TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ULTIMATUM TO CHINA.
SITBJECT to a reservation which we discuss below, Lord Salisbury has managed very well in China. It was quite certain that we must protect English mis- sionaries from outrage and murder at the instigation of Mandarins and the hands of Chinese mobs. AU that talk about the imprudence of the missionaries, and the uselessness of their work, and the "natural hatred" of the Chinese for such impertinent teaching, was altogether beside the international question. The missionaries were entitled to protection by treaty, and by the comity of nations, and if they had not been, to protect traders who go to China for gain and abandon men who go to China to make Chinamen better, would have affronted, perhaps degraded, the conscience of any Christian community. Their protection from massacre in future was therefore a foregone conclusion. It was certain again that the Central Government would not protect them if it could help it, and certain also that if it were compelled to do its duty, its protection would be efficacious. A word of ex- planation is required at this point, because the public has got a fancy into its head which is, we believe, erroneous. It has learned very late in the day the cardinal fact that China is, in a sense, a federative despotism ; that is, that the Satraps whom we call Viceroys are allowed, so long as they send up tribute liberally to Pekin, to govern as they please, or as their subjects will let them. They have even armies of their own, fleets of their own, and loans of their own, just as the earlier " Presidency " Governors had in India. It was sud- denly assumed, upon this discovery, that they were in- dependent of Pekin, and that if they pleased they could defy the Emperor himself. That, however, is just what they cannot do. The Central Power, having no effective standing Army, has a difficult part to play, and is most reluctant to display its reserved claims openly ; but it retains the power to dismiss, degrade, or execute any Viceroy, and when pressed by any necessity, whether that arises from without or within the Palace, it exerts that power. The Emperor himself commands, and disobedience is parricide. Resistance is hopeless, for the decree will be executed by the Viceroy's enemies, or by the mob, or, in certain extreme cases, by those secret agents whom Pekin knows how to employ, and who under- stand the art of making coffee as well as the messengers of the Seraglio. The object, therefore, is to compel the "Son of Heaven" to exert his power as fully as if he had been himself defied, to exert it, that is, in the way which Chinamen know to be really meant ; and this Lord Salisbury has succeeded in doing in the least troublesome way. To have threatened Pekin or Tientsin might have disturbed the world, but to threaten Nankin would disturb nobody except the Imperial Court, which knows perfectly well that the occupation of the Chinese capital of China would, among all Chinese Chinamen, say, 90 per cent of the population, destroy the prestige of the Manchoo dynasty. The Throne yielded at once, so rapidly, indeed, as to raise sus- picions of a trick, the delinquent Viceroy was degraded by proclamation, specifically for not having protected the missionaries, and was declared incapable in future of the public service. That decree, supported as it is by the presence of a British fleet opposite Nankin, will, we believe, officially destroy the Viceroy of Sze-chuen, even should he not "commit suicide," and will be received throughout the Empire by the great officials as a warning that they must protect missionaries against open outrage, and especially against murder. They can protect them if they please; for although autho- rity in China is singularly weak against popular violence, the idea being to rule by paternal injunc- tions supported by executions, and not by military force, the mobs will not move without the favour of the 'Mandarins, and the Viceroy holds local Mandarins in the hollow of his hand. He can ruin or degrade any one of them. The missionaries therefore will, for the future, be ,comparatively safe against local risings, and it is in local risings alone that their permanent danger consists. No Chinese province will "rise as one man" against them ; and if it did, the Mandarins are strong enough to get them away in safety on pretext of trial, like any other criminals. This is precisely the end which, as regards missionaries, all the Powers of Europe wish to secure, and it has been, for a time at least, secured.
There can be little question that Lord Salisbury has laid' his finger on the weak place in the huge Chinese organi- sation, and the only serious doubt is whether he has not inflicted too serious a wound. It is urged by very grave, men that the Chinese Empire has been more seriously shaken by the Japanese victories than appears, that the. prestige of Pekin is greatly lowered, and that if the European Powers, who are always being injured or insulted, strike at the Viceroys, these great officials will encourage local feeling, until some fine day we shall find China practically split up into twenty or thirty separate kingdoms, all weak, all anarchical, and all per- haps hostile to one another. That would be a terrible prospect for a fourth of the human race, as well, it is said, for the future of European trade. Have we a right ta inflict such misery upon a great people, merely in order that European trade, and European search for knowledge,. and the preaching of European ideas of morality, may all alike be free ? That is a formidable argument against the policy pursued ; but there are, we think, no less than three good and sufficient answers to it. One, and perhaps- the best, is that we cannot help ourselves, that we are bound to protect our subjects from violent wrong, and that there is no other way of doing it. The consequences may conceivably be disastrous to China ; but so long as we are ourselves, demanding nothing but what is right, we are not morally bound to think too much of contingent and possible con- sequences to the wrongdoers. Human beings do not know enough of the future to speculate on such chances, and can only move along a very narrow groove, taking care that they do nothing wilfully which their own con- sciences condemn. The taking of Sebastopol might have broken up Russia ; but, as a matter of fact., it only broke up serfage,—that is, it produced an enormous reduction in the sum of human misery and degradation. The second and more doubtful answer is that there is no perfect evidence that the existence of China as a united Empire is a good thing either for the world or for the Chinese. They might, as inhabitants of small Kingdoms, be a much finer set of people. The existence of the grand central despotism has helped to kill out in them all veracity, all humbleness of mind, and all the military virtues, without which no race can ever permanently prosper,—the refusal to fight being a refusal to fight for the right as well as for the wrong, to obey, and to suppress selfishness, the only permanent root of cowardice. The twenty Kingdoms might develop more enterprise, more commerce, more capacities of all descrip- tions, than the single huge Empire has ever done,—a process. the easier because the provinces of China are segregated. from each other by geographical difficulties, by the ten- dency of each great river to develop its own trade, and by differences of dialect and civilisation among the people.. We know, from the history of the war with Japan, that the hugeness of the organism is valueless for purposes of defence, and it may be as valueless for any other good end. And the third answer is, that the effect of diminish- ing the prestige of Pekin in attacking the Viceroys is only an assumption. Suppose it increases it. It is perfectly. conceivable, at all events, that if the Imperial Court were compelled to put the curb more frequently on its Viceroys, to coerce them under a stricter discipline, to make them fear Pekin instead of evading it, the Empire might be seriously the stronger. If the Viceroys were afraid, as, for instance, Abdurrahman Khan's Viceroys are afraid, or even as our own Viceroys are afraid, the Emperor would at least com- mand all his fleets, all his armies, and all his revenue, which, even when China is invaded, is not the case now. It may very well be that the independence of the Viceroys is an evil tradition instead of a good, and that Sir Nicholas O'Conor, in compelling the Emperor to make a public eihibition of his reserved power, has done him and China a remarkable and permanent service. Of course, if the Viceroy of Sze-chuen resisted successfully, this would not be the case ; but he can only resist with the consent of the Viceroy of Nankin, who is, we believe, in some official sense his superior, and who, at all events, can block his waterway ; and there, lying opposite Nankin, sweltering in heat that must be awful, lies a British fleet which in an hour could lay the old capital in ashes. We think Lord Salisbury has acted wisely.
Previous page
