1860] WAR IN JAPAN 371 a convention was signed by which apology was made for the obstruction of the river in the preceding June; the Treaty of Tientsin completely ratified, the war indemnity being doubled; the Port of Tientsin opened to British trade; and a small territory in the Province of Canton ceded to the English to be held as a dependency of Hong-Kong. On the exchange of ratifications, the allied forces evacuated the city and withdrew. England was involved also in brief hostilities with Japan. The policy of that country was even more exclusive than that War in Japan. of China. Previous to 1858 the trade had been limited to 1862. the Dutch, who occupied an island in the Bay of Yokohama, beyond which they were not allowed to pass. But in that year, on his way home from concluding the Treaty of Tientsin, Lord Elgin signed at Yeddo a treaty of commerce and friendship with the Tikoon or Governor of Japan. By this, in the course of the next five years, five ports were to be opened to British subjects, a diplomatic agent was allowed to reside in Yeddo, and consular agents in the other open towns. Although the friendship was cemented by the visit to England of Ambassadors from Japan in 1862, the jealousy of the natives continued, and it was found necessary to remove the seat of the English Embassy from Yeddo to Yokohama. Mr. Richardson, a Murder of Mr. member of the Embassy, and some friends were riding Richardson. upon a road where by treaty foreigners were allowed to go, when a "Damio," or noble, and his suite came past them. Though the Englishmen withdrew to give him room, the native soldiers fell upon them and murdered Mr. Richardson. This was on the 14th September 1862. As soon as possible after the event the English Minister demanded £100,000 as compensation from the Tikoon, and £25,000 from the Prince of Satsuma, the Damio implicated. The Tikoon acknowledged his responsibility, and paid the £100,000 with a full apology. But the Prince refused to pay the indemnity, and after the lapse of some months, during which hostility began to show itself, and the ports were closed to Europeans, the English agent called upon the Admiral of the station to proceed against Kagosima, the capital of the refractory Damio. The Admiral by way of reprisal seized some Japanese steamers, upon which batteries from the shore opened a heavy fire upon the English ships. The fire was returned, the palace bombarded, and unfortunately the greater part of the town burnt. Upon this resistance ceased, the Prince yielded, promising to apprehend and punish the offenders, and the Japanese Government again opened all the ports with the exception of Yokohama. War in Ashantee. 1864. Another little war in 1864 nearly produced a Ministerial crisis. At the instigation of the Governor of Cape Coast Castle on the African Gold Coast, an expedition was organised against the King of Ashantee, who had made an attack on the friendly tribe of Fantees. The pestilential character of the country worked havoc among the English troops, and the expedition returned without having effected anything, at a cost of many lives and much money. The Government was assailed for having carelessly neglected the proper precautions, and a motion by Sir John Hay, which was practically a motion of censure, was lost only by the narrow majority of seven. The feeling with which the ineffectual diplomacy in Europe, coupled with the somewhat hasty assertion of British rights against semi-barbarous people, was regarded by one section of the people is illustrated by the tone of the debate on this motion. "The responsibility lies," said Sir John Hay, "on Government the Cabinet, the men who had betrayed Denmark and truckled to Germany, who had convulsed China and devastated Japan, who ten years ago had sent a British army to perish of want and cold in the Crimean winter, and had now sent some hundreds of British troops to perish of hunger, thirst, fever and want of shelter, in the burning plains and pestilential swamps of Central Africa." But the disapprobation was chiefly a party feeling. There is no reason to suppose that the Opposition would have acted on any different principle had they been in power. They had again and again declared that war in Europe was impossible, and it is the unfortunate necessity of our position in close contact through our trade with barbarous and semi-barbarous nations, that we should at times assume the attitude of the bully, and employ force, the only argument likely to prove effective. blamed. during the Far more important, and more absorbing in its interest than diploFirm attitude matic wrangles, or small and distant warfare, was the of Government terrible crisis through which the United States was American War. passing. And the Government deserves great credit for its action during the difficulties of the time. It followed a cool and dignified course in the midst of the most excited popular feeling, and in presence of bitter suffering brought by the war upon our own people. The triumph of the Republican Party, and the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, at the close of 1860, may be regarded as the immediate cause of the secession of the Southern States. From that time till the spring of 1865, when the fall of the Confederate capital Richmond, and the 1864] WAR IN ASHANTEE 373 surrender of General Lee closed the encounter with the triumph of the North, the two sections of the great Republic were engaged in warfare on a gigantic scale. The division between the Northern and Southern States had been of long standing. On commercial questions their interests were directly opposed. The North was a manufacturing country, the people of the South were without manufactures, and were the producers of raw material. In the supposed interests of manufactures a protective tariff was established, which in some instances was practically prohibitory. The effect was naturally to raise the causes of the price of every manufactured article which the Southerner war. required, and to oblige him to exchange his raw products disadvantageously in the European markets. But hand in hand with the commercial question went the question of slavery, an institution forming an inherent part of the civilisation of the South, and closely connected with the form which its industrial life assumed. For many years the struggle between the slaveholders and the abolitionists had been acute. The rage for abolition had become a fanaticism, and excited a corresponding feeling among those who held that abolition was an assault on the most obvious rights of property. As Territory after Territory demanded admission among the sovereign States of the Union, the battlefield on which this question was fought had been found in the establishment or abolition of slavery by the constitution of each new made State. An attempt, by what is known as the Missouri Compromise, to fix as a limit between the two systems 36.30° of north latitude had failed as civilisation rolled westward; and the heat with which the rights of the slaveholders were supported when Kansas was demanding admission to the Union had produced something little short of civil war. At length in 1856 the election of Buchanan to the Presidency over the abolitionist candidate Fremont, seemed to throw into the hands of the South the chance of securing their supremacy. The election of Lincoln in 1860 appeared to snatch from them the prize they had thought secured, and almost immediately South Carolina began to speak of refusing to submit to Northern domination, and of the necessity of disruption. Buchanan's last message on December 3d, 1860, was intended to suggest a compromise. Disrup- Secession of the tion involved the gravest constitutional questions. It Southern States. depended upon the character of the Confederation of the United States. As each State was recognised as sovereign, as each had joined the Confederation voluntarily, it was held by the advocates of separation that it was within the rights of each to secede of its own will from a contract into which it had voluntarily entered; on the other hand the dominant party in the North asserted that the contract was for ever, that the limits of State sovereignty as contrasted with national sovereignty were clearly marked, and that the right of secession did not lie within them. Again the question was at issue which must inevitably occur in composite nations; and to those who regarded the greatness of the American Republic as of higher value than the gratification of provincial patriotism there could be no doubt as to the side which should command their support. But the irritation caused by political defeat, and the very natural abhorrence to submit to the domination of a party which seemed for its own selfish purposes to be hampering their commercial prosperity, and in its onesided fanaticism to be threatening them with a vast confiscation, blinded the eyes of the Southerners, and made them ready at once to accept the constitutional view which was so entirely in harmony with their wishes. One after the other with great rapidity the Southern States followed the line marked out for them by Carolina. By May 1861, eleven States had broken from the Union. The pretext, as we gather from the declaration of South Carolina, was the interference or threatened interference of the Federal Government with the institution of slavery sanctioned by the constitution of the States. The principle involved was the right of secession. Feeling of War. The war was thus two-sided; to some a war against slavery, to others a war for the maintenance of the Union. It was England on the this twofold issue which confused public opinion in England. While hatred of slavery attracted it towards the North, sympathy with those who thought themselves oppressed attracted it towards the South. But other and less creditable reasons tended much to increase among the wealthier classes the favour in which the Southern cause was held; with their usual misapprehension of the true meaning of the word, they supposed that the Southerners came nearer to satisfy the ordinary definition of gentlemen than their Northern brethren. Descended as a fact from settlers of a higher social rank than the New Englander, their form of civilisation had given them something of the manners and external culture which belong to a leisured class. The wealthy Englishman, forgetful of the shallowness of this veneer, felt that he had more in common with the well-descended planter than with the rough and energetic man of the North, to whom he attributed the pushing vulgarity of the self-made man and that national self-assertion 1861] THE AMERICAN WAR to maintain 375 which both politically and socially was regarded as the most odious characteristic of the American. Certainly, for one reason or the other, partisanship of the South was the common tone of English society. It cannot be denied that the North was inclined to act in a high-handed fashion. The Southern States had speedily formed themselves into a Confederation, and elected as their President Jefferson Davis; they seized the national property, called out troops, and supplied their want of a fleet by giving commissions to privateers. But the North, in spite of the complete organisation thus begun, insisted upon treating the Confederate States merely as rebels. It was upon this difference of view that the first difficulty of England and other European countries arose. The Ministry had to decide whether the Southerners should be treated merely as rebels, or whether they would extend to them the rights of a Determination belligerent Power. Lord Russell early declared that of the Ministry England had determined to maintain not only strict neutrality. neutrality but close silence in the dispute. No doubt the susceptibility of the Northerners rendered it advisable that England should, in this case at all events, abstain from that moral interference in which it indulged so freely in European quarrels. Our Ambassador, Lord Lyons, was instructed to give no advice, although always on fitting occasions to urge the desire of the English Government for a peaceful solution of the existing differences. It was also thought right, on the 14th of May, to put out a Proclamation of strict neutrality, and to prohibit English subjects from enlisting or supplying privateers, or in any way affording assistance to either party But the circumstances of the case did not allow the Government to rest merely in this position. English privateers were sailing under the flag of the Southern Confederacy. The Northern Government had declared a blockade of the Southern ports, and it became necessary to state publicly whether the same rights were to be extended to these vessels as would be given to those of a country engaged in war, or whether they should be treated as pirates, and whether the blockade was to be respected or not. In May 1862 Lord Russell explained that in the view of the Cabinet belligerency was not so much a principle as a fact, that when any mass of a population engaged in war reached a certain force and consistency it was entitled to be treated as a belligerent, and that the Southern Confederacy appeared to satisfy those conditions. And further, some weeks later he informed the Commons that orders had been given to prohibit armed ships and privateers both on one side |