for legislation and control. They are not needed, and they are not fitted for executive action, especially in moments of peril and difficulty. The seldomer Parliament meets, and the shorter time it sits during actual hostilities, the better for the country which it represents, and the better for its own dignity and influence.’ Now, that is a paragraph from the Economist newspaper.116
Bright had little doubt where the loan to fund an unjust war would end up. The money raised would not be given to the Turks directly, he noted, but to a French and English commission:
If we could by possibility, with the knowledge which we possess of the history of the past, conceive ourselves in the Ottoman Empire and subject to its rule, with two of the Powers of the West coming and, under the pretence of defending us from an enemy, taking first the revenues of Egypt, then that of Syria, then that of Smyrna, the inlet and outlet of their commerce, and then appointing a commission to sit in our capital city to expend the money necessary to defray the expenses of our army, should we not say, the glory of the nation had departed, and with it the last shadow of our independence? Should we not say, that the nations pretending to assist us were but treacherous friends … ? 117
Bright felt sure that behind the rhetoric of friendship lurked the desire for profit and territory, and he predicted that it would not be long before Britain and France made expansionist moves in the Near East. There he was wrong. The two allies in the Crimea turned their gaze instead to the Far East, where another backward and despotic empire was in need of liberal lessons in free trade.
The Second Opium War
The signal for the Second Opium War was given in October 1856, when Chinese police arrested the Chinese crew of the Arrow, a lorcha (a type of junk) in Canton accused of piracy. The British consul claimed, falsely, that the vessel was flying the Union Jack, that it was registered in Hong Kong, and so based on a treaty signed in 1843 (in the wake of the First Opium War) the Chinese had no right to detain anyone on board. Sir John Bowring, the plenipotentiary, chief superintendent of trade, governor, commander-in-chief and vice-admiral of Hong Kong, then sent a fleet to bomb Canton into submission – despite the fact that its governor had already released the captives and agreed to his terms, refusing only to apologize, since, as Governor Yeh stated, the Arrow was Chinese. For this, three weeks of fire rained down on Canton, followed by a four-year invasion ending in the sacking of Beijing. Thus was China opened to Western trade and culture.118 France, Russia and the US joined in the attack, but Britain and its special interest in one commodity gave the war its name. British revenue from opium was so vast at the time that it not only kept afloat the state machine in India, where most of the opium was grown, but turned a trade deficit with Asia in silk, tea and ceramics into an overall surplus.119 Chinese opium addicts were in demand, their supply limited by the ban the Qing dynasty had imposed on this powerful narcotic.
The pretext for invasion, and a widespread suspicion that the drug trade stood to benefit, sparked an uproar when news of the ‘Arrow incident’ reached London in 1857. The Conservative opposition leader Lord Derby brought forward a motion on 24 February condemning British behaviour as ‘the arrogant demands of overweening, self-styled civilization’, which was narrowly rejected in the upper house.120 Richard Bethell, Attorney General, privately advised ministers, ‘a very serious case against us on the points of international law could be, and probably would be, made in the Commons’.121 Cobden stepped in with a censure motion days later; carried by sixteen votes in a marathon debate, it toppled Lord Palmerston’s government, and an election was called.
Behind the scenes Cobden exhorted his press contacts to expose not only the illegality of British actions but also the free trade arguments with which some justified them. ‘There is no great empire where our trade is a quarter as free’, Cobden wrote, comparing the low duties charged in China favourably with Europe, and rounding on those close to Wilson, from Clarendon to Porter. Cobden denounced all groups backing war, from ‘Manchester fire-eaters’ and ‘the Liverpool China Association’ to the intrigues of Paris, London and Washington and the missionaries in league with them. ‘God help the Christians who think of making their religion acceptable in the rear of an opium war’, he wrote, ‘for surely nothing but an interruption of the laws of human nature by especial divine interposition could ever have that result!’122
This time the liberal backlash against any criticism of Britain’s action abroad was still more venomous than over Crimea. Bowring, the official at the centre of events, was a liberal intellectual of high standing, onetime editor of the Westminster Review, disciple and literary executor of Bentham, a member of the League and the Peace Society, a non-conformist, ex-radical MP, who once exclaimed to a crowd in Bolton, ‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.’ He had also been a close friend of Cobden and Bright.123 The Economist defended Bowring.124 He had acted a little ‘precipitously’, but it would only sow mischief to reprimand or recall him: besides, even if he had been in error, and his actions were technically illegal, and even if, ‘as regards that illicit trade our hands are not clean’ – an allusion to opium – ‘all declare that satisfactory, safe, and dignified intercourse with those arrogant and cruel people is impossible till they have met with severe chastisement’. The paper did not fear for Europeans resident in China, ‘for the same mail that carries out this news will carry out such reinforcements as will put opposition and danger at defiance’.125 In retrospect, there was a thread that ran between the wars in Crimea and Canton. ‘Trade is as much a necessity of society as air or food or clothing or heat.’ Interventions were therefore akin to humanitarian operations.
We may regret war … but we cannot deny that great advantages have followed in its wake. As the improvement both of Turkey and Russia will be consequent on the war now happily at an end; so any war with China that results in bringing her people more completely into trade communication with all other nations … relieving them from the temptation to put infants to death, to allow the aged to die for want of food, and to exterminate great numbers from their standing in each other’s way.126
The Economist and its allies prevailed, so far as public opinion was concerned, despite Cobden’s victory over Palmerston in the House. In the ensuing election, Palmerston took his campaign to the country, with an endlessly reprinted manifesto that ran, ‘An insolent barbarian wielding authority in Canton has violated the British flag.’ Virtually the entire ‘peace party’ was swept from office – Cobden, Bright and Thomas Milner Gibson among them.127 The Economist was exultant. Here was proof of who really represented the middle classes; not Manchester relics ‘extinguished’ by their pacifism, but the new Liberal Party. Bright ought to reflect on the ‘unrepented sin’ of his ‘disregard of all patriotic feeling and decorum’, rather than blaming electors who were just as interested in Peace, Retrenchment and Reform as ever, but stood firm for the flag. Ten years on from the repeal of the Corn Laws it was not they, but Bright who had changed. He did not understand the real men of Manchester, and the Economist endeavoured to educate him.
As a body wealth is not their sole pursuit, they are patriots as well as manufacturers. They think that there are higher objects both for men and citizens to strive for than mere material well-being. They did not grudge their hundred or thousand pounds subscription to the League for the defeat of Protection, and they were not likely to grudge their hundred or thousand pounds to the National Treasury for repelling Russian aggression. They did not like to be held up to the scorn and odium of the world as men who had no idea and no aim beyond their ledgers – as the incarnation of cold, hard, and narrow selfishness.128
Cobden drew more radical lessons from his defeat than Bright, and he advised the latter to take a break from politics and abandon his seat in Manchester. ‘The great capitalist class formed an excellent basis for the Anti-Corn-Law movement, for they had inexhaustible purses, which they opened freely in a contest where not only their pecuniary interests but their pride as “an order” was at stake’, Cobden reflected. ‘But I very much doubt whether such a state of society is favourable to a democratic political movement.’129 In another letter he complained bitterly of what the Economist had become, and of its role in pushing the government line on the