THE KiGOSIMA DEBATE. T HE debate on the burning of Kagosima
was, on the whole, a creditable one, and its effect will, we believe, be per- manently beneficial. The division, it is true, showed a large majority for the Government, but many causes contributed to thin the ranks of the advocates of humanity. Every such vote is a vote of confidence, and there were dozens within the House who, while regarding the bombardment as a disaster, were not prepared to punish it by handing the coantry over to Earl Derby, or even to appeal on such a subject from the educated to the people. Then no vote or series of votes would in the least degree help to rebuild Kagosima, or com- pensate the relatives of the victims, or do away with the im- pression produced on the Japanese, and the reluctance of all average Englishmen to mourn over spilt milk, a reluctance which makes repentance to them the most difficult of Chris- tian virtues, is fully reflected in the Commons. Then, too, Mr. Buxton, the mover, though delivering a speech in which the facts were marshalled with most telling effect, proposed for some inexplicable reason to withdraw his motion, and the proposal thinned the House of all who would have voted on his side, but who were disinclined to sit out an avowedly sterile debate. Above all, the House of Commons is on one point deeply penetrated by an official tradition usually most just and sound. The members cannot bear not to support an agent who had at a great dis- tance dared to carry out orders from home, even in a vehement or too aggressive a spirit. They feel instinctively that under a free Government the temptation of every officer is to consult opinion rather than his orders, and that if stern orders are ever to be sent agents must be upheld, in spite of the consequences which flow from them. In this instance, orders giving Admiral Kuper an excuse were sent, the motion, though pointedly worded so as to avert censure from the Admiral, still did censure him, and the House was reluctant even to appear to strike at a man who had a colourable justification and obeyed orders under fire. That in the teeth of all these drawbacks eighty-five gentlemen should have voted that a British naval triumph was contrary to the usages of war, to the policy, and to the duty of the country is a fact most creditable to the national character.
It will, too, we believe, produce the most beneficial effect. Government triumphed in the division, but in the debate they were intellectually vanquished. They had, in fact, scarcely any- thing to say. They proved, indeed, that the double requisition upon Prince Satsuma, as well as the Tycoon, was justified by a Japanese sanction ; but it is the mode of the requisition, not the requisition itself, which the Liberals strive to condemn. They proved, too, that Mr. Richardson was murdered in defiance of treaty ; but no one has seriously blamed them for being a little too unscrupulous in their attempt to bring a murderer to justice. The point against them is not that, but the excessive and needless suffering inflicted on unoffending citizens who had not murdered Mr. Richardson, or screened the murderer, or defied the British, or done any one of the two or three hundred things for which Christians deem it right to kill people in masses. That is the single point which interests the country, and on that Government has exceedingly little to say. Mr. Layard made a great point of the obligation on Admiral Kuper to return an enemy's fire, which nobody has denied; but the fire did not justify the bombardment of the palace and city on the second day. That was done, if for any reason, in pursuance of Earl Russell's instructions, and for that the Government must be held directly responsible. The Foreign Secretary ordered the British Charge d'Affaires to shell the palace ; "but the Government had a very limited knowledge of the position of the town of Kagosima; they did not even know that there was a town there "—a defence which, in fact, asserts that Earl Russell issued orders for shelling a place in utter recklessness, without knowing or caring how many human beings his order might affect. Our own belief is that he did nothing of the kind ; that he had a strong idea of the place he ordered to be shelled, that he had compounded out of the words " Prince," " feudal," and " sea shore," an idea of an Oriental Ehrenbreitstein, and intended simply to shell that. He was not reckless, but only exceedingly ignorant ; but that is not Mr. Layard's defence. He seems to have telt that his theory about naval etiquette would not cover the pro- ceedings of the second day, for he immediately invented two audaciously clever arguments addressed to that point alone. He actually, with a hardihood which almost excites our admiration, made the catastrophe of the first day a moral excuse for the crime of the second. " Could they," he said, "have left the palace of the chief malefactor untouched after they had destroyed the dwellings of the poor? " Thousands of innocents having suffered, they must, as a moral measure, kill some thousands more lest a guilty one should escape. Even this, however, was scarcely hardier than an assertion made almost in the same breath that the destruction of innocent persons in Kagosima was very small, for doubtless the Japanese, like the people of Constantinople, were always expecting great fires and always ready to run away ! Why not say at once that he was sure that the Japanese liked the bombardment? it would have been just as true, and much less answerable. It is true that Orientals do in most cities expect fires, and that as they make no effort to put them out they can, under ordinary circum- stances, escape pretty easily ; but that is when the fire begins in one spot and leaps along the wind. In Kagosima fires must have broken out after every shell, i. e., in fifty places at once, and in dozens of blocks the only mode of escape must have been through the smoke and flame. If Mr. Layard imagines that the thirty thousand young children whom the city must have contained, and the 90,000 women, accomplished that exit in safety, his mind must have a sanguine bent which disquali- fies him for opinion. Does he, perchance, believe that an Asiatic epidermis will not burn, or Asiatic flesh give to the impact of broken shell ? His argument—not to mince mat- ters—was clever nonsense, and Sir Roundell Palmer's was very little better. All he could find to allege in defence of an act condemned by every principle he ever professed in his life was, " that the consequences of the firo on the second day were the result of the continuation of the conflagration on the first," a defence which needs only the evidence it has not got to obtain some trifling force. As it is, it is only equalled by the idea of Lord Palmerston, who first proved that civilized nations sometimes bombarded towns in time of war, then stated that " he did not defend such Ws," and then deduced from those two statements that the bombard- ment of Kagosima during peace was defensible.
The intellectual defeat of the Government is patent, and officers are almost as sensitive to opinion as to votes. Earl Russell, and Colonel Neale, and Admiral Kuper, who were all to blame, have all been officially exonerated, but all have received a lesson. The Foreign Secretary has acknowledged his by writing a despatch specially warning our representa- tives in Japan against taking innocent lives. Colonel Neale, though rewarded for his negotiations, will feel that his order was not approved ; and Admiral Kuper will scarcely again threaten even barbarians with " the destruction of their town " before they have performed, or threatened to perform, any act of hostility. Those new orders and that novel mode- ration will be of themselves a gain ; but the true advantage of the debate is this, that it will teach agents whom the depart- ments can but partially control that even victory will not save their acts from searching Parliamentary scrutiny, that they can be tried even when their acts are officially approved before the only tribunal whose verdict lives—the body of just men who prefer mercy, and justice, and humanity before success.
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