Читать книгу Japan and the Pacific, and a Japanese View of the Eastern Question онлайн

8 страница из 34

Mr. Gladstone, it certainly seems to me, only viewed the matter from a moral point of view. If we look at it in this light, then the British occupation of Port Hamilton was a still more striking example of English “loose law and loose notion of morality in regard to Eastern nations.”

Palmerston was defeated in the House by sixteen votes, but was returned at the general election by a large majority backed by the aggressive feelings of the English nation.

He contended that “if the Chinese were right about the Arrow, they were wrong about something else; if legality did not exactly justify violence, it was at any rate required by policy.”^[2] He described this policy in the following way—“To maintain the rights, to defend the lives and properties of British subjects, to improve our relations with China, and in the selection and arrangement of those objects to perform the duty which we owed to the country.”

This is easy to understand, and showed at any rate a disposition, in fact a wish, for the Anglo-Chinese alliance.