to an end (November 14), that Lord Palmerston was therefore out of office and the Duke of Wellington at the helm of affairs.
But the worst feature of this whole melancholy spectacle is the stolid apathy with which the English public received the news of the failure of Lord Napier's mission and the heartless cruelty with which the Duke of Wellington condemned Lord Napier's conduct. The silent acquiescence of the British public in the expulsion from Canton, in so degrading a manner, of the principal officer of their King and their country, lowered British reputation in the eyes of the Chinese and contributed to encourage them to venture upon future outrages. As to the Duke, he never had much respect for Lord Palmerston's or anybody's statecraft. With a belief in his own shrewd intuition of the right thing to be done at any critical moment, he combined a somewhat brusque manner of criticising supposed diplomatic blunderers. He looked upon this whole scheme of the fallen Whig leaders as a bungle from the beginning to the end and judged it, exactly as he judged the Cabul disasters eight years later, as a case of 'giving undue power to political agents.' The series of insults heaped upon Lord Napier, while alive, by the Chinese Authorities, was kindness compared with the cruel injustice with which the Duke of Wellington censured Lord Napier when dead. The man whose 'puissant arm could bind the tyrant of a world' proved childishly impotent in his encounter with Chinese mandarindom. The hero who, 'conquering Fate, enfranchised Europe,' entirely missed his opportunity of becoming also the liberator of European trade in Asia. The noble Duke entirely forgot himself when he gave it as his opinion (March 24, 1835) that Lord Napier had brought about the failure of his mission by assuming high-sounding titles, by going to Canton without permission, and by attempting an unusual mode of communication. Understanding that British trade in China was flourishing again, in spite of the defeat Lord Napier had sustained at Canton, the Duke recommended to keep the enjoyment of what we have got and to repress the ardour of British traders.
