 Section 1 of A History of Our Own Times from the Accession of Queen Victoria to the General Election of 1880 Volume 3. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Pamela Nagami M.D. A History of Our Own Times from the Accession of Queen Victoria to the General Election of 1880 Volume 3 by Justin McCarthy. Chapter 30. The Lorce Aero Part 1 After the supposed settlement of the eastern question at the Congress of Paris, a sort of langer seems to have come over Parliament and the public mind in England. Lord John Russell endeavored unsuccessfully to have something done which should establish in England a genuine system of national education. He proposed a series of resolutions, one of which laid down the principle that after a certain appointed time, when any school district should have been declared to be deficient in adequate means for the education of the poor, the quarter-sessions of the peace for the county city or borough should have power to impose a school rate. This was a step in the direction of compulsory education. It anticipated the principle on which the first genuine measure for national instruction was founded many years after. It was, of course, rejected by the House of Commons when Lord Russell proposed it. Public opinion, both in and out of Parliament, was not nearly ripe for such a principle then. All such proposals were quietly disposed of, with the observation that that sort of thing might do well for Prussians, but would never suit Englishmen. That was a time when oppression was regarded in England as a dull, beer-bemused, servile creature, good for nothing better than to grovel before his half-inebriated monarchs and to get the stick from his incapable military officers. The man who suggested then that perhaps some day the Prussians might show that they knew how to fight would have been set down, as on par intellectually, with the narrow-minded grumbler who did not believe in the profound sagacity of the Emperor of the French. For a country of practical men, England is ruled to a marvelous extent by phrases, and the term un-English was destined for a considerable time to come to settle all attempts at the introduction of any system of national education which even touched on the compulsory principle. One of the regular attempts to admit the Jews to Parliament was made, and succeeded in the House of Commons to fail as usual in the House of Lords. The House of Lords itself was thrown into great perturbation for a time by the proposal of the government to confer a peerage for life on one of the judges, Sir James Park. Lord Lindhurst strongly opposed the proposal on the ground that it was the beginning of an attempt to introduce a system of life peerages which would destroy the ancient and hereditary character of the House of Lords, allow of its being at any time broken up and remodeled according to the discretion of the minister in power, and reduce it in fact to the level of a Continental Life Senate. Many members of the House of Commons were likewise afraid of the innovation. It seemed to foreshadow the possible revival of an ancient principle of crown nomination, which might be applied to the representative as well as to the hereditary chamber, seeing that at one time English sovereigns did undoubtedly assume the right of nominating members of the House of Commons. The government, who had really no reactionary or revolutionary designs in their mind, settled the matter for the time by creating Sir James Park, Baron Wensley Dale in the usual way, and the object they had in view was quietly accomplished many years later when the appellate jurisdiction of the Lords was remodeled. Sir George Lewis was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was as yet not credited with anything like the political ability which he afterwards proved that he possessed. It was the fashion to regard him as a mere bookman, who had drifted somehow into Parliament and who, in the temporary absence of available talent, had been thrust into the office, lately held by Mr. Gladstone. The contrast indeed between the style of his speaking and that of Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Disraeli was enough to dishearten any political assembly. Mr. Gladstone had brought to his budget speeches an eloquence that brightened the driest details and made the wilderness of figures to blossom like the rose. Mr. Disraeli was able to make a financial statement burst into a bouquet of fireworks. Sir George Lewis began by being nearly inaudible and continued to the last to be oppressed by the most ineffective and unattractive manner and delivery. But it began to be gradually found out that the monotonous, halting, feeble manner covered a very remarkable power of expression. That the speaker had great resources of argument, humor, and illustration. That every sentence contained some fresh idea or some happy expression. It was not very long before an experienced observer of Parliament declared that Sir George Lewis delivered the best speeches with the worst manner known to the existing House of Commons. After a while a reaction set in and the capacity of Lewis ran the risk of being overrated quite as much as it had been undervalued before. In him men said, was seen the coming Prime Minister of England. Time, as it will be seen afterwards, did not allow Sir George Lewis any chance of making good this prediction. He was undoubtedly a man of rarability and refined intellect. An example very uncommon in England of the thinker, the scholar, and the statesman in one. His speeches were an intellectual treat to all with whom matter counted for more than manner. One who had watched parliamentary life from without and within for many years said he had never had his deliberate opinion changed by his speech in the House of Commons but twice. And each time it was an argument from Sir George Lewis that accomplished the conversion. For the present, however, Sir George Lewis was regarded only as the sort of statesman whom it was fitting to have an office just then. The statesman of an interval in whom no one was expected to take any particular interest. The attention of the public was a good deal distracted from political affairs by the simultaneous outbreak of new forms of crime and fraud. The trial of Palmer in the rougely poisoning case, the trial of Dove in the Leeds poisoning case, these and similar events set the popular mind into wild alarm as to the prevalence of strict nine poisoning everywhere. The failure and frauds of the Royal British Bank, the frauds of Robson and Redpath, gave for the time a sort of idea that the financial principles of the country were crumbling to pieces. The culmination of the extraordinary career of John Sadler was fresh in public memory. This man, it will be recollected, was the organizer and guiding spirit of the Irish Brigade, the gang of adventurers whom we have already described as trading on the genuine grievances of their country to get power and money for themselves. John Sadler overdid the thing. He embezzled, swindled, forged, and finally escaped justice by committing suicide on Hampstead Heath. So fraudful had his life been that many persons persisted in believing that his supposed suicide was but another fraud. He had got possession, such was the theory, of a dead body which bore some resemblance to his own form and features. He had palmed this off as his own corpse, done to death by poison, and had himself contrived to escape with a large portion of his ill-gotten money. This extraordinary parody and perversion of the plot of Jean-Paul Richter's story of Zebenke's really found many faithful believers. It is worth mentioning, not as a theory credible in itself, but as an evidence of the belief that it got abroad as to the character and stratagems of Sadler. The brother of Sadler was expelled from the House of Commons, one of his accomplices who had obtained a government appointment and had embezzled money, contrived to make his escape to the United States, and the Irish Brigade was broken up. It is only just to say that the best representatives of the Irish Catholics and the Irish National Party in and out of Parliament had never from the first believed in Sadler in his band and had made persistent efforts to expose them. About this time Mr. Cyrus W. Field, an energetic American merchant, came over to this country to explain to its leading merchants and scientific men a plan he had for constructing an electric telegraph line underneath the Atlantic. Mr. Field had had this idea strongly in his mind for some years, and he made a strenuous effort to impress the English public with a conviction of its practicability. He was received by the merchants of Liverpool on November 12th, 1856 in their exchange rooms, and he made a long statement explaining his views which were listened to with polite curiosity. Mr. Field had, however, a much better reception on the whole than Monsieur de Lesseps, who came to England a few months later, to explain his project for constructing a ship canal across the Isthmus of Suez. The proposal was received with coldness and more than coldness by engineers, capitalists, and politicians. Engineers showed that the canal could not be made, or at least maintained when made. Capitalists proved that it never could pay, and politicians were ready to make it plain that such a canal if made would be a standing menace to English interests. Lord Palmerston, a few days after, frankly admitted that the English government were opposed to the project because it would tend to the more easy separation of Egypt from Turkey and set afloat speculations as to the ready access to India. Monsieur de Lesseps himself has given an amusing account of the manner in which Lord Palmerston denounced the scheme in an interview with the projector. Luckily, neither Mr. Field nor Monsieur de Lesseps was a person to be lightly discouraged. Great projectors are usually as full of their own ideas as great poets. Monsieur de Lesseps had in the end perhaps more reason to be alarmed at England's sudden appreciation of the scheme than he had in the first instance to complain of the cold disapprobation with which her government encountered it. The political world seemed to have made up its mind for a season of quiet. Suddenly that happened which always does happen in such a condition of things, a storm broke out. To those who remember the events of that time, three words will explain the nature of the disturbance. The Lorca Arrow will bring back the recollection of one of the most curious political convulsions known in this country during our generation. For years after the actual events connected with the Lorca Arrow, the very name of that ominous vessel used to send a shutter through the House of Commons. The word suggested first an impassioned controversy which had left a painful impression on the condition of political parties, and next an effort of futile persistency to open the whole controversy once again and force it upon the notice of legislators who wished for nothing better than to be allowed to forget it. In the speech from the throne at the opening of Parliament on February 3, 1857, the following passage occurred. Her Majesty commands us to inform you that acts of violence, insults to the British flag, an infraction of treaty rights committed by the local Chinese authorities at Canton, and a pertinacious refusal of redress have rendered it necessary for Her Majesty's officers in China to have recourse to measures of force to obtain satisfaction. The acts of violence, the insults to the British flag, and the infraction of treaty rights alleged to have been committed by the Chinese authorities at Canton had for their single victim the Lorca Arrow. The Lorca Arrow was a small boat built on the European model. The word Lorca is taken from the Portuguese settlement at Macau at the mouth of the Canton River. It often occurs in treaties with the Chinese authorities. Every British schooner, cutter, Lorca, etc., are words that we constantly find in these documents. On October 8, 1856, a party of Chinese in charge of an officer boarded a boat called the Arrow in the Canton River. They took off twelve men on a charge of piracy, leaving two men in charge of the Lorca. The Arrow was declared by its owners to be a British vessel. Our consul in Canton, Mr. Parks, demanded from Ye, the Chinese governor of Canton, the return of the men, basing his demand upon the ninth article of the Supplemental Treaty of 1843, entered into subsequently to the Treaty of 1842. We need not go deeper into the terms of this treaty than to say that there could be no doubt that it did not give the Chinese authorities any right to seize Chinese offenders or supposed offenders on board an English vessel. It merely gave them a right to require the surrender of the offenders at the hands of the English. The Chinese governor Ye contended, however, that the Lorca was not an English but a Chinese vessel, a Chinese pirate venturing occasionally for her own purposes to fly the flag of England, which she had no right whatever to hoist. Under the treaties with China, British vessels were to be subject to consular authority only. The treaty provided amply for the registration of vessels entitled to British protection, for the regular renewal of the registration and for the conditions under which the registration was to be granted or renewed. The Arrow had somehow obtained a British registration, but it had expired about ten days before the occurrence in the Canton River, and even the British authorities who had been persuaded to grant the registration were not certain whether with the knowledge they subsequently obtained it could be legally renewed. We believe it may be plainly stated at once as a matter of fact that the Arrow was not an English vessel, but only a Chinese vessel which had obtained by false pretenses the temporary possession of a British flag. Mr. Consul Parks however was fussy, and he demanded the instant restoration of the captured men, and he sent off to our plenipotentiary at Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, for authority and assistance in the business. Sir John Bowring was a man of considerable ability. At one time he seemed to be a candidate for something like fame. He was the political pupil and literary executor of Jeremy Bentham, and for some years was editor of the Westminster Review. He had a very large and varied, although not profound or scholarly, knowledge of European and Asiatic languages. There was not much scientific study of languages in his early days. He had traveled a great deal and sat in Parliament for some years. He understood political economy and had a good knowledge of trade and commerce, and in those days a literary man who knew anything about trade and commerce was thought a person of almost miraculous versatility. Bowring had many friends and admirers and he set up early for a sort of great man. He was full of self-conceit and without any very clear idea of political principles on the large scale. Nothing in all his previous habits of life, nothing in the associations and friendships by which he had long been surrounded, nothing in his studies or his writings warranted anyone in expecting that when placed in a responsible position in China at a moment of great crisis he would have taken on him to act the part which aroused such a controversy. It would seem as if his eager self-conceit would not allow him to resist the temptation to display himself on the field of political action as a great English plenipotentiary, a master spirit of the order of Clive or Warren Hastings, bidding England to be of good cheer and compelling inferior races to grovel in the dust before her. Bowring knew China as well as it was then likely that an Englishman could know the huge mummy empire by the hands of custom-wrapped and swathing bands. He had been consul for some years at Canton and he had held the post of Chief Superintendent of Trade there. He sent to the Chinese authorities and demanded the surrender of all the men taken from the arrow. Not merely did he demand the surrender of the men, but he insisted that an apology should be offered for their arrest and a formal pledge given by the Chinese authorities that no such act should ever be committed again. If this was not done within 48 hours, naval operations were to be begun against the Chinese. This sort of demand was less like that of a dignified English official, conscious of the justice of his cause and the strength of his country, than like the demeanor of ancient pistol formulating his terms to the fallen Frenchman on the battlefield. All pharum and furcum and pharitum discussed the same and French unto him. Sir John Bowring called out to the Chinese Governor Ye that he would pharum and furcum and pharitum and bade the same be discussed in Chinese unto him. Ye sent back all the men, saying in effect that he did so to avoid the pharing and furking and phariting, and he even undertook to promise that for the future great care should be taken that no British ship should be visited improperly by Chinese officers. But he could not offer an apology for the particular case of the Arrow, for he still maintained, as was indeed the fact, that the Arrow was a Chinese vessel, and that the English had nothing to do with her. In truth, Sir John Bowring had himself written to consul parks to say that the Arrow had no right to hoist the English flag as her license, however obtained, had expired. But he got over this difficulty by remarking that after all the Chinese did not know that fact, and that they were therefore responsible. Accordingly Sir John Bowring carried out his threat and immediately made war on China. He did something worse than making war in the ordinary way. He had Canton bombarded by the fleet which Admiral Sir Michael Seymour commanded. From October 23rd to November 13th, naval and military operations were kept up continuously. A large number of forts and junks were taken and destroyed. The suburbs of Canton were battered down and ordered that the ships might have a clear arrange to fire upon the city. Shot and shell were poured in upon Canton. Sir John Bowring thought the time appropriate for reviving certain alleged treaty rights for the admission of representatives of British authority into Canton. During the parliamentary debates that followed, Sir John Bowring was accused by Lord Darby and Mr. Cobden of having a sort of monomania about getting into Canton. Curiously enough in his autobiographical fragment Sir John Bowring tells that when he was a little boy he dreamed that he was sent by the King of England as ambassador to China. In his later days he appears to have been somewhat childishly anxious to realize this dream of his infancy. He showed all a child's persistent strength of will and weakness of reason in enforcing his demand. And he appears at one period of the controversy to have thought that it had no other end than his solemn entry into Canton. Meanwhile Commissioner Yeh retaliated by foolishly offering a reward for the head of every Englishman. Throughout the whole business Sir John Bowring contrived to keep himself almost invariably in the wrong. And even where his claim happened to be in itself good, he managed to assert it in a manner at once untimely, imprudent and indecent. End of Section 1. Section 2 of a History of Our Own Times, Volume 3 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 30 The Lorcha Arrow, Part 2 This news from China created a considerable sensation in England, although not many public men had any idea of the manner in which it was destined to affect the House of Commons. On February 24, 1857, Lord Darby brought forward in the House of Lords a motion comprehensively condemning the whole of the proceedings of the British authorities in China. The debate would have been memorable if only for the powerful speech in which the venerable Lord Lindhurst supported the motion and exposed the utter illegality of the course pursued by Sir John Bowring. Lord Lindhurst declared that the proceedings of the British authorities could not be justified upon any principle, either of law or of reason. That the arrow was simply a Chinese vessel, built in China and owned and manned by Chinaman, and he laid it down as a principle which no one will successfully contest, that you may give any rights or privileges to a foreigner or a foreign vessel as against yourself, but you cannot grant to any such foreigner a single right or privilege as against a foreign state. In other words, if the British authorities chose to give a British license to a Chinese pirate boat which would secure her some immunity against British law, that would be altogether an affair for themselves and their government. But they could not pretend by any British register or other document to give a Chinese boat in Chinese waters a right of exemption from the laws of China. Perhaps the whole question never could have arisen if it were not for the fact on which Lord Lindhurst commented that when we are talking of treaty transactions with eastern nations, we have a kind of loose law and loose notion of morality in regard to them. The question as to the right conferred by the license, such as it was, to hoist the British flag, could not have been disposed of more effectually than it was by the Chinese governor Ye himself in a single sentence. A lurcha, as Lei put it, owned by a Chinese, purchased a British flag, did that make her a British vessel? The lurchanzler was actually driven to answer Lord Lindhurst by contending that no matter whether the lurcha was legally or illegally flying the British flag, it was not for the Chinese to assume that she was flying it illegally and that they had no right to board the vessel on the assumption that she was not what she pretended to be. To show the value of that argument, it is only necessary to say that if such were the recognized principle, every pirate in the Canton River would have nothing further to do than to hoist any old scrap of British bunting and sail on, defiant under the very eyes of the Chinese authorities. The governor of Canton would be compelled to make a formal complaint to Sir John Bowring and trust meanwhile that a spirit of fair play would induce the pirates to wait for a formal investigation by the British authorities. Otherwise, neither Chinese nor British could take any steps to capture the offenders. The House of Lords rejected the motion of Lord Darby by a majority of 146 to 110. On February 26, Mr. Cobden brought forward a motion in the House of Commons declaring that the papers which had been laid upon the table failed to establish satisfactory grounds for the violent measures resorted to at Canton in the late affair of the arrow, and demanding that a select committee be appointed to inquire into the state of our commercial relations with China. This must have been a peculiarly painful task for Mr. Cobden. He was an old friend of Sir John Bowring, with whom he had always supposed himself to have many or most opinions in common, but he followed his convictions as to public duty in despite of his personal friendship. It is a curious evidence of the manner in which the moral principles become distorted in a political contest that during the subsequent elections it was actually made a matter of reproach to Mr. Cobden that while acknowledging his old friendship for Sir John Bowring he was nevertheless found ready to move a vote of censure on his public conduct. The debate was remarkable more for the singular political combination which it developed as it went on than even for its varied ability and eloquence. Men spoke and voted on the same side, who had probably never been brought into such companionship before and never were afterwards. Mr. Cobden found himself supported by Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, by Mr. Roebuck and Sir E.B. Lytton, by Lord John Russell and Mr. Whiteside, by Lord Robert Cecil afterwards the Marquis of Salisbury, Sir Frederick Thessager, Mr. Roundell Palmer afterwards Lord Selbrun, Mr. Sidney Herbert and Mr. Milner Gibson. The discussion lasted four nights and it was only as it went on that men's eyes began to open to its political importance. Mr. Cobden had probably never dreamed of the amount or the nature of the support his motion was destined to receive. The government and the opposition alike held meetings out of doors to agree upon a general line of action in the debate and to prepare for the result. Lord Palmerston was convinced that he would come all right in the end, but he felt that he had made himself obnoxious to the advanced liberals by his indifference or rather hostility to every project of reform, and he persuaded himself that the opportunity would be eagerly caught at by them to make a combination with the Tories against him. In all this he was deceiving himself, as he had done more than once before. There is not the slightest reason to believe that anything but a growing conviction of the insufficiency of the defense set up for the proceedings in Canton influenced the great majority of those who spoke and voted for Mr. Cobden's motion. The truth is that there has seldom been so flagrant and so inexcusable an example of high-handed lawlessness in the dealings of a strong, with a weak nation. When the debate first began it was quite possible that many public men still believed some explanation or defense was coming forward which would enable them to do that which the House of Commons is always unwilling not to do, to sustain the action of an English official in a foreign country. As the discussion went on it became more and more evident that there was no such defense or explanation. Men found their consciences coerced into a condemnation of Sir John Bowring's conduct. It was almost ludicrous when the miserable quibblings and evasions of the British officials came to be contrasted with the cruelly clear arguments of the Chinese. The reading of these latter documents came like a practical enforcement of Mr. Cobden's description of the Chinese Empire as a state which had its system of logic before the time of Aristotle and its code of morals before that of Socrates. The vote of censure was carried by 263 votes against 247, a majority of 16. Mr. Disraeli, in the course of a clever and defiant speech made toward the close of the long debate, had challenged Lord Palmerston to take the opinion of the country on the policy of the government. I should like, he exclaimed, to see the program of the proud leaders of the liberal party, no reform, new taxes, canton blazing, peaking invaded. Lord Palmerston's answer was virtually that of Brutus. Why, I will see the at Philippi then. He announced two or three days after that the government had resolved on a dissolution and an appeal to the country. Lord Palmerston knew his Pappenheimers. He understood his countrymen. He knew that a popular minister makes himself more popular by appealing to the country on the ground, that he has been condemned by the House of Commons for upholding the honour of England and coercing some foreign powers somewhere. His address to the electors of Tiverton differed curiously in its plan of appeal from that of Lord John Russell to the electors of the city, where that of Mr. Disraeli to those of Buckinghamshire. Lord John Russell coolly and wisely argued out the controversy between him and Lord Palmerston and gave very satisfactory reasons to prove that there was no sufficient justification for the bombardment of Canton. Mr. Disraeli described Lord Palmerston as the Tory chief of a radical cabinet and declared that with no domestic policy he is obliged to divert the attention of the people from the consideration of their own affairs to the distractions of foreign politics. His external system is turbulent and aggressive that his rule at home may be tranquil and unassailed. In later days a charge not altogether unlike that was made against an English Prime Minister who was not Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston understood the temper of the country too well to trouble himself about arguments of any kind. He came to the point at once. In his address to the electors of Tiverton he declared that an insolent barbarian wielding authority at Canton violated the British flag, broke the engagements of treaties, offered rewards for the heads of British subjects in that part of China, and planned their destruction by murder, assassination, and poison. That of course was all sufficient. The insolent barbarian wasn't itself almost enough. Governor Ye certainly was not a barbarian. His argument on the subject of international law obtained the endorsement of Lord Lindhurst. His way of arguing the political and commercial case compelled the admiration of Lord Darby. His letters form a curious contrast to the documents contributed to the controversy by the representatives of British authority in China. However, he became for electioneering purposes an insolent barbarian, and the story of a Chinese baker who was said to have tried to poison Sir John Bowring became transfigured into an attempt at the wholesale poisoning of Englishmen in China by the express orders of the Chinese governor. Lord Palmerston further intimated that he and his government had been censured by a combination of factious persons who, if they got into power and were prepared to be consistent, must apologize to the Chinese government and offer compensation to the Chinese commissioner. Will the British nation, he asked, give their support to man who have thus endeavored to make the humiliation and degradation of their country the stepping stone to power. No, to be sure, the British nation would do nothing of the kind. Lord Darby, Lord Lindhurst, Mr. Gladston, Mr. Cobden, Mr. Disraeli, Sir E. B. Lytton, Lord Gray, Lord Robert Cecil, these were the craven Englishmen, devoid of all patriotic or manly feeling who were trying to make the humiliation and degradation of their country a stepping stone to power. They were likewise the friends and allies of the insolent barbarian. There were no music halls of the modern type in those days. Had there been such, the denunciations of the insolent barbarian and of his still baser British friends would no doubt have been shouted forth night after night in the metropolis to the accompaniment of rattling glasses and clattering pintpots. Even without the alliance of the music halls, however, Lord Palmerston swept the field of his enemies. His victory was complete. The defeat of the men of peace in a special was what Mr. Ruskin once called, not a fall, but a catastrophe. Cobden, Bright, Milner Gibson, W. J. Fox, Laird, and many other leading opponents of the Chinese policy were left without seats. There was something peculiarly painful in the circumstances of Mr. Bright's defeat at Manchester. Mr. Bright was suffering from severe illness. In the opinion of many of his friends, his health was thoroughly broken. He had worked in public life with a generous disregard of his physical resources, and he was compelled to leave the country and seek rest, first in Italy and afterwards in Algeria. It was not a time when even political enmity could, with a good grace, have ventured to visit on him the supposed offences of his party. But the insolent barbarian phrase overthrew him too. He sent home from Florence a farewell address to the electors of Manchester which was full of quiet dignity. I have esteemed it a high honour, thus ran one passage of the address, to be one of your representatives, and have given more of mental and physical labour to your service than is just to myself. I feel it scarcely less an honour to suffer in the cause of peace, and on behalf of what I believe to be the true interests of my country, though I could have wished that the blow had come from other hands, at a time when I could have met face to face those who dealt it. Not long after Mr. Cobden, one of the least sentimental and the most unaffected of men, speaking in the Manchester Free Trade Hall of the circumstances of Mr. Bright's rejection from Manchester, and the leave-taking address which so many regarded as the last public word of a great career, found himself unable to go on with that part of his speech. An emotion more honourable to the speaker in his subject than the most elaborate triumph of eloquence, checked the flow of the orator's words and for the moment made him inarticulate. Lord Palmerston came back to power with renewed and redoubled strength. The little war with Persia which will be mentioned afterwards came to an end in time to give him another claim as a conqueror on the sympathies of the constituencies. His appointments of bishops had given great satisfaction to the evangelical party, and he had become for the time quite a sort of church hero, much to the amusement of Lord Darby, who made great sport of Palmerston the true Protestant, Palmerston the only Christian Prime Minister. In the royal speech at the opening of parliament, it was announced that the differences between this country and China still remained unadjusted, and that therefore Her Majesty has sent to China a plenipotentiary fully entrusted to deal with all matters of difference, and that plenipotentiary will be supported by an adequate naval and military force in the event of such assistance becoming necessary. It would be almost superfluous to say that the assistance of the naval and military force thus suggested was found to be necessary. The government, however, had more serious business with which to occupy themselves before they were at liberty to turn to the easy work of coercing the Chinese. The new parliament was engaged for some time in passing the act for the establishment of a court of divorce, that is to say, abolishing the ancient jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts respecting divorce, and setting up a regular court of law, the divorce and matrimonial causes court, to deal with questions between husband and wife. The passing of the divorce act was strongly contested in both houses of parliament, and indeed was secured at last only by Lord Palmerston's intimating, very significantly, that he would keep the houses sitting until the measure had been disposed of. Mr Gladston in particular offered to the bill a most strenuous opposition. He condemned it on strictly conscientious grounds. Yet it has to be said, even as a question of conscience, that there was divorce in England before the passing of the act. The only difference being that the act made divorce somewhat cheap and rather easy. Before it was the luxury of the rich. The act brought it within the reach of almost the poorest of Her Majesty's subjects. We confess that we do not see how any great moral or religious principle is violated in the one case any more than in the other. The question at issue was not whether divorce should be allowed by the law, but only whether it should be high priced or comparatively inexpensive. It is certainly a public advantage, as it seems to us, that the change in the law has put an end to the debates that used to take place in both houses of parliament. When any important bill of divorce was under discussion, the members crowded the house, the case was discussed in all its details as any clause in a bill is now debated. Long speeches were made by those who thought the divorce ought to be granted, and those who thought the contrary, and the time of parliament was occupied in the edifying discussion as to whether some unhappy woman's shame was or was not clearly established. In one famous case where a distinguished peer, orator, and statesman sought a divorce from his wife, every point of the evidence was debated in parliament for night after night. Members spoke in the debate who had known nothing of the case until the bill came before them. One member perhaps was taken with a vague sympathy with the wife. He set about to show that the evidence against her proved nothing. Another sympathized with husbands in general, and made it his business to emphasize every point that told of guilt in the woman. More than one earnest speaker during those debates expressed an ardent hope that the time might come when parliament should be relieved from the duty of undertaking such unsuitable and scandalous investigations. It must be owned that public decency suffers less by the regulated action of the divorce court than it did under this preposterous and abominable system. We cannot help adding too that the divorce act, judging by the public use made of it, certainly must be held to have justified itself in a merely practical sense. It seems to have been thoroughly appreciated by a grateful public. It was not easy after a while to get judicial power enough to keep the supply of divorces up to the ever-increasing demand. Lord Palmerston then appears to be furnished with an entirely new lease of power. The little Persian war has been brought to a close. The country is not disposed to listen to any complaint as to the manner in which it was undertaken. The settlement of the dispute with China promised to be an easy piece of business. The peace party were everywhere overthrown. No one could well have anticipated that within less than a year from the general election, a motion made in the House of Commons by one whom it unseated was to compel the government of Lord Palmerston suddenly to resign office. End of Section 2 Section 3 of a history of our own times, Volume 3 by Justin McCarthy. This Librovox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 31. TRANSPORTATION PART 1 The year 1857 would have been memorable if for no other reason because it saw the abolition of the system of transportation. Transportation as a means of getting rid of part of our criminal population dates from the time of Charles II when the judges gave power for the removal of offenders to the North American colonies. The fiction of the years coming immediately after took account of this innovation and one of the most celebrated, if not exactly one of the finest of Defoe's novels, deals with the history of a convict thus sent out to Virginia. Afterwards the revolt of the American colonies and other causes made it necessary to send convicts farther away from civilization. The punishment of transportation was first regularly introduced into our criminal law in 1717 by an act of parliament. In 1787 a cargo of criminals was shipped out to Botany Bay on the eastern shore of New South Wales and near Sydney, the present thriving capital of the colony. Afterward the convicts were also sent to Von Diemansland, or Tasmania, and to Norfolk Island, a lonely island in the Pacific, some 800 miles from the New South Wales shore. Norfolk Island became the penal settlement for the convicted among convicts. That is to say criminals who after transportation to New South Wales committed new crimes there might be sent by the colonial authorities for sterner punishment to Norfolk Island. Nothing can seem on the face of it a more satisfactory way of disposing of criminals than the system of transportation. In the first place it got rid of them as far as the people at home were concerned, and for a long time that was about all that the people at home cared. Those who had committed crimes not bad enough to be disposed of by the simple and efficient operation of the gallows were got rid of in a manner almost as prompt and effective by the plan of sending them out in shiploads to America or to Australia. It looked too as if the system ought to be satisfactory in every way into everybody. The convicts were provided with a new career, a new country, and a chance of reformation. They were usually, after a while, released from actual endurance in the penal settlement and allowed conditionally to find employment and to make themselves, if they could, good citizens. Their labor it was thought would be of great service to the colonists. The Act of 1717 recited that, In many of His Majesty's colonies and plantations in America there was a great want of servants who, by their labor and industry, might be the means of improving in making the said colonies and plantations more useful to this nation. At that time statesmen only thought of the utility of the colonies to this nation. Philanthropy might therefore for a while beguile itself with the belief that the transportation system was a benefit to the transported as well as to those among whom they were sent. But the colonists very soon began to complain. The convicts who had spent their period of probation in hulks or prisons generally left those homes of horror with natures so brutalized as to make their intrusion into any community of decent persons in insufferable nuisance. Pent up in penal settlements by themselves the convicts turned into demons. Drafted into an inhabited colony they were too numerous to be wholly absorbed by the population and they carried their contagion along with them. New South Wales began to protest against their presence. Lord John Russell, when secretary for the colonies in 1840 ordered that no more of the criminal refuse should be carted out to that region. Then Tasmania had them all to herself for a while. Lord Stanley, when he came to be at the head of the colonial office, made an order that the free settlers of Tasmania were not to obtain convict labor at any lower rates than the ordinary market price. And Tasmania had only put up with the presence of the convicts at all for the sake of getting their labor cheap. Tasmania therefore began to protest against being made the refuse ground for our scoundrelism. Mr Gladstone, while colonial secretary, suspended the whole system for a while, but it was renewed soon after. Sir George Gray endeavored to make the Cape of Good Hope a receptacle for a number of picked convicts. But in 1849 the inhabitants of Cape Colony absolutely refused to allow a shipload of criminals to be discharged upon their shores and it was manifestly impossible to compel them to receive such disagreeable guests. By this time public opinion in England was ready to sympathize to the full with any colony which stood out against the degrading system. For a long time there had been growing up a conviction that the transportation system carried intolerable evils with it. Romilly and Bentham had condemned it long before. In 1837 a committee of the House of Commons was appointed to consider and report on the system. The committee included Lord John Russell, Sir Robert Peale, Charles Buller, Sir W. Molesworth, and Lord Howick afterwards Earl Gray. The evidence they collected settled the question in the minds of all thinking men. The Reverend Walter Clay, son of the famous prison chaplain, Reverend John Clay, says in his memoirs of his father that probably no volume was ever published in England of which the contents were so loathsome as those of the appendix to the committee's report. There is not much exaggeration in this. The reader must be left to imagine for himself some of the horrors which would be disclosed by a minute account of what happened in a penal den like Norfolk Island where a number of utterly brutalized men were left to herd together without anything like beneficent control, without homes, and without the society of women. In Norfolk Island the convicts worked in chains. They were roused at daylight in the morning and turned out to labor in their irons and huddled back in their dens at night. In some rare cases convicts were sent directly from England to Norfolk Island, but as a rule the island was kept as a place of punishment for criminals who already convicted in the mother country were found guilty of new crimes during their residence in New South Wales. The condition of things in New South Wales was such as civilization has not often seen. In Sydney especially it was extraordinary. When the convicts were sent out to the colony they received each in turn, after a certain period of penal probation, a conditional freedom, in other words a ticket of leave. They were allowed to work for the colonists and to support themselves. Anyone who wanted laborers or artisans or servants could apply to the authorities and have convicts assigned to him for the purpose. Female convicts as well as male were thus employed. There was therefore a large number of convicts, men and women, moving about freely in the active life of Sydney, doing business, working in trades, performing domestic service, to all appearance occupying the place that artisans and laborers and servants occupy among ourselves. But there was a profound difference. The convict laborers and servants were in reality little better than slaves. They were assigned to masters and mistresses and they had to work. Stern laws were enacted and were no doubt required to keep those terrible subordinates in order. The lash was employed to discipline the men, the women were practically unmanageable. The magistrates had the power on the complaint of any master or mistress to order a man to be flogged with as many as fifty lashes. Some of the punishment lists remind a reader of the days of slavery in the United States. On every page we come on entries of the flogging of men for disobeying the orders of a master or a mistress, for threatening a fellow servant, for refusing to rub down the horse or clean the carriage or some such breach of discipline. A master who was also a magistrate was not allowed to adjudicate in his own case, but practically it would seem that masters and mistresses could have their convict servants flogged whenever they thought fit. At that time a great many of the native population, the blacks as they were called, used to stream into the town of Sydney as the Indians now come into Salt Lake City or some other western town of America. In some of the outlying houses they would lounge into the kitchens as beggars used to do in Ireland in old days, looking out for any scraps that might be given to them. It was a common sight then to see half a dozen of the native women, absolutely naked, hanging round the doors of the houses where they expected anything. Between the native women and the convicts at large, an almost indiscriminate intercourse set in. The black men would bring their wives into the town and offer them for a drop of rum or a morsel of tobacco. In this extraordinary society there were those three strands of humanity curiously intertwined. There was the civilized Englishman with his money, his culture, his domestic habits. There was the outcast of English civilization, the jailbird fresh from the prison and the hulks. And there was the aboriginal naked savage. In the drawing room sat the wife and daughters of the magistrate. In the stable was the convict, whose crimes had perhaps been successive burglaries crowned with attempted murder. In the kitchen were women servants taken from the convict depot and known to be prostitutes. And hanging round the door were the savages, men and women. All the evidence seems to agree that with hardly any exceptions the women convicts were literally prostitutes. There were some exceptions which it is well to notice. Witnesses who were questioned on the subject gave it as the result of their experience that women convicted of any offense whatever in this country and sent out to New South Wales invariably took to profligacy unless they were Irish women. That is to say it did not follow that an Irish convict woman must necessarily be a profligate woman. It did follow as a matter of fact in the case of other women. Some of the convicts married women of bad character and lived on their immoral earnings and made no secret of the fact. Many of these husbands boasted that they made their wives keep them in what they considered luxuries by the wages of their sin. Tea and sugar were great luxuries to them at that time and it was a common saying among men of this class that their wives must take care to have the tea and sugar bag filled every day. Convicts soon inoculated the natives with the vilest vices and the foulest diseases of civilization. Many an English lady found that her woman servants went off in the night somewhere and came back in the morning and they knew perfectly well that the women had been off on some wild freak of profligacy but it was of no use to complain. In the midst of all this it would appear that a few of the convicts did behave well. That they kept to work with iron industry and rose in the world and were respected. In some cases the wives of convicts went out to New South Wales and started farms or shops and had their husbands assigned to them as servants and got on tolerably well. But in general the convicts led a life of utter profligacy and they corrupted all that came within their reach. One convict said to a judge, let a man be what he will, when he comes out here he is soon as bad as the rest. A man's heart is taken from him and there is given to him the heart of a beast. Perpetual profligacy, incessant flogging. This was the combination of the convict's life. Many of the convicts liked the life on the whole and wrote to friends at home urging them to commit some offence, get transported and come out to New South Wales. An idle ruffian had often a fine time of it there. This of course does not apply to Norfolk Island. No wretch could be so degraded or so unhappy anywhere else as to find relief in that hideous layer of suffering and abomination. Such was the condition of things described to the Committee of the House of Comments in 1837. It is right and even necessary to say that we have passed over almost without illusion some of the most hideous of the revelations. We have kept ourselves to abominations which at all events bear to be spoken of. From the publication of the evidence taken before the Committee any one might have seen that the transportation system was doomed. It was clear that if any colony made up its mind to declare that it would not endure the thing any longer no English minister could venture to say that he would force it on the colonists. The doomed and odious system however continued for a long time to be put in operation as far as possible. It was most tempting both as to theory and to practice. It was an excellent thing for the people at home to get rid of so much of their ruffianism and it was easy to persuade ourselves that the system gave the convicts a chance of reform and ought to be acceptable to the colonists. End of Section 3 Section 4 of a History of Our Own Times Volume 3 by Justin McCarthy this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Pamela Nagami Chapter 31. Transportation Part 2 The colonists however made up their minds at last in most places and would not have any more of our convicts. Only in Western Australia were the people willing to receive them on any conditions and Western Australia had but scanty natural resources and could in any case harbor very few of our outcasts. The discovery of gold in Australia settled the question of those colonies being troubled any more with our transportation system for the greatest enthusiast for transportation would hardly propose to send out gangs of criminals to a region glowing with the temptations of gold. There were some thoughts of establishing a convict settlement on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria on the north side of the great Australian island. Some such scheme was talked of at various intervals. It always however broke down on a little examination. One difficulty alone was enough to dispose of it effectually. It was impossible after the revelations of the committee of the House of Commons to have a convict settlement of men alone and if it was proposed to found a colony where were the women to come from? Were respectable English and Irish girls to be enticed to go out and become the wives of convicts? What statesmen would make such a proposal? The wildest projects were suggested. Let the convicts marry the savage women one ingenious person suggested. Unfortunately in the places thought most suitable for a settlement there happened to be no savage women. Let the convict men be married to convict women, said another philosopher. But even if any colonial minister could have been found hardy enough to approach parliament with a scheme for the foundation of a colony on the basis of common crime it had to be said that there were not nearly enough of convict women to supply brides for even a tolerable proportion of the convict men. Another suggestion it is only necessary to mention for the purpose of showing to what lengths the votaries of an idea will go in their effort to make it fit in with the actual condition of things. There were persons who thought it would not be a bad plan to get rid of two nuisances at once our convicts and a portion of what is euphuistically termed our social evil by founding a penal settlement on some lonely shore and sending out cargos of the abandoned women of our large towns to be the wives of the present and the mothers of the future colonists. When it came to propositions of this kind it was clear that there was an end to any serious discussion as to the possibility of founding a convict settlement. As late as 1856 committees of both houses of parliament declared themselves greatly in favour of the transportation system that is of some transportation system of an ideal transportation system but also recorded their conviction that it would be impossible to carry out the known system any longer. The question then arose what was England to do with the criminals whom up to that time she had been able to shovel out of her way. All the receptacles were closed but Western Australia and that counted for almost nothing. Some prisoners were then and since sent out for a part of their term to Gibraltar and Bermuda but they were always brought back to this country to be discharged so that they may be considered as forming a part of the ordinary class of criminals kept in detention here. The transportation system was found to carry evils in its train which did not directly belong to its own organization. It had been for a long time the practice of England and Scotland to send out to a colony only those who were transported for ten years and upwards and to retain those condemned for shorter periods in the hulks and other convict prisons. In these hideous hulks the convicts were huddled together very much as in Norfolk Island with scarcely any superintendents or discipline and the result was that they became what were called with hardly any exaggeration floating hells. It was quite clear that the whole system of our dealings with our convicts must be revised and reorganized. In 1853 the government took a step which has been well described as an avowal that we must take the complete charge of our criminals upon ourselves. A bill was brought in by the ministry to substitute penal servitude for transportation unless in cases where the sentence was for fourteen years and upwards. The bill reduced the scale of punishment that is to say made a shorter period of penal servitude supply the place of a longer term of transportation. Lord Palmerston was home secretary at this time. It was to ring that curious episode in his career described in a former volume when he adopted, if such an expression may be used, the business of home secretary in order as he put it to learn how to deal with the concerns of the country internally and to be brought in contact with his fellow countrymen. He threw all his characteristic energy into the work of carrying through the measure for the establishment of a new system of secondary punishments. It was during the passing of the bill through the House of Lords that Lord Gray suggested the introduction of a modification of the ticket of leave system which was in practice in the colonies. The principle of the ticket of leave was that the convict should not be kept in custody during the whole period of his sentence, but that he should be allowed to pass through a period of conditional liberty before he obtained his full and unrestricted freedom. Lord Gray also urged that the sentences of penal servitude should correspond in length with the sentences for transportation. The government would not accept this latter suggestion, but they adopted the principle of the ticket of leave. The bill was introduced into the House of Lords by Lord Cranworth, the Lord Chancellor. When it came down to the House of Commons, there were some objections made to the ticket of leave clauses, but the government carried them through. The effect of the measure was to substitute penal servitude for transportation in all cases, except those where the sentence of transportation was for 14 years and upwards. Now there can be no doubt that the principle of the ticket of leave is excellent, but it proved on its first trial in this country the most utter delusion. It got no fair chance at all. It was understood by the whole English public that the object of the ticket of leave was to enable the authorities to give a conditional discharge from custody to a man who had in some way proved his fitness for such a relaxation of punishment, and that the eye of the police would be on him even during the period of his conditional release. This was in fact the construction put on the Act in Ireland where accordingly the ticket of leave system was worked with the most complete success. Under the management of Sir Walter Crofton, Chairman of the Board of Prison Directors, the principle was applied exactly as anyone might have supposed it would be applied everywhere, and as indeed the very conditions endorsed on the ticket of leave distinctly suggested. The convicts in Ireland were kept away from the general community in a little penal settlement near Dublin. They were put at first to hard, monotonous, and weary labor. They were then encouraged to believe that with energy and good conduct they could gradually obtain relaxation of punishment and even some small rewards. They were subjected to a process of really reforming discipline. They got their conditional freedom as soon as they had satisfactorily proved that they deserved and were fit for it. But even then they had to report themselves periodically to the police and they knew that if they were seen to be relapsing into old habits and old companionships, they were certain to be sent back to the penal settlement to begin the hard work over again. The result was substantial and lasting reform. It was easy for the men who were let out conditionally to obtain employment. A man who had Sir Walter Crofton's ticket of leave was known by that very fact to have given earnest of good purpose and steady character. The system in Ireland was therefore all that its authors could have wished it to be. But for some inscrutable reason the act was interpreted in this country as simply giving every convict a right after a certain period of detention to claim a ticket of leave provided he had not grossly violated any of the regulations of the prison or misconducted himself in some outrageous manner. In 1856 Sir George Gray, the Home Secretary, told the House of Commons that there never was a more fallacious idea than the supposition that a ticket of leave was a certificate of good character and that a man only obtained such a ticket if he could prove that he had reformed. A ticket of leave he went on to explain was indeed withheld in the case of very bad conduct, but in any ordinary case the convicts, unless they have transgressed the prison rules enacted in such a manner as to incur an unfavorable report from the prison authorities, are after a stated period of imprisonment entitled as a matter of course to a ticket of leave. It would be superfluous to examine the working of such a system as that which Sir George Gray described. A number of scoundrels whom the judges had sentenced to be kept in endurance for so many years were without any conceivable reason turned loose upon society long before the expiration of their sentence. They were in England literally turned loose upon society for it was held by the authorities here that it might possibly interfere with the chance of a jailbird's getting employment if he were seen to be watched by the police. The police therefore were considerably ordered to refrain from looking after them. I knew you once, says the hero of a poem by Mr. Browning, but in paradise should we meet I will pass nor turn my face. The police were ordered to act thus discreetly if they saw Bill Sykes asking for employment in some wealthy and quiet household. They certainly knew him once, but now they were to pass or turn their face. Nothing surely that we know of of the internal arrangements of Timbuktu, to adopt the words of Sidney Smith, warrants us in supposing that such a system would have been endured there for a year. Fifty percent of the ruffians released on ticket of leave were afterwards brought up for new crimes and convicted over again. Of those who although not actually convicted were believed to have relapsed into their old habits from sixty to seventy percent relapsed within the first year of their liberation. Baron Bramwell stated from the bench that he had instances of criminals coming before him who had three sentences overlapping each other. The convict was set free on ticket of leave, convicted of some new crime, and recommitted to prison, released again on ticket of leave and convicted once again before the period of his original sentence had expired. An alarm sprang up in England and like all alarms it was supported both by exaggeration and misconception. The system pursued with the convicts was bad enough, but the popular impression ascribed to the ticket of leave men every crime committed by anyone who had been previously convicted and imprisoned. A man who had worked out the whole of his sentence and who therefore had to be discharged committed some crime immediately after. Excited public opinion described it as a crime committed by a ticket of leave man. Two committees sat as has already been said in 1856. The result of the public alarm and the parliamentary consideration of the whole subject was the bill brought in by Sir George Gray in 1857. This measure extended the provisions of the Act of 1853 by substituting in all cases a sentence of penal servitude for one of transportation. It extended the limits of the penal servitude sentences by making them correspond with the terms of transportation to which men had previously been sentenced. It gave power also to pass sentences of penal servitude for shorter periods than were allowed by former legislation, allowing penal servitude for as short a period as three years. It attached to all sentences of penal servitude the liability to be removed from this country to places beyond seas fitted for their reception and it restricted the range of the remission of sentence. The Act, it will be seen, abolished the old-fashioned transportation system altogether but it left the power to the authorities to have penal servitude carried out in any of the colonies where it might be thought expedient. The government had still some idea of utilizing Western Australia for some of our offenders but nothing came of this plan or of the clause in the new Act which was passed to favour it under a fact transportation was abolished. How the amended legislation worked in other respects we shall have an opportunity of examining hereafter. Transportation was not the only familiar institution which came to an end in this year. The Gretna Green marriages became illegal in 1857, their doom having been fixed for that time by an Act passed in the previous session. Thence forward such marriages were unlawful unless one of the parties had lived at least 21 days previously in Scotland. The hurried flight to the border, the post-sheds and the panting steeds, the excited lovers, the pursuing father passed away into tradition. Lydia Langwish had to reconcile herself to the license and the blessing and even the writers of fiction might have given up without a sigh an incident which had grown wearisome in romance long before it ceased to be interesting in reality. End of Section 4 Section 5 of a history of our own times Volume 3 by Justin McCarthy this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Pamela Nagami Chapter 32 The Seapoy Part 1 On the 23rd of June 1857 the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Placie was celebrated in London. One object of the celebration was to obtain the means of raising a monument to Clive in his native county. At such a meeting it was but natural that a good deal should be said about the existing condition of India and the prospects of that great empire which the genius and the daring of Clive had gone so far to secure for the English crown. It does not appear, however, as if any alarm was expressed with regard to the state of things in Bengal or as if any of the noblemen and gentlemen present believed that at that very moment India was passing through a crisis more serious than Clive himself had had to encounter. Indeed, a month or so before a Bombay journal had congratulated itself on the fact that India was quiet throughout. Yet at the hour when the Placie celebration was going on the great Indian mutiny was already six weeks old and had already assumed full and distinctive proportions was already known in India to be a convulsion destined to shake to its foundations the whole fabric of British rule in Hindustan. A few evenings after the celebration there was some cursory and casual discussion in Parliament about the doubtful news that had begun to arrive from India but as yet no Englishman at home took serious thought of the matter. The news came at last with a rush. Never in our time, never probably at any time came such news upon England as the first full story of the outbreak in India. It came with terrible, not unnatural exaggeration. England was horror stricken by the stories of wholesale massacres of English women and children of the most abominable tortures, the most degrading outrages inflicted upon English matrons and maidens. The newspapers ran over with the most horrifying and the most circumstantial accounts of how English ladies of the highest refinement were dragged naked through the streets of Delhi and were paraded in their nakedness before the eyes of the aged King of Delhi in order that his hatred might be feasted with the sight of the shame and agony of the captives. Descriptions were given to which it is unnecessary to make any special illusions now of the vile mutilations and tortures inflicted on English women to glut the vengeance of the tyrant. The pen of another Procopius would alone have done full justice to the narratives which were poured in day after day upon the shuddering years of Englishmen until all thought, even of the safety of the Indian Empire, was swallowed up in a wild longing for revenge on the whole seed, breed, and race of the mutinous people who had tortured and outraged our country women. It was not till the danger was all over and British arms conquered northern India that England learned the truth with regard to these alleged outrages and tortures. Let us dispose of this most painful part of the terrible story at the very beginning and once for all. During the Indian mutiny the blood of innocent women and children was cruelly and lavishly spilt on one memorable occasion with a bloodthirstiness that reached times of medieval warfare. But there were no outrages in the common acceptation upon women. No English woman was stripped or dishonored or purposely mutilated. As to this fact all historians of the mutiny are agreed. But if the first stories of the outbreak that reached England dealt in exaggerations of this kind they do not seem to have exaggerated. They do not seem to have even appreciated the nature of the crisis with which England was suddenly called upon to deal. The fact was that throughout the greater part of the north and northwest of the great Indian Peninsula there was a rebellion of the native races against English power. It was not alone the seapoise who rose in revolt. It was not by any means a merely military mutiny. It was a combination of deliberate design and long preparation or the sudden birth of chance and unexpected opportunity. A combination of military grievance, national hatred and religious fanaticism against the English occupiers of India. The native princes and the native soldiers were in it. The Mohammedan and the Hindu forgot their own religious antipathies to join against the Christian. Hatred and panic were the stimulants of that great rebellious movement. The quarrel about the greased cartridges was but the chance spark flung in among all the combustible material. If that spark had not lighted it some other would have done the work. In fact there are thoughtful and well-informed historians who believe that the incident of the greased cartridges was a fortunate one for our people that coming as it did precipitated unexpectedly a great convulsion which occurring later and as the result of more gradual operations might have been far more dangerous to the perpetuity of our rule. Let us first see what were the actual facts of the outbreak. When the improved enfield rifle was introduced into the Indian army the idea got abroad that the cartridges were made up in paper greased with a mixture of cows fat and hogs lard. It appears that the paper was actually greased but not with any such material as that which religious alarm suggested to the native troops. Now a mixture of cows fat and hogs lard would have been above all other things unsuitable for use in cartridges to be distributed among our sepoys. For the Hindu regards the cow with religious veneration and the Mohammedan looks upon the hog with water loathing. In the mind of the former something sacred to him was profaned in that of the latter something unclean and abominable was forced upon his daily use. It was in 1856 that the new rifles were sent out from England and the murmur against their use began at once. Various efforts were made to allay the panic among the native troops. The use of the cartridges complained continued by orders issued in January 1857. The Governor General sent out a proclamation in the following May assuring the Army of Bengal that the tales told to them of offense to their religion or injury to their caste being meditated by the Government of India were all malicious inventions and falsehoods. Still the idea was strong among the troops that some design against their religion was meditated. A mutinous spirit began to spread itself abroad. In March some of the native regiments had to be disbanded. In April some executions of sepoys took place for gross and open mutiny. In the same month several of the Bengal native cavalry and mirout refused to use the cartridges served out to them although they had been authoritatively assured that the paper in which the cartridges were wrapped had never been searched by any offensive material. On May 9 these men were sent to the jail. They had been tried by court marshal and were sentenced 80 of them to imprisonment and hard labor for ten years, the remaining five to a similar punishment for six years. They had chains put on them in the presence of their comrades who no doubt regarded them as martyrs to their religious faith and they were thus publicly sent to the common jail. The guard placed over the jail actually consisted of sepoys. The following day, Sunday, May 10 was memorable. The native troops in mirout broke into open mutiny. The suma dies, the in iluk tabile temples, had come. They fired upon their officers, killed a colonel and others, broke into the jail, released their comrades and massacred several of the European inhabitants. The European troops rallied and drove them from their cantiments or barracks. Then came the momentous event, the turning point of the mutiny, the act that marked out its character and made it what it afterwards became. Mirout is an important military station between the Ganges and the Jumna, 38 miles of Delhi. In the vast palace of Delhi, almost a city in itself, a reeking Alsatia of lawless and privileged vice and crime, lived the aged king of Delhi as he was called, the disestablished but not wholly disendowed sovereign, the descendant of the great Timur, the last representative of the grand mogul. The mutineers fled along the road to Delhi and some said that they were not to be pursued or stopped on their way. Unchecked, un-pursued, they burst into Delhi and swarmed into the precincts of the palace of the king. They claimed his protection. They insisted upon his accepting their cause in themselves. They proclaimed him, Emperor of India, and planted the standard of rebellion against the English rule on the battlements of his palace. The mutiny was transformed a leader, a flag, and a cause, and the mutiny was transfigured into a revolutionary war. The seapoy troops in the city and the cantons on the Delhi ridge two miles off and overlooking the city at once began to cast in their lot with the mutineers. The poor old puppet whom they set up as their emperor was some 80 years old, a feeble creature believed to have a weak debauchery. He had long been merely a pensioner of the East India Company. During the early intrigues and struggles between the English and French in India, the company had taken the sovereigns of Delhi under their protection nominally to save them from the aggressiveness of the rival power and as might be expected the Delhi monarch soon became mere pensionaries of the British authorities. After the death, a different arrangement should be made that the title of king would not be allowed any longer and that the privileges of the palace, the occupants of which were thus far allowed to be a law to themselves should be restricted or abolished. A British commissioner directed affairs in the city and British troops were quartered on the Delhi ridge outside. Still the king was living and was called a king. The city, whose name and effigies had been borne by all the coin of India until within some twenty years before. He stood for legitimacy and divine right and he supplied all the various factions and sects of which the mutiny was composed or to be composed with a visible and acceptable head. If the mutineers, flying from Mirut, had been promptly pursued and dispersed or captured before they reached the palace, they would have to tell might have been much shorter and very different. But when they reached unchecked the Jhumna glittering in the morning light, when they swarmed across the bridge of boats that spanned it, and when at length they clamored under the windows of the palace that they had come to restore the rule of the Delhi dynasty, they had all unconsciously seized one of the great critical moments of religious war. This is the manner in which the Indian rebellion began and assumed its distinct character. But this dry statement of facts would go a very short way toward explaining how the mutiny of a few regiments came to assume the aspect of rebellion. Mutinies were not novelties in India, there had been some very serious outbreaks before the time of the greased cartridges. The European officers of the country used to use themselves mutiny in Bengal nearly a century before, and at that time the seapoy stood firm by the company whose salt they had eaten. There was a more general and serious mutiny at Velour near Madras in 1806, and the sons of the famous Tipu Sahib took part with it and endeavored to make it the means of regaining the forfeited power of their house. It had to be dealt with as if it were a war, or had to be recaptured. In 1849 a Bengal regiment seized a fortress near Lahore. Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Sindhi, once protested that 30 regiments of the Bengal army were ripe for revolt. Napier, however, seems to have thought only of military mutiny and not of religious and political rebellion. At Mutut itself, the very cradle of the outbreak, a pamphlet was published in 1861 by Colonel Hodgson to argue that the admission of the priestly caste too freely into the Bengal army would be the means of fomenting sedition among the native troops. But there was a combination of circumstances at work to bring about such a revolt as Napier never dreamed of, a revolt as different from the outbreak he contemplated as the French revolution differed from the mutiny of the Nohr. In 1851, the army, the princes, and the populations of India were brought together. The causes and motives for sedition says Bacon, and the words have been cited with much appropriateness in effect by Sir J.W.K. in his History of the Seapoy War. Our innovations in religion, taxes, alteration of laws and customs, breaking of privileges, general oppression, advancement of unworthy persons, strangers, deaths, disbanded soldiers, factions grown desperate, and whatsoever in offending people joineth and kniteth them in a common cause. Not all these various impulses to rebellion were stirring perhaps in India, but assuredly many, possibly the majority of them were at work. As is usual in such cases too, it happened that many changes made, nay, many privileges disinterestedly conferred by the ruling power in India for the benefit and pleasure of the native levees turned into other causes and stimulants of sedition and rebellion. Let us speak first of the army. The Bengal army was very different in its constitution and condition from that of Bombay or Madras, the other great divisions of Indian government at that time. In the Bengal army, the Hindu Seapoys were far more numerous than the Promethans and were chiefly brahmins of high caste. While in Madras and Bombay the army was made up, as the Bengal regiments are now, of men of all sex and races without discrimination. Until the very year before the mutiny, the Bengal soldier was only enlisted for service in India and was exempted from any liability to be sent across the seas, across the black water which the army needed to have to cross. No such exemption was allowed to the soldiers of Bombay or Madras and in July 1856 an order was issued by the military authorities to the effect that future enlistments in Bengal should be for service anywhere without limitation. Thus the Bengal Seapoy had not only been put in the position of a privileged and pampered favorite, but he had been subjected to the disappointment of seeing his privileges taken away from him. He was indeed an excellent soldier and was naturally made a favorite by many of his commanders. But he was very proud and was rigidly tenacious of what he considered his rights. He lived apart with his numerous and almost limitless family, representing all grades of relationship. He cooked his food apart and ate it apart. He wished one set of governing principles while he was on parade and had a totally different code of customs and laws and morals to regulate his private life. The tide of blood relationship was very strong with the Seapoy. The elder Seapoy always took good care to keep his regiment well supplied with recruits from among his own family. As the Highlands sergeant in the British army endeavors to have as many as possible a gift and clan in the regiment with himself, as the Irishman in the New York police force is anxious to get as many of his friends and fellow countrymen as may be into the same ranks, so the Seapoy did his best to surround himself with men of his blood and of his ways. There was therefore the spirit of a clan and of a sect pervading the Seapoy regiments, a strong current flowing beneath the stream of superficial military discipline and a screed accor. The Seapoy had many privileges denied to his fellow religionists who were not in the military ranks. Let it be added that he was very often deeply in debt, that his pay was frequently mortgaged to users who hung on him as the crimps do upon a sailor in one of our Seaport towns and that therefore he had something of Catiline's reason for desiring a general upset and clearing off of old responsibilities. But we must above all other things take into account when considering the position of the Hindu Seapoy, the influence of the tremendous institution of caste, an Englishman or European of any country will have to call his imaginative faculties somewhat vigorously to his aid in order to get even an idea of the power of this monstrous superstition. He who, by the mirest accident, by the slightest contact with anything that defiled had lost caste, was excommunicated from among the living and was held to be for evermore a cursed of God. His dearest friend, his nearest relation shrank back from him in alarm and abhorrence. When Helen McGregor in Scott's romance would express her sense of the degradation that had been put on her shoulders that her mother's bones would shrink away from her in the grave if her corpse were to be laid beside them. The Seapoy fully believed that his mother's bones ought to shrink away from contact with the polluted body of the son who had lost caste. Now it had become from various causes a strong suspicion in the mind of the Seapoy that there was a deliberate purpose in the minds of the Hindus and to bring them all to the dead level of one caste or no caste. The suspicion in part arose out of the fact that this institution of caste, penetrating as it did so subtly and so universally into all the business of life could not become into frequent collision with any system of European military and civil discipline, however carefully and considerably managed. No doubt there was in many instances a lack of consideration shown for the Hindus peculiar and very perplexing tenets. The Englishman is not usually a very imaginative personage, nor is he rich in those sympathetic instincts which might enable a ruler to enter into and make allowance for the influence of sentiments and usages widely different from his own. To many a man, fresh from the ways of England, the Hindu doctrines and practices appeared so ineffably absurd that he could not believe any human beings were serious in their devotion to them and he took no pains to conceal his opinion as to the absurdity of the creed and the hypocrisy of those who professed it. Some of the elder officers and civilians were imbued very strongly with the conviction that the work of open and what we may call aggressive proselytism was part of the duty of a Christian and in the best faith and with the purest intentions they thus strengthened the growing suspicion that the mind of the authorities was set on the defilement of the Hindus nor was it among the Hindus alone that the alarm began to spread abroad. It was the conviction of the Mohammedans that their faith and their rights were to be tampered with as well. It was whispered among them everywhere that the peculiar baptismal custom of the Mohammedans was to be by law and that Mohammedan women were to be compelled to go unveiled in public. The slightest alterations in any system gave fresh confirmation to the suspicions that were afloat among the Hindus and muscle-mans. When a change was made in the arrangements of the prisons and the native prisoners were no longer allowed to cook for themselves a murmur went abroad that this was the first overt act in the conspiracy to destroy the cast and with it the bodies and souls of the Hindus. Another change must be noticed too. At one time it was intended that the native troops should be commanded for the most part by native officers. The men would therefore have had something like sufficient security that the religious scruples were regarded and respected. But by degrees the clever pushing and capable Britain began to monopolize the officers' posts everywhere. The natives were shouldered out of the high positions until at length it became practically an army of native rank and file commanded by Englishmen. If we remember that a Hindu sergeant of lower caste would when off parade often abase himself with his forehead to the dust before a sepoy private who belonged to the Brahmin order we shall have some idea of the perpetual collision between military discipline and religious principle which affected the Hindu members of an army almost exclusively commanded by Europeans and Christians. End of section 5. Section 6 of a history of our own times volume 3 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Pamela Nagami Chapter 32 the sepoy part 2. There was however yet another influence and one of tremendous importance in determining the set of that otherwise vague current of feeling which threatened to disturb the tranquil permanence of English rule in India. We have spoken of the army and of its religious scruples. We must now speak of the territorial and political influences which affected the princes and the populations of India. There had been just before the outbreak of the mutiny a wholesale removal of the landmarks, a striking application of a bold and thorough policy of annexation, a gigantic system of reorganization applied to the territorial arrangements of the north and northwest of the great Indian peninsula. A master spirit had been at work at the reconstruction of India and if you cannot make revolutions with rose water neither can you make them without reaction. Lord Dalhousie had not long left India on the appointment of Lord Canning to the Governor Generalship when mutiny broke out. Lord Dalhousie was a man of commanding energy, of indomitable courage, with the intellect of a ruler of men in the spirit of a conqueror. The statesmen of India performed their parts upon a stage and yet they are to the world in general somewhat like the actors in a provincial theater. They do not get the fame of their work and their merits. Men have arisen in India, whose deeds, if done in Europe, would have ranked them at least with the Richeliers and Bismarcks of history, if not actually with the Caesars and Charlemanes, in who are yet condemned to what may almost be called a merely local renown, a record on the role of great officials. Lord Dalhousie was undoubtedly a great man. He had had some parliamentary experience in England and in both houses and he had been Vice President and subsequently President of the Board of Trade under Sir Robert Peel. He had taken great interest in the framing of regulations for the railway legislation of the mania season of 1844 and 1845. Toward the close of 1847 Lord Harding was recalled from India and Lord Dalhousie was sent out in his place. Never was there in any country an administration of more successful activity than that of Lord Dalhousie. He introduced cheap postage in India. He made railways. He set up lines of electric telegraph. Within fifteen months according to one of his biographers the telegraph was an operation from Calcutta then to Atac on the Indus and again from Agra to Bombay and Madras. He devoted much of his attention to irrigation, to the making of great roads, to the work of the Ganges Canal. He was the founder of a comprehensive system of native education, especially female education, a matter so difficult and delicate in a country like India. He put down infanticide the odious and extraordinary thug system and the sati or burning of widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands. These are only some of the evidences of his unresting all conquering energy. They are but illustrative as they are far indeed from being exhaustive even as a catalog. But Lord Dalhousie was not wholly engaged in such works as these. Indeed his noble and glorious triumphs over material, intellectual and moral obstacles run some risk of being forgotten or overlooked by the casual reader of history in the storm of that fierce controversy which his other enterprise is called forth. During his few years of office he annexed the Punjab, he incorporated part of the Burmese territory in our dominions, he annexed Nagpur, Saharat, Jassi, Berar, and Oed. We are not called upon here to consider in detail the circumstances of each of these annexations or to ask the reader to pass judgment on the motives and policy of Lord Dalhousie. It is fair to say that he was not by any means the mere imperial procounsel he is often represented to be thirsting with the ardour of a Roman conqueror to enlarge the territory of his own state at any risk or any sacrifice possible. There was reason enough to make out a plausible case for even the most questionable of his annexations and in one or two instances he seems only to have resolved on annexation reluctantly and because things had come to that pass that he saw no other safe alternative left to him. But his own general policy is properly expressed in his own words. We are Lord's paramount and our policy is to acquire as direct a dominion over the territories and possession of the native princes as we already hold over the other half of India. Such a principle as this could only conduct in the vast majority of cases to a course of direct annexation let the ruler begin by disavowing it as he will. In the Punjab the annexation was provoked in the beginning as so many such retrobutions have been in India by the murder of some of our officers sanctioned if not actually ordered by a native prince. Lord Dalhousie marched a force into the Punjab. This land, the land of the five waters, lies at the gateway of Hindustan and was peopled by Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, the latter a new sect of reformed Hindus. We found a rate against us not only the Sikhs, but our old enemies the Afghans. Lord Gough was in command of our forces. He fought rashly and disastrously the famous battle of Chileanwala. The plain truth may as well be spoken out without paraphrasis. He was defeated. But before the outcry raised in India and in England over this calamity had begun to subside, he had wholly recovered our position and by the complete defeat which he inflicted upon the enemy at Gujarat. Never was a victory more complete in itself or more promptly and effectively followed up. The Sikhs were crushed. The Afghans were driven in wild route back across their savage passes. Lord Dalhousie annexed the Punjab. He presented as one token of his conquest the famous diamond the Kohinor surrendered in evidence of submission by the Maharaja of Lahore to the Crown of England. Lord Dalhousie annexed Oed on the ground that the East India Company had bound themselves to defend the sovereigns of Oed against foreign and domestic enemies, unconditioned that the state should be governed in such a manner as to render the lives and property of its population safe and that while the company performed their part of the contract, the King of Oed so governed his regions as to make his rule accursed to his own people and to all neighboring territories. Other excuses or justifications there were of course in the case of each other annexation and we shall yet hear more of what came of the annexation of Sahara and Josie. If however each of these acts of policy were not only justifiable but actually inevitable, nonetheless must the succession of such profound emotion among the races in whose midst they were accomplished. Lord Dalhousie wanted one quality of a truly great man. He lacked imagination. He had not that dramatic instinct that finds sympathetic insight by which a statesman is enabled to understand the feelings of races and men differing wholly in education, habits and principles from himself. He appeared to be under the impression once a ruler had established among whatever foreign people a system of government or of society better than that which he found existing there, he might count on obtaining their instant appreciation of his work and their gratefulness for it. The sovereign of Oed was undoubtedly a very bad ruler. His governing system, if it ought to be dignified by such a name, was a combination of anarchy and robbery. Oed were reavers and bandits. The king was the head reaver and bandit. But human nature, even in the West, is not so constituted as to render a population always and at once grateful to any powerful stranger who uproots their old and bad systems and imposes a better on them by force of arms. A tyrant, but our masters then were still at least our countrymen, is the faithful expression of a sentiment which has embarrassed energetic reformers before the days of Lord Dalhousie. The populations of India became stricken with alarm as they saw their native princes thus successively dethroned. The subversion of thrones, the annexation of states seemed to them naturally enough to form part of that vast scheme for rooting out all the religions and systems of India concerning which so many vague forebodings had darkly warned the land. Many of our seapoys came from Oed and other annexed territories, and little reason as they might have had for any personal attachment to the subverted dynasties they yet felt that national resentment which any manner of foreign intervention is almost certain to provoke. There were peculiar reasons too why if religious and political events did prevail the moment of Lord Canning's accession to the supreme authority in India should seem inviting and favourable for schemes of sedition. The Afghan war had told the seapoy that British troops were not absolutely invincible in battle. The impression produced almost everywhere in India by the Crimean war was a conviction that the strength of England was on the wane. The stories of our disasters in India had gone abroad, adorned with immense exaggerations among all the native populations of Hindustan. Any successes that the Russians had had during the war were in Asia and these naturally impressed the Asiatic mind more than the victories of France and England which were one farther off. Intelligent and quick-witted Mohammedans and Hindus talked with Englishmen, English officers in India and heard from them once of the manner in which our system had broken down in the Crimea of the blunders of our government and the shortcomings of our leaders. They entirely misinterpreted the significance of the stories that were so freely told. The Englishmen who spoke of our failures talked of them as the provoking and inexcusable blunders of departments and individuals. The Asiatics who greedily listened were convinced that they heard the acknowledgement of a national collapse. The Englishmen were so confident in the strength and resources of their country that it did not even occur to them to think that anybody on earth could have a doubt on the subject. It was as if a millionaire were to complain to someone in a foreign country that the neglect and blunder of a servant had sent his remittances to some wrong place and left him for the moment without money enough to pay his hotel bill and the listener were to accept this as a genuine announcement of approaching bankruptcy. The sepoys saw that the English force in Northern India was very small and he really believed that it was small because England had no more men to send there. He was as ignorant as a child about everything which he had not seen with his own eyes and he knew absolutely nothing about the strength, the population and the resources of England. In his mind, Russia was the great rising and conquering country, England was sinking into decay, her star waning before the strong glare of the portentous Northern light. Other impulses too there were to make sedition believe that its opportunity had come. Lord Canning had hardly assumed office as Governor-General of India when the dispute occurred between the British and Chinese authorities at Canton and a war was imminent between England and China. Troops were sent shortly after from England to China and although none were taken from India yet it was well known among the native populations that England had an Asiatic war on her hands. Almost at the same moment war was declared against Persia by the proclamation of the Governor-General at Calcutta in consequence of the Shah having marched an army into Herat and besieged in violation of a treaty with Great Britain made in 1853. A body of troops was sent from Bombay to the Persian Gulf and shortly after General Uttram left Bombay with additional troops as commander and chief of the field force in Persia. Therefore in the opening days of 1857 it was known among the native populations of India that the East India Company was at war with Persia and that England had on her hands a quarrel with China. At this time the number of native soldiers in the employment of England throughout northern India was about 120,000 while the European soldiers numbered only about 22,000. The native army of the three Presidencies taken together was nearly 300,000 while the Europeans were but 43,000 of whom some 5,000 had just been told off for duty in Persia. It must be owned that given the existence of a seditious spirit it would have been hardly possible for it to find conditions more seemingly favorable and tempting. To many a temper of sullen discontent the appointed and fateful hour must have seemed to be at hand. There can be no doubt that a conspiracy for the subversion of the English government in India was afoot during the early days of 1557 and possibly for long before. The story of the mysterious chapatis is well known. The chapatis are small cakes of unleavened bread. Bannocks of salt and dough they had been termed and they were found to be distributed with amazing rapidity and precision of system at one time throughout the native villages of the north and northwest. A native messenger brought two of these mysterious cakes to the settlement of a village and bade him to have others prepared like them and to pass them on to another place. The token has been well described as the fiery cross of India although it would not appear that its significance was as direct and precise as that of the famous Highland War signal. It is curious how varying an unsatisfactory is the evidence about the meaning of these chapatis. According to the positive information of some witnesses, the sending of such a token had never been accustomed, either Mohammedan or Hindu in India. Some witnesses believe that the chapatis were regarded as spells to avert some impending calamity. Others said the native population looked on them as having been sent round by the government itself as a sign that in future all would be compelled to eat the same food as the Christians ate. Others again said the intention was to make this known but to make it known on the part of the seditious in order that the people might be prepared to resist the plans of the English. But there could be no doubt that the chapatis conveyed a warning to all who received them that something strange was about to happen and bade them to be prepared for whatever might befall. One fact alone conclusively proves that the signal given had a special reference to impending events connected with British rule in India. In no instance were they distributed among the populations of still existing native states. They were only sent among the villages over which English rule extended. To the quick, suspicious mind of the Asiatic a breath of warning may be as powerful as the crash of an alarm bell or the sound of a trumpet. It may be as some authorities would have us to believe that the panic about the greased cartridges disconcerted instead of bringing to a climax the projects of sedition. End of section 6.