, in fact, been unsuccessful in expelling the barbarians, just as Yeh had been, and the imperial decree superseding him naturally followed. His presence or absence had then become of no importance to the Allies, as, had he remained, he would have accepted the accomplished fact of the foreign supremacy with as good a grace as the gentry and their braves had done, for they never contemplated endangering their lives by fighting. Outrages on stragglers, assassination, kidnapping, and bravado filled up the repertory of their militant resources, and when these were no longer effective they retired into private life as if nothing had happened. The officials were no less acquiescent once they realised that they had a master.

The interest of this Canton episode lies in its relation to the Chinese question generally. Foreign intercourse with China is marked by a rhythm so regular that any part of it may be taken as an epitome of the whole, like a pattern of wall-paper. From Canton we learn that calculation of national advantage or danger, argument from policy, even threats which are not believed, are so much "clouds and wind," not profitable even as mental exercises. What alone is valid is concrete fact; not treaties, but the execution of them.

* * * * *

The Imperial Commissioners had in good time presented their own demand on Lord Elgin, and in most becoming terms, for between preferring and meeting a request there is all the difference in the world. The two Chinese signatories of the treaty frankly avowed that they had signed without scrutiny under military pressure, and that certain stipulations were highly inconvenient to the Imperial Government, particularly the right of keeping a Minister in residence in Peking. Lord Elgin agreed to move his Government, and the Government consented to waive the right, conditionally. Lord Elgin laid stress on the retention of the right as a right, forgetting that in China a right conditionally waived is a right definitely abandoned. Nor only so, but so far from consolidating what remains, it constitutes a vantage-ground for demanding further concessions, and in other fields of international relations besides that of China. Nothing therefore could have been wider of the mark than any expectation that "the decision of her Majesty's Government respecting residence in Peking would induce the Chinese Government to receive in a becoming manner a representative of her Majesty when he proceeds to the Peiho to exchange the ratification." Experience pointed to quite the opposite effect.

These critical remarks are by no means intended either to belittle Lord Elgin's good work, to depreciate his real statesmanship, or to scoff at his sensibility and high-mindedness. But his errors being like a flaw in a steel casting, pregnant with destruction, and as the same kind of flaw continues to vitiate many of our smaller diplomatic castings, the China question could not really be understood without giving proper consideration to them. For the rest, as a despatch writer Lord Elgin was both copious and able--he did not take a double first at Oxford for nothing. Still, his writings and orations are scarcely the source whence one would seek for light and leading on the Chinese problem. They are vitiated by self-vindication. Many of them are elaborate efforts to make the worse appear the better reason, while their political philosophy is based too much on speculative conceptions where ascertained data were available.

On the last day of July 1858 Lord Elgin with his suite set out on their memorable voyage to Japan, the narrative of which has been so skilfully woven by Laurence Oliphant. This episode will claim our attention later. His lordship came, saw, and conquered--returned to China in a month crowned with fresh laurels. At Shanghai he saw the tariff settled, and then performed another pioneer voyage of prodigious significance. This was up the Yangtze as far as the great central emporium Hankow. Captain Sherard Osborn was the Palinurus of that original and venturesome voyage. After that, Lord Elgin bent his steps towards England; but before leaving China the ghosts of things done and undone haunted him. "A variety of circumstances lead me to the conclusion that the Court of Peking is about to play us false," was the melancholy epitaph he wrote on his mixed policy, on his honest attempt to make war with rose-water, and his subordination, on critical occasions, of judgment to sentiment.

Meantime his brother Frederick, who had carried the Tientsin treaty to London, was returning with it and the Queen's ratification and his letter of credence as British Minister to China. The _dénoûment_ of the plot was now at hand. The real mind of the Chinese Government was finally declared in the sanguinary reception the new envoy met with at the entrance of the Peiho in June 1859. Frederick Bruce was generally considered a man of larger calibre than his elder brother. "In disposition he was a fine, upright, honourable fellow," writes Sir Hope Grant, "and in appearance tall and strong made, with a remarkably good expression of countenance." But it took even him a long time to fathom the new situation. After his disastrous repulse from the Taku forts he wrote in August, "I regret much that when the permanent residence was waived it was not laid down in detail what the reception of the Minister at Peking was to be." But it was no question of detail that barred his passage to Peking. It was the settled determination never to see the face of any foreign Minister; and it seems strange that it should have taken not only another year but another war finally to convince the British plenipotentiaries and their Government that the message of China from first to last, from Peking and Canton, had been to fling the treaty in their face.

II. LORD ELGIN'S SECOND MISSION.

Invasion of Peking -- Convention of Peking -- Establishment
of the British Legation -- Russian and British, a contrast.

The Chinese perfidy at Taku had of course to be avenged. A formidable expedition was equipped by the Allied Powers, Lord Elgin and Baron Gros being reappointed as plenipotentiaries. The history of the famous Peking campaign of 1860, with its tragic incidents, has been impressed on the world by so many writers, military and civil, most of them actors in the scenes they depict, that the barest outline of events may suffice in this place.

In the preliminary agreement between the two Governments, the British military force was limited to 10,000 effectives; but the number actually placed in the field exceeded that figure by the consent of the French, whose forces were between 6000 and 7000. The British contingent was commanded by General Sir Hope Grant, the French by General Montauban, afterwards created Count Palikao,--"a fine, handsome, soldier-like man, apparently under sixty years of age."

The naval forces were commanded respectively by Vice-Admiral Sir James Hope, "a tall, noble-looking man, with a prepossessing and most gentlemanlike appearance,"[42] and by Admiral Page, "a superior man with a great deal of dry humour, but bad-tempered."[43]

The friction arising between Allies working together, waiting for each other, consulting at every step, taking precedence of each other on alternate days, at first vexatious, was in the end overcome by the tact of the commanders on both sides.

The first operation of war was to occupy the harbour of Chusan as an intermediate base. After that the British force was conveyed in transports to Talien-wan, where they were disembarked, while the French were landed at Chefoo, on the opposite shore of the Gulf of Pechili. At these points preparations were made for the intended descent on the coast of the province of Chihli, between 200 and 300 miles to the westward. The British force included 1000 cavalry in splendid condition, and a battery of Armstrong guns, then for the first time used in active service. The French had no cavalry, the attempts to import horses from Japan were not successful, and the scarcity of draught-animals on their side caused great delay in the sailing of the expedition from the temporary depots. At length on July 26 a fleet of over 200 sail--a magnificent spectacle--carried the two armies to within twenty miles of the Peiho, where they anchored, waiting for favourable weather and a minute reconnaissance.

The one piece of strategy in the campaign was the choice of a landing-place. The Taku forts, which had been strong enough to repulse Sir James Hope with severe loss a year before, had been further strengthened, for to the Chinese it was a matter of life and death to bar the entrance to the Peiho. The chain barrier across the mouth of the river could not be forced under the concentrated fire of the forts; only the lightest draught vessels could approach within five miles; and a frontal attack was not to be thought of. But a decided difference of opinion between the Allied generals had disclosed itself as to the mode of procedure. The French commander was determined to land on the coast to the southward of the forts; the English was still more resolute in selecting as a landing-place the mouth of the Peitang river, eight miles northward of Taku. So irreconcilable were their views that it was agreed that each should go his own way, only starting simultaneously. After more careful study, however, General Montauban came to think better of his own scheme, and proposed to Sir Hope Grant to join him in the landing at Peitang.

So on August 2 the first detachments of 2000 from each army were disembarked, and the campaign proper commenced. The forts at Peitang were easily occupied, "a kind old man" pointing out where there were loaded shells which would explode on foot pressure on a gun-lock laid so as to fire a train. By means of a raised causeway leading through a sea of "briny slush," positions were reached whence the Taku forts could be attacked from the rear. Though bravely defended, the forts on the left bank were captured, and as they commanded those on the opposite bank no resistance was offered by the latter. The Peiho was thus opened for the conveyance of troops and stores to Tientsin, which was made the base of operations for the advance of the Allied armies on Peking.

The military movements were hampered by the presence of the two plenipotentiaries, who stopped on the way to negotiate with the unbeaten foe. Delay was not the only untoward consequence of these proceedings. At one moment a military disaster seemed to have been narrowly escaped. Taking advantage of the singular credulity of the Allies, the Chinese, while engaging them in friendly negotiations, had planned to decoy the army into a convenient camping-ground at Changchia-wan, towards which the troops were marching, when, "To my surprise," writes the commander-in-chief, "we found a strong Tartar picket, who retired on our approach; and a little farther on were seen great bodies of cavalry and infantry, the latter drawn up behind a large nullah to our right front, displaying a number of banners." In the meantime the envoys, Parkes, Loch, and other officers, who had been negotiating with the higher mandarins at Tungchow, a couple of miles off, were seized and made prisoners with their escort, all being subsequently cruelly tortured, and most of them massacred, in accordance with Chinese practice in war.

Sir Hope Grant, finding his army of 4000 men in process of being hemmed in, attacked and routed the Chinese troops on September 18, resuming his march on the 21st, when the remainder of his force had joined him. He had not gone far, however, when the way was again barred, and another action had to be fought at the bridge Pali-chiao, ten miles from Peking, where General Montauban distinguished himself, and whence he derived his title.

Far from owning themselves defeated, the Chinese on the morrow resumed negotiations as between equals. The Imperial Commissioners who had mismanaged the affair were replaced by Prince Kung, a brother of the emperor, who sent letters under a flag of truce, saying he was ready to come to terms, but "said nothing about our poor prisoners." The Allied plenipotentiaries declined to treat until the captives should be returned, whereupon Prince Kung sent another letter saying they were safe, but would only be sent back on the restitution of the Taku forts and the evacuation of the river by the Allied fleets.

Lord Elgin had demanded that he should deliver the Queen's letter in person to the emperor. Prince Kung refused this demand, which Lord Elgin incontinently abandoned. Waxing bolder, Prince Kung next threatened that the entry of the Allied forces into the capital would be followed by the instant massacre of the prisoners. The plenipotentiaries retorted by intimating that the surrender of prisoners was a necessary condition of the suspension of hostilities. A week having been wasted in this vain seesaw, an ultimatum was sent into Peking on September 30. This was answered by the Chinese inviting the Allies to retire to Changchia-wan, the scene of the great defeat of their army, offering to sign the treaty there. And so the contest was maintained until the Allied artillery was planted within sixty yards of the north gate, and the hour was about to strike when the wall was to be battered down.

Most valuable information--the topography of the city--had been supplied by General Ignatieff, who accompanied the Allies. A map which he lent to Sir Hope Grant showed every street and house of importance in Peking, laid down by a scientific member of the Russian mission in the city. The data had been obtained by traversing the streets in a cart, from which angles were taken, while an indicator fixed to the wheel marked the distances covered. Without this plan the attack would have been made from the south side, as proposed by General Montauban, which would have involved a march through the commercial or Chinese quarter, and the surmounting first of the Chinese and then of the Tartar wall. The map made it clear that from every point of view the north side offered the most eligible point of attack, where nothing intervened between a great open plain and the wall of the Manchu city.

Passing over the dramatic incidents of the destruction of the Summer Palace, an act of calculated vengeance for the murder and maltreatment of envoys and prisoners, the flight of the emperor on a hunting tour to Jêho, whence he never returned, the release of the prisoners and their account of the captivity, the new treaty was signed at the Hall of Ceremonies on October 22, 1860, by Prince Kung, "a delicate gentlemanlike man, evidently overcome with fear," and his coadjutor, Hangki. The treaties of Tientsin were ratified, and some further indemnities exacted. The special provisions introduced into the French treaty will be referred to in a subsequent chapter.[44]

The closing scene was marked by a degree of haste somewhat recalling Tientsin in 1858. The very slow advance on Peking brought the climax of the campaign unpleasantly close to the season when communication by water would be shut off by ice; "the weather became bitterly cold, some of the hills being covered with snow." And Sir Hope Grant's never-failing counsellor, Ignatieff, with "his usual extreme kindness," furnished him with the most important information that the Peiho would soon become frozen up and it would be unsafe to linger in Peking. Mr Loch's galloping off with the treaty, as shown in the illustration, was rather typical of the whole business. The treaty as such was of little consequence--the fulfilment of its provisions was everything.

Some lessons, nevertheless, had been learned in the school of diplomatic adversity. Peking was not left without a _locum tenens_ of the Minister, Tientsin was not left without a garrison, and the Taku forts were occupied by the Allies for a couple of years after the final conclusion of peace.

"Ring out the old; ring in the new." There seemed a natural fitness in the Hon. Frederick Bruce succeeding the Earl of Elgin as Minister plenipotentiary, and there was a dramatic finish in the farewell ceremonial when the retiring representative of the Queen vacated the seat of honour, placing therein his younger brother, whom he introduced to Prince Kung as the accredited agent of Great Britain. The new era was inaugurated; a real representative of her Britannic Majesty was installed in the capital of the Son of Heaven.

The season was late, and though two palaces had been granted on lease for the residences of the British and the French Ministers, many alterations and repairs were needed to render them fit for occupation, which could not be effected before the closing of the sea communication by ice. The Ministers therefore resolved to withdraw from Peking for the winter, placing their respective legations in charge of a junior consular officer, Mr Thomas Adkins, who volunteered to hold the post until the return of the plenipotentiaries in the following spring.

Mr Adkins was not the only foreign sojourner in the Chinese capital. There was a French Lazarist priest, Mouilli by name, who, having successfully concealed himself among his native Christians during the military advance of the Allies, emerged from his hiding-place on the triumphant entry of the ambassadors, and showed himself in the streets in a sedan chair with four bearers. There was the permanent Russian establishment within the city, with its unbroken record of 173 years. Originally composed of prisoners taken at the siege of Albazin, it had become a seminary of the Orthodox Church and a political _vedette_ of the Russian empire, invaluable to the two masterful diplomatists who appeared suddenly on the scene in the years 1858 and 1860. The mission served as a speculum through which Russia could look into the inner recesses of the Chinese State, while to the Chinese it was a window of bottle-glass through which the external world was refracted for them. The Russian Government selects its agents on the principle on which we select university crews or All-England elevens--namely, the most fit. So important and far-sighted a scheme as the Peking mission was not left to chance or the claims of seniority, but was maintained in the highest efficiency. Its members--six ecclesiastical and four lay--were changed every ten years. All of them, from the Archimandrite downwards, were accomplished linguists, speaking Chinese like the natives, and masters also of the Manchu and Mongol languages. Their relations with the Chinese officials were unostentatious, yet brotherly. Few secrets, either of administration, dynastic politics, or official intrigue, no communications between the Government, provincial or imperial, and any foreigners, escaped record in the archives of the Russian mission. The _personnel_ were protected from outrage or insult by their own tact and their traditional prestige; and as the Daimios of Japan in their anti-foreign manifestos declared that every foreigner could be insulted with impunity except the Russians, so in China the name was a talisman of security. While the Anglo-French expedition was marching towards Peking the Russian Secretary, M. Popoff, had occasion to leave that city and pass the night at a native inn on the road to Tientsin. The place became filled with the retreating Chinese soldiery, and M. Popoff had the pleasure of hearing their excited conversation respecting himself. They were for dragging him out and killing him on the spot, when the landlord interposed. "That foreigner is a Russian," said he; "it will be dangerous to lay a hand on him."

M. Popoff's errand was to meet General Ignatieff, who was making his way to Peking with the Allied forces. It was of the utmost importance that he should arrive simultaneously with the French and English plenipotentiaries in order to save China from her doom. China's extremity was Russia's opportunity for showing the sincerity of her long unbroken friendship. The foreigners had come to possess themselves of the empire and destroy the dynasty. Their ruthless character was soon to be shown in the burning and pillage of the Summer Palace. The Chinese Court's apprehension of the impending calamity was proved by the flight of the emperor to a quasi-inaccessible retreat. In that terrible crisis no sacrifice would have been deemed by the imperial family too great to "get rid of the barbarians." Confirming their own worst fears as to the designs of the invaders, General Ignatieff revealed to them the only way of salvation. Nothing would arrest the schemes of the Allies but the intervention of a strong Power friendly to China. He had it in his power to make such representations to Baron Gros and Lord Elgin as would induce them to withdraw their troops. This essential service he offered to the Chinese for a nominal consideration. Only a rectification of frontier by inclusion of a sterile region inhabited by robbers and infested by tigers, where no mandarin could make a living, fit only for a penal settlement, with a rugged sea-coast where no Chinese sail was ever seen. Prince Kung jumped at the providential offer of deliverance, and so that great province called Primorsk, with its 600 miles of coast-line, which gave to Russia the dominion of the East--"Vladivostock"--was signed away by the panic-stricken rulers of China. A year later this transaction cropped up in conversation over the teacups, after the business of the day had been disposed of, between Prince Kung and a certain foreign diplomatist, who remarked that there was never the remotest intention on the part of the Allies of keeping a single soldier in China after the treaty was made. The Prince looked aghast, then said solemnly, "Do you mean to say we have been deceived?" "Utterly," replied the other; and then the dejection of the Prince was such as the foreigner, who lived to enjoy a twenty-years' acquaintance with him, declared he never saw in his or any other Chinese countenance. Thus General Ignatieff, without any force, in the vulgar sense, of his own, was adroit enough and bold enough to wield the forces of his belligerent neighbours so as to carry off the only solid fruit of the war, while fulfilling the obligations of friendship for China and denouncing her spoilers.

The Russian envoy had not the same incentive to hurry away from Peking as the other treaty-makers had, for the ice which would imprison them would afford him the most expeditious road for travel homewards through Siberia. He was nearly as much relieved as Prince Kung himself at getting rid of these "barbarians," for then he had the field of diplomacy all to himself. He made his treaty, and departed during the winter by the back door, across Mongolia.

Ignatieff was a man well known in English society, and thoroughly conversant with England. Like most educated Russians, he was affable and sympathetic--a "charming fellow." He was courteous and companionable to the _locum tenens_ of the English Legation, and in taking leave of Mr Adkins expressed the opinion that he would be all right in his isolation so long as the emperor did not return to Peking, but in that event his position would not be an enviable one. However, "if you fear any trouble, go over to the Russian mission: they will take care of you."

The winter of 1860 left the statesmen of China some food for reflection. The thundering legions had passed like a tornado which leaves a great calm behind it. The "still small voice" had also departed, with a province in his _chemadán_, gained without a shot or even a shout. Two strongly contrasted foreign types had thus been simultaneously presented to the astonished Chinese. Can it be doubted which left the deeper impression?

Preparations were made during the winter for receiving the foreign Ministers in the spring. A department of Foreign Affairs was created under the title of "Tsung-li Koh Kwoh She Yu Yamên," or briefly, "Tsungli-Yamên," the three original members being Prince Kung, Kweiliang, and Wênsiang. The Yamên was established by imperial decrees in January; Mr Bruce and M. Bourboulon arrived in March 1861, when diplomacy proper began, the thread of which will be resumed in a later section.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] "Verily," writes Wingrove Cooke, "Sir John Bowring, much abused as he is both here and at home, has taken a more common-sense view of these matters than the high diplomatists of England and France."

[38] Before the conclusion of his second mission Lord Elgin's opinion of at least one of those whom at the outset he disparaged had undergone considerable modification. "Parkes," he wrote in 1860, "is one of the most remarkable men I ever met for energy, courage, and ability combined. I do not know where I could find his match."

[39] Lord Elgin protested against the use of this tabooed term, but took no exception to the statement as to his having obeyed the commands of the Imperial Commissioners.

[40] 'The Scotsman,' September 18, 1858.

[41] It seems to have been a general opinion at the time that Lord Elgin was deterred from proceeding to Peking by the protestations of his learned advisers, who declared that his doing so would "shatter the empire."

[42] Sir Hope Grant's Journal.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Vol. ii. p. 224.