what I have no doubt will be the greatest consolation to usto see our opinions prevalent in high places. The second, which is scarcely less important, is that the inevitable consequence of the existing system will be an injurious influence upon our rivals, the Liberal party. No party can long exist where its chief and selected men are in power and continue to hold office not only without carrying their principles into effect, but without even frankly avowing their profession. I see before me many members of the Administration who obtained their seats in the House by their protestations to their constituents— by their Liberal engagements to the great Liberal party—but who, having adopted a Conservative policy, still retain their seats in that Administration. It is for them to explain their position to their constituents and to the party in the country whom they are supposed to represent. . . . The people of this country will find upon reflection that from the competitive emulation of great political parties has sprung that wise and temperate system of Government which has so long characterised the history of this country; they will cherish with still greater interest and they will value still more highly the distinctive principles which form parties. At any rate when we are told . . . that the present lamentable state of public affairs is occasioned by the break up of parties, we at least can say, 'That allegation does not apply to us; we are a Conservative party; we hold Conservative opinions; we are prepared to maintain them, and if a Minister who has no opinions cannot pass his measures he has no right--and those who defend him have no right to libel the constitution of the country to which we owe all our reputation and all our greatness.''

Two great convulsions abroad in the course of the autumn

The Lorcha "Arrow."

17

were to do for the Government that which the eloquence of its opponents was insufficient to accomplish. For a considerable. time a practice had obtained in China of allowing Chinese vessels to take out English papers, and to place themselves under the protection of the English consuls. It is obvious that such a custom was one eminently liable to abuse and one which needed the greatest care and reserve on our part to prevent its being made an engine of mischief. Unfortunately consuls are not invariably the wisest of men, and to entrust them with such a power as this practice implied was to run great risk of endangering our relations with the Chinese Government. The crash came at the beginning of October. A lorcha-the word is Portuguese, and is explained by Lacerda as "a sort of ship of India"-called the "Arrow" was lying in the Canton River. She had been built by a Chinese; she was owned by a Chinese ; her captain and crew were Chinese, but she had had an English registry, which had expired early in September. Nevertheless she still flew the English flag, and claimed English protection. Why such protection should have been given it is not easy to understand. The lorcha had a most evil reputation. She was notoriously used for smuggling purposes, and to the evasion of the Chinese revenue laws she added a little piracy. Her right to use the English flag at all was, to say the least, questionable, seeing that the Act of the Colonial Legislature of Hong Kong was framed for the benefit of ships of a totally different class. In any case the position was a doubtful one, and there was nothing surprising in the fact that the Chinese authorities should have boarded her and taken out her master and crew. It was said that the English flag was hauled down, but of that there is little or no evidence, and the Chinese officials emphati

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cally denied that anything of the sort had been done. A demand for reparation was made, to which the Chinese Commissioners afterwards assented, but Sir John (formerly Dr.) Bowring-a great pet of several Whig Governments in succession. -thought the opportunity a favourable one for increasing British influence at Canton. He accordingly wrote to Sir Michael Seymour, the naval commander on the station, calling upon him to enforce the fulfilment of treaty obligations as regarded the city of Canton. Sir Michael Seymour complied with Sir John Bowring's wishes, and began by destroying the forts on the river. England was thus plunged into a costly and embittered war for the sake of a piratical Chinese trading boat, and placed in an essentially false position by the action of her Whig representatives abroad.

To complicate matters, a mutiny broke out amongst our troops in India. In the spring of the year 1856, Lord Dalhousie had left Calcutta for England worn out with toil and the effects of the climate. The last official act he performed was to receive a farewell address, and in the course of the short and touching speech which he then delivered, he warned his hearers against relying on a long continued peace in India. By January 1857, his forebodings were realised, General Hearsey reporting to the Government that at Dum-Dum, near Calcutta, there was a very uneasy feeling amongst the Sepoys, who had been told that the new cartridges which had been served out to them were greased with the fat of pigs and of oxen, and that the object of making them bite them was to destroy their caste. Immediately on this becoming known, it was observed that all the traces of a wide spread insurrectionary organisation were visible in India; that chupatties (cakes of unleavened bread) and lotahs (earthen

The Queen's Speech.

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ware pots) were passed from hand to hand, from house to house, from village to village, and that wherever the native soldiery were to be found, disaffection was sure to manifest itself. Old Indians looked gloomy and younger men felt uneasy. To add to the complication, English diplomacy had created for us a little war in Persia, where, on the 27th of January, General Outram landed with a small force to avenge the Persian occupation of Herat in Cabúl.

In the midst of all this turmoil, Parliament was opened on the 3rd of February. The Queen's Speech was almost wholly taken up with the details of Lord Palmerston's "spirited foreign policy," which had thus landed the country in a war with China, a war with Persia, a quarrel with the King of the two Sicilies, and a misunderstanding with the United States on the subject of Central America. The Indian Mutiny was not referred to, and the legislation for the year was vaguely mentioned in the Speech. "Bills will be submitted for your consideration," said her Majesty's representatives, "for the consolidation and amendment of important portions of the law." When the debate on the Address came on, Mr. Disraeli delivered himself of an elaborate and minute. indictment of the Government. He pointed out that at the close of the late struggle, the condition of the Great Powers of Europe afforded a fair prospect of peace. How was it then that wars and rumours of wars pervaded the whole of the Speech from the throne? The seeds of difficulty in our diplomatic relations had been, he contended, sown immediately after the Treaty of Peace; first with reference to Italy, our intermeddling with the affairs of which country had for six months diverted the mind of England from the consideration

of her domestic policy, and he created an enormous sensation, by the declaration that at that time a secret treaty was in existence, by which France guaranteed to Austria with the assent of the English government, the whole of her Italian dominions. Was a minister, he asked, justified in holding out to Italy and to Europe under these circumstances, that he was determined to change the aspect of social and political life in the Peninsula? He insisted that the people of this country were the victims of an imposture-that time was wasted and expense unnecessarily incurred. Then came the Russian difficulty. What was the reason, he inquired, for our being on the point of losing one of the principal objects for which we had gone to war? The reason was, that our plenipotentiary, himself a member of the Cabinet, had blundered over his work. Yet, instead of the mistake being avowed and rectified, every means was taken to excite the popular mind against Russia and to create an impression that she wished to back out of the Treaty. All these difficultics in foreign affairs which had occupied nearly a year, were, he argued, attributable to ministers who, when the question about Bolgrad and the Isle of Serpents was adjusted—a question, by the way, which arose out of an extraordinary blunder concerning maps in our own Foreign Office had advised a course in the Neuchatel dispute, which but for the prudence of the Swiss would have involved them in war, and embroiled the entire continent. Happily the tranquillity of Europe was so well established, that even a "firebrand minister" could not subvert it, but in another quarter of the globe we had, not rumours of wars but actual war, and he thought it was the duty of the House to inquire what was the cause of