Chapter 10

Summary of Public Events, 1856-93--Civil War in America--Extension of the Franchise--Disestablishment of Irish Church-Education Act of 1870--Wars in China and Abyssinia--Purchase of Suez Canal Shares--Wars in Afghanistan, Zululand, and Egypt--Home Rule Bill--Growth of the Empire and National Progress.

We now continue our summary of public affairs. The Crimean War had been finished, and the mutiny had broken out, whilst Lord Palmerston was prime-minister. In 1858 he was obliged to resign his post; but he returned to office next year, and this he held till his death in 1865. Under him there was quiet both in home and in foreign affairs, and we managed to keep from being mixed up with the great wars which raged abroad.

Seldom has a premier been better liked than Lord Palmerston. Nominally a Whig, but at heart an old-fashioned Tory, he was first and foremost an Englishman, ever jealous for Britain's credit and security. He was not gifted with burning eloquence or biting sarcasm; but his vigour, straightforwardness, good sense, and kindliness endeared him even to his adversaries. Honestly indifferent to domestic reform, but a finished master of foreign politics, he was of all men the man to guide the nation through the ten coming years, which at home were a season of calm and reaction, but troubled and threatening abroad.

Besides the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, we had another war with China, as unjust as the opium war of sixteen years before, and quite as successful. In 1856, the Canton authorities seized the crew of a Chinese pirate which carried a British flag. Under strong pressure from British officials, Commissioner Yeh surrendered the crew, but refused all apology, whereupon Canton was bombarded. A twelvemonth later, it was stormed by the British and French allied forces; Yeh was captured, and sent off to die at Calcutta; and in June 1858 a treaty was signed, throwing open all China to British subjects. In a third war (1859-60), to enforce the terms of that treaty, Pekin surrendered, and its vast Summer Palace was sacked and destroyed.

In January 1858, an attempt on the life of the Emperor Napoleon was made by Orsini, an Italian refugee, who had hatched his plot and procured his bomb-shells in England. Lord Palmerston therefore introduced a bill, removing conspiracy to murder from the class of misdemeanour to that of felony. The defeat of that bill, as a truckling to France, brought in the second Derby administration, which lasted sixteen months, and in which a professed Jew was first admitted to parliament, in the person of Baron Rothschild. Another Jew, by race but not by creed, Mr Disraeli, was at the time the leader of the House of Commons. His new Reform Bill satisfied nobody; its rejection was followed by a dissolution; and Lord Palmerston returned to office, June 1859.

Sardinia had aided France against Russia, and France was now aiding Sardinia to expel the Austrians from