LORD DERBY AND PERU.
THE debate of Tuesday night, on Dr. Cameron's motion with regard to the Peruvian Government's treatment of the crew of the English ship Talisman,' will hardly raise the character of Mr. Disraeli's Government with those who wish to see it pursuing a" spirited." foreign policy. We do not suppose, indeed, that many persons will study the papers just presented to Parliament respecting the imprisonment of British subjects in Peru, but those who do peruse those papers will cer- tainly come away from them with the impression that English subjects perhaps, in this respect, not differing from the subjects of most other States—have exceedingly 'little chance of obtaining anything like justice in Peru ; that the Peruvian Government, aware of the strength of its own weak- ness, and of the impossibility of replacing the Administration by anything more deserving the name of " government," is disposed to laugh at the remonstrances addressed to it by stronger Governments ; and that Lord Derby is so fully alive to the embarrassment of the situation, that he is rather well pleased than otherwise when the Peruvian Government can find him a decent excuse for not demanding of it the re- paration which these repeated outrages demand. For example, take the following case :—Lawrence Higginson, an employe on board the 'Santiago ' steamship, had the misfortune on June 15, 1874, in the Bay of Panama, in buying a revolver of a trader,— the revolver being loaded, without his knowledge,—to pull the trigger and wound a Chilian in the back. A doctor was imme- diately sent for, and the wound being serious, the Steam-ship Company sent the wounded man into hospital and paid all his ex- penses. On its next voyage a month later, the Santiago ' took the wounded man, who was recovering or recovered, on board again. At Callao, in Pern,—a different republic, observe,—the Chilian .brought a charge against Higginson of an attempt to murder him, though the authorities at Panama had been perfectly satis- fied that the matter was an accident. The port captain took Higginson out of the ship on July 18, imprisoned him in the common felons' ward of the prison,—a filthy hole, where he was placed with malefactors of the lowest kind,—and set him at liberty on July 24, on the avowed ground that no evidence of any kind had appeared to justify his deten- tion. Mr. Nugent, her Majesty's representative at Lima, demanded compensation for this man's grossly unjust imprison- ment, and Lord Derby at first strongly supported the demand. But when the demand for compensation went in, the Peruvian Minister produced a story which had, according to him, been laid before the judicial authorities at Callao, that the accuser of Higginson, who "presented himself to the authorities at the port wounded and blood-stained," "complained of having been the victim of an attempted assassination within the territories of the Republic." It is noticeable that this statement as to the blood-stained appearance of the man, and the assertion that the act had been committed " within the territories of the Republic," is contained only in the Minister's reply, and is not supported at all by any of the depositions which he encloses. On the contrary, the accuser's own statement is that the wound was received "on the voyage" to Callao. But on the strength of this completely unsupported assertion of the Peruvian Minister's, which was no doubt invented for the purpose, Lord Derby writes to Mr. St. John,—"I have to state to you that I am advised that the explanations given by the Peru- vian Minister for Foreign Affairs of the causes which led to the arrest and imprisonment of Mr. Higginson, are such as to pre- clude her Majesty's Government from insisting further upon an apology and indemnity from the Peruvian Government, the arrest and imprisonment appearing to have been in due course of law as ordinarily administered in Peru, though based upon what eventually proved to be a grossly false statement of facts." In other words, if the Peruvian Government can but invent false facts to make their procedure look legal, Lord Derby will pass over the falsehood of the facts, though he would not pass over the maladministration of the law, in case there had been no attempt to pervert the facts. Not unnatur- ally, Mr. St. John writes back,—with an evidently suppressed sigh at Lord Derby's perverse determination to find an excuse for exonerating the Peruvian Minister,—" I regretted to have to convey this decision, as lately the Acting Captain of the Port at Callao has been treating British subjects in a most arbitrary manner, and I have been in constant correspondence on the subject, and am strongly remonstrating with the Peru- vian Government."
That represents perfectly, as we believe, Lord Derby's temper in the matter. And what he did in Mr. Higginson's case, he appears to have done in relation to the treatment of two wretched English boys, called Bell and Stirling, who were imprisoned and sentenced for a clime for which they had cer- tainly not been duly tried, not apparently because they com- mitted the crime, but because they applied for compensation for unjust imprisonment on the charge. Lord Derby acted again in precisely the same manner in relation to the crew of the ' Talisman,' whose treatment formed the subject of debate on Tuesday night, and indeed, in relation to the other gross acts of official injustice to British sub- jects which are described in these papers. Lord Derby is always long-suffering with the evil-doers, knowing, no doubt, as every statesman must, that you do not gain much by up- setting or humiliating a very bad government, since it is all but certain that a worse government will take its place, or that, if it is not changed, the same government will become even more false and shifty than before under pressure from without. Still there must be a limit placed to the injustice to which British subjects are liable under the regime of these helpless, and yet malicious Governments, and we do not think that Lord Derby seems at all inclined to put any limit to them. His reasons may, in a cosmopolitan sense, be statesmanlike, but we under- stood from Mr. Disraeli that cosmopolitanism is the foible of Liberal Administrations, and that it was his boast that his Administration should at least be thoroughly English and national in tone. Certainly, it has not been that in relation to the treatment of the crew of the' Talisman." No doubt, in the first instance, the ease of the Talisman' was a case justifying irritation and that tendency to harshness which irritation always causes, on the part of the Peruvian authorities. The ' Talisman' was really chartered in England, with the intention of making war on the Government of Peru, and it received on hoard a band of filibusters in South America for that purpose. As Mr. Bourke justly enough said,—and it was the only part of his painfully-laboured speech which came to anything,— " no terms were sufficiently bad to describe the conduct of those wicked men who acted in this country for Pierola,"—the author of the insurrection,—" they certainly were the greatest miscreants in the country ;" and it is quite natural that the Peruvian Government and people, finding a vessel under the British Flag made the instrument of a revolutionary conspiracy, should be less inclined than usual to do justice, or, as it would seem nearer the mark to say, more inclined than usual to do injustice, to the persons more or less con- nected with that vessel. This we will admit. And we will admit, therefore, that Lord Derbywas right in being exceptionally mild in his treatment of the very gross injustice done to the British sailors and officers of this ship. But this even exceptional mildness should have a limit. It is not pretended that the English crew took any active part in the private war levied by this ship. All the ordinary seamen have been dismissed at last, after more than a year's detention, without anything established against them. There was, no doubt, fair ground for supposing that the captain and mates must have perceived that the ship's cargo and destination were not what they ought to have been. It was quite right to retain them in custody and try them. Indeed, there could have been no sort of reasonable ground for complaint that the whole English crew were accused of complicity in the insurrection, and tried. But what there is ground of complaint for is, that a crew should be kept in prison untried, against the law of Peru, for twelve months ; that the vessel itself, before condemnation as a prize, should have been used by the Peruvian Government as a vessel-of-war on their own side, and worked by the English engineer, under compulsion, on that duty ; and that on the excuse that the crew must be detained till the question whether the Talisman' was lawful prize was determined, the trial should have been put off and off for twelve months, and indeed, as regards the officers of the ship—one of whom has been killed in prison by a fellow- prisoner—for a year and four months. These are monstrous injustices, and no decent excuse has been made for their be- nignant toleration by Lord Derby. There was no occasion at all to defer the trial of the men till the question of the prize-character of the vessel was determined. There was no occasion at all to use the vessel as a vessel-of-war belonging to the Peruvian Government before it was condemned as a prize. And there was no pretence for delay in the trial of the officers, even after the men had been dismissed from custody. The whole story is a narrative of the grossest perversion of justice. Indeed, the elaborate meekness of our Government's despatches, taken in con- nection with the almost passionate desire of Mr. Bourke to apologise for the mal-administration of justice in Peru, do more credit to its candour than to its national sym- pathies. Mr. Forster, in his speech on Tuesday, summed up the case very ably :—" He hoped that when the proper time came, the Government would demand that compensation should be given to these men. He might be mistaken, but as far as he knew, no protest had been made by our Minister at Peru with respect to the forced impressment of the sailors. The Government had not merely to consider those two men now in prison, and the compensation due to the crew, but also the situation in future of other British subjects in Peru and similar countries. The Government ought to make a strong protest whenever international law was clearly broken, as in this case, in order to prevent such outrages for the future. The honour- able and learned gentleman was right in saying that we ought not to act arbitrarily and despotically towards weak Powers, but in this case it was the weak State that was exercising despotic power over us. It was just because it was weak that it did so, for they all felt that it would be undignified to send our men-of-war to take steps to vindicate our rights. The honourable and learned gentleman asked what we would do in such a case, and his reply was that no Power in Europe would have treated our subjects as Peru had done." If we may judge by the attitude which Lord Derby took in Mr. Higginson's case, there is little hope of his insisting on " compensation " for any one. The Peruvian Government have only to aver that its action was quite in accordance with the ordinary precedents, and that those precedents compelled it to let the trial of the men wait till the final decision had been taken on appeal as to the prize charac- ter of the ship, and Lord Derby will be advised by his Law Officers that there is no case for asking compensation, and will take their advice with eagerness. We quite admit the diffi- culty of dealing with these weak Governments. If you press too hardly on them, they degenerate by their repeated humi- liations. If you bear too much with them, they find out, in a very different sense, the truth of the Apostolic paradox that when they are weak, then they are strong, and the intercourse of civilised nations with them becomes almost intolerable. Still it cannot be doubted that Lord Derby overdoes the policy of generosity to those miserable Governments, forgetting that generosity to these Governments means a wrong to the victims
of these Governments. We recommend him and Mr. Bourke to study Mr. Disraeli's doctrine that Cosmopolitanism and Conservatism cannot be made to agree, and to become a little more Conservative and a little less Cosmopolitan.
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