Sir John Bowring was governor of Hong Kong, with the oversight of British interests in the Empire.  A gifted poet, and an enthusiastic advocate of universal peace, he was a man who might be counted on, if in [Page 163] the power of man, to hold the dogs of war in leash.  But he, too, had been consul at Canton and he knew by experience the quagmire in which the best intentions were liable to be swamped.

Parkes, whom I came to know as Her Britannic Majesty’s minister in Peking, was the soul of honour, as upright as any man who walked the earth.  But with all his rectitude, he, like the Viceroy Yeh, was irascible and unyielding.  When the viceroy refused his demand for the rendition of the Arrow and her crew, he menaced him with the weight of the lion’s paw.  Alarmed, but not cowed, the viceroy sent the prisoners in fetters to the consulate, instead of replacing them on board their ship; nor did he vouchsafe a word of courtesy or apology.  Parkes, too fiery to overlook such contemptuous informality, sent them back, much as a football is kicked from one to another; and the viceroy, incensed beyond measure, ordered their heads to be chopped off without a trial.

Here was a Gordian knot, which nothing but the sword could loose.  War was provoked as before by the rashness of a viceroy.  The peace-loving governor did not choose to swallow the affront to his country, nor did the occupant of the Dragon Throne deign to interfere; looking on the situation with the same sublime indifference with which the King of Persia regarded the warlike preparations of the younger Cyrus, when he supposed, as Xenophon tells us, that he was only going to fight out a feud with a neighbouring satrap.  How could China be opened; how was a stable equilibrium possible so long as foreign powers were kept at a distance from the capital of the Empire?

[Page 164] In three months the haughty viceroy was a prisoner in India, never to return, and his provincial capital was held by a garrison of British troops.  On this occasion the old blunder of admitting the city to ransom was not repeated, else Canton might have continued to be a hotbed of seditious plots and anti-foreign hostilities.  Parkes knew the people, and he knew their rulers also.  He was accordingly allowed to have his own way in dealing with them.  The viceroy being out of the way, he proposed to Pehkwei, the Manchu governor, to take his place and carry on the provincial government as if the two nations were at peace.  Strange to say, the governor did not decline the task.  That he did not was due to the fact that he disapproved the policy of the viceroy, and that he put faith in the assurance that Great Britain harboured no design against the reigning house or its territorial domain.