TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ADMIRALTY ON KAGOSIMA. LORD CLARENCE PAGET is not the official to whom Government should have entrusted the defence of an ugly business. The man has no plausibility. For a speaker i not gifted with eloquence, he s in the House sometimes oddly effective, but then he wants to feel his own mind assured, to be clear as to the justice as well as the fitness of his words, to have all the more prominent facts visibly ranged on his side. Whenever he is internally doubtful, or aware that his facts need concealment, or afraid that his con- science may have a gouty twinge, he is apt to talk trash, and he cannot make trash acceptable by a covering of rhetorical flowers. Mr. Stansfeld, if he had been properly demoralized by a few more years of office, would have defended the destruction of Kagosima a great deal more effectively, for he would have made his audience think about him and his mar- vellous diction, instead of a few thousand of burnt Japanese. There never was a defence offered for a great calamity more painful to read than that offeredby Lord Clarence Paget at Deal. There had, as he acknowledged with curious want of tact, been "a great and grievous destruction of property" at Bagosima, though he "had no intelligence whatever as to the loss of life," and that loss of property, he averred, "was by her Majesty's Government most sincerely deplored." They weep, this Cabinet, over Japanese furniture, lac- quered or plain, but as to human beings they know, not to say care, nothing at all about them. That touch was meant to diminish the public displeasure, but unfortunately for the Ministry their countrymen are just like themselves, much more solicitous about property than about human life. It is to protect the property of non-belligerents that all recent legislation has been directed, and Lord Clarence has merely afforded Mr. Cobden another handle, while bringing home to the popular mind the ruin such a precedent may be used to effect. As to the sacrifice of life, the speaker, doubtless, intended to throw suspicion on the stories of its extent; but the world at large is not quite so ignorant as its rulers would fain believe. The estimate current in the fleet when the last mail left Yokohama of the total amount of mischief in- flicted was 400 killed and 1,000 wounded, and as women and children are not, of course, reckoned, and as the deaths by a fire lasting forty-eight hours, by rafters falling, and oil ex- ploding, and fright, and suffocation, and inability from sick- ness to fly, cannot have been counted up, that number is pro- bably somewhere about one-fifth of the truth. We think the African chief a great brute who allows a hundred slaves to be slain in order to attend his spirit in heaven, but Richardson's spirit has been cheered by an " acci- dental " holocaust of some thousands, offered up, too, in the regular sacrificial manner—the reek of burnt flesh going up, not to the contentment of any god Lord Clarence pro- fesses to worship. What on earth is it to the point whether the Admiralty has received official statistics, or is in this mat- ter as innocent of figures as in every other? They did not expect, we presume, that Satsuma should send them registers of the men he has lost, corrected tables of women burned, annotated memoranda of children charred in that fire "seen fourteen miles off," and the broad facts are as patent to them as to the rest of mankind. They know that a mighty city with more than the population of Sheffield was burnt to the ground without warning, that the houses were wood and paper, that while it was burning below the sky rained shells from above, that in the midst of this hell were some 80,000 women and as many children under ten, and that all had to choose between a sudden flight to the uplands and consequent nun, or a desperate strife with death to rescue their moveable property ; and knowing this, they weep over furniture as if the end of Government were to console Wardonr Street and Hanway lard.
The Secretary to the Admiralty seems himself to have seen the feebleness of his argument, for a moment after be essayed a broader one. The whole affair, however destructive to property or to life, was an "accident." "Well, they per- formed their duty nobly ; and I am sure that if it had not been for the dreadful sea running, and the consequent un- steadiness of the platforms of the guns, the fire of our ships would have been confined to the forts which belonged to the Prince, and would not have extended to the town which lay in their rear." Only imagine the feeling of England if Russia, after bombarding Constantinople to punish an assassin, were to offer that excuse. The city was destroyed because the waves rocked the ships ! Even if it had been true it would have been imbecile, but it is the very smalles6 part of the truth. Was it the rocking of the waves which made the Admiral open fire on the second day, or which compelled Earl Russell to provide for the "shelling of the Prince's house," or which induced the resort to rockets? Or was it, perchance, the waves which persuaded Colonel Neale to order the move- ments which would, he knew, lead to the hostilities which, as the Admiral informed the Japanese envoys, would result in the destruction of their town ? One scarcely knows how to treat such an excuse as serious, or avoid the impossible suspicion that Lord Clarence was quizzing his audience. If this be a justification' then sea-sickness is an excuse for murder, and Hunt might have pleaded the jolting of his cab as the reason why prussic acid. was found in his children's stomachs. It might have been jerked into the porter, and so might Ka&osima have been saved had its harbour been only a pond. each a defence dis- plays nothing except the straits to which Government is reduced to defend an occurrence for which, whether accidental or resolved on under the heat of battle, all Europe is now condemning us, and which has not, to all appearance, cowed its victims.
Already the telegram announces that another European, this time a Frenchman, has been murdered, and the French Admiral has set off to try and extort reparation. He also will, doubtless, try bombardment, and then the "combined hostilities" mentioned as imminent will become realities. It needed but this to reveal the magnitude of the offence we are committing in Japan. We are not only doing mischief utterly out of proportion to any good to be done,—firing, as it were, on a school because a murderer has hidden himself in the school-room, but we are setting an example sure to be followed. The Europeans in japan are being elevated into a caste backed by the strength of all Europe—a caste who are to be kept inviolate at whatever expense to mankind. We are reviving in their favour the laws which made the life of a noble worth a thousand times that of a peasant, and exagger- ating them till a soldier is the equivalent of a Japanese village and a merchant of a whole population. It is really intolerable. Whatever may be the case in China, it is quite certain that we do not intend to govern Japan ; that Europe, indeed, in combination, cannot attempt to govern it. The single apology for destruction, therefore, that it is to clear the way for new structures, is, in this case, wanting, and we rare leading Europe to destroy Japanese cities with the single object of preserving a trade which, when it is founded, will not yield the equivalent of the wealth we have swept away.
People have talked of late as if the struggle were pretty equal, the Japanese "worthy opponents," the result of operations not a matter of moral certainty, but if there be one point certain in politics it is that Japan cannot resist France and England combined, that in the war which the Conqueror is just leaving our ports with a battalion of marines to assist, the civilization and social order of the empire must go down to be replaced by an anarchy which we, from the first, declare we do not intend to remove. We pass the ploughshare over cities in order to sow nothing. And all this is done before the country has even de- cided to do it, before it has been possible even to think whether we will buy one more small tribute to our commercial wealth at such an expense of blood. And when it has been accom- plished, and Japan has been overthrown, and an ancient order has disappeared, and millions have been added to our taxation, and thirty millions of people are given up to the civil war which in the East always precedes reconstruction, we shall hug ourselves with the belief that we are not as Americans, that we do not make war for "tariffs," or subju- gate a free people in order to increase the wealth of our great commercial cities. And when some man who can realize scenes a little away from his eyes complains of the human misery all these acts have produced, he will be told that Government knows nothing of the subject of complaint, but that the shells must be held for this or that silly reason to have been self- directed.
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