recommended by medical men to their patients as a means of maintaining health. But the legal privilege preserved by the Divorce Act is enjoyed by the dominant sex to this day. The Act had other faults, the chief of which was that the procedure under it was so expensive that it was almost useless for the {221} poor. But it was at least an advance towards liberty.[275] One other measure of a Liberal sort has already been mentioned. In 1860 the Lords rejected the Bill for the repeal of the duty on paper. In 1861 it was forced through, the price of paper was reduced, and the cheap newspaper and the cheap book, with their enormous influence upon the habits of the mass of the people, were made possible. This was the work of Gladstone alone, and he and Cobden together contrived the great French Commercial Treaty which completed the reform of the tariff, and left the country with no import duties except those which were imposed on goods not produced in England, and those which a countervailing excise robbed of all protective character. With these exceptions, the important events of the Palmerston period took place abroad, where the Prime Minister's foreign policy pursued its pretentious course. It presented its usual alternation of generous but risky interference on behalf of oppressed nationalities with arrogant assertions of the British ego. A war with China in 1856 exhibited it at its very worst. A ship called the _Arrow_ had obtained a licence from our representative to fly the British flag in the China seas. Like others which enjoyed the same privilege, the _Arrow_ seems to have used it for very dubious purposes. After the period for which the licence was granted had expired the Chinese Governor Yeh of Canton boarded the ship and arrested some of its crew on a charge of piracy. Though his conduct at a later stage was more violent, it seems clear that at the beginning of the quarrel he acted with dignity, and strictly within the law. But Sir John Bowring, the British Minister on the spot, chose to treat his action as a wanton and unprovoked insult to the British flag. He demanded the surrender of the prisoners and an apology, and when Yeh did what Bowring himself would have done if their positions had been reversed, and refused to give way, he proceeded to employ all the ships and troops at his disposal in warlike operations. It was the {222} affair of Don Pacifico over again, with an even less specious excuse. In this case there was no legal justification even for diplomatic remonstrance.