But the attack, damaging as it was, failed to upset the Ministry; though the House, in 1858, at Mr. Gladstone’s suggestion, forced the Government to accept a clause in the India Bill which disallowed such pretensions on the part of the Crown.[303] But at the beginning of the Session of 1857 it was not Persia but China that really engrossed the attention of the country. A dispute between Sir John Bowring, Governor of Hong Kong, and the Chinese authorities at Canton, raised an issue which made it easy for the Peelites to unite with the Tories, and the Cobdenites with both. [Illustration: SIR JOHN BOWRING.] The Chinese War of 1857 occupies an unique place in the events of the Victorian epoch, because it was a war which was provoked by a member of the Peace Society. In October, 1856, the Chinese authorities arrested twelve Chinamen on board a native lorcha called the _Arrow_, on a charge of piracy. The British Consul, asserting that the _Arrow_ was a British ship, contended very properly that the accused should have been demanded from him. Nine of the Chinamen were released. Sir John Bowring thereupon insisted on the release of the other three, and an apology within forty-eight hours, on pain of immediate reprisals. The three men were released; but the Chinese Governor courteously refused to apologise, because, he said, as the _Arrow_ was _not_ a British ship, no wrong had been done to the British flag. This was literally true, for Sir J. Bowring, as everybody now admits, was utterly mistaken as to the nationality of the lorcha. The courtesy of the Chinese in surrendering the prisoners in deference to an illegal demand, which Bowring had couched in terms of offensive arrogance, was rewarded next day by the bombardment of the luckless commercial city of Canton--a barbarous act which could be justified by the laws neither of God nor of man. In fact, “a prancing pro-Consul,” to use a famous phrase of Sir William Harcourt’s, had virtually usurped the prerogative of the Crown, and levied war on a foreign Government on his own responsibility. Instead of recalling Bowring and the British Consul, Lord Palmerston, without giving the matter much thought, identified himself with their proceedings, though many Members of his Cabinet, notably Lord Granville and Mr. Labouchere, who afterwards were forced to defend Bowring in Parliament, personally disapproved of his conduct.[304] But Ministers virtually abandoned the case of the _Arrow_ when the controversy grew hot. “As usual,” writes Mr. Morley, “they shifted the ground from the particular to the general; 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; Orientals mistake justice for fear; and so on through the string of well-worn sophisms, which are always pursued in connection with such affairs.”[305] The real truth, as the Tory leaders said in the debates