Mr. Charles Buxton wrote an admirable letter to Wednesday's Times
on Admiral Kuper's destruction of Kagosima. Quoting carefully from the Admiral's despatches, and the calm approval expressed by the Chargé d'Affaires on the spot for all the Admiral had done, he enumerates with great'force the points which aggra- vate the horror of that extraordinary bombardment. We have been ever since the Congress of Paris endeavouring to mitigate the operations of war on private property,—here we destroyed wilfully not only masses of private property, but numbers of innocent lives, committing an outrage many degrees worse than would have been that bombardment of Odessa from which we rightly shrank in the Crimean war. The Japanese did not seek our commerce—" they abjured it "—but we forced it upon them. Hundreds of thousands in Kagosima were not parties to the murder of Mr. Richardson, and not responsible for it. Mr. Buxton justly remarks that they were no more responsible for the murder of Mr. Richard- son than the people of Birmingham. And, no doubt, the bombardment of Birmingham would have had just as much effect in preventing the repetition of the murder of English subjects by the Japanese,—probably much less effect in promoting it.
Previous page
