in both Houses of Parliament, was that Bowring’s vanity had been hurt because the Chinese had refused to receive him in Canton. When he sent Admiral Sir M. Seymour to bombard the port he tacked on to his original ultimatum a demand that foreigners should be freely admitted to the city, on the ground that this privilege, though ceded by the Treaty of 1846, had never been granted. Admitting that his interpretation of this disputed point in the Treaty was correct, neither he nor Lord Palmerston had any right to force that interpretation on China by war. Their duty was to have acted in concert with the Governments of France and the United States, who were equally interested in the question, and in this way to exhaust the resources of diplomacy, before appealing to the arbitrament of the sword. Every Member of both Houses of Parliament who was not an infatuated partisan of Lord Palmerston’s took this view of the case; and when Mr. Cobden, on the 26th of February, brought forward a motion condemning the policy of the Government, he carried it, after a debate which lasted many nights, by a majority of sixteen.[306] In the House of Lords the Government repelled the attack, on the 27th of February, by a majority of thirty-six; and had the division been taken on the same night in the Commons, the majority, after Cobden’s and Russell’s speeches, would have been so enormous that Palmerston would hardly have dared to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament. But he adroitly delayed matters, held a meeting of his Party, harangued them, and threatened them with a dissolution, and so, by the 4th of March, when the division was taken, the majority against him dwindled to sixteen. On the 5th of March, Ministers announced that Parliament would be dissolved and the sense of the country taken on the issue. The antipathy of the Queen to “penal dissolutions,” indeed, to any dissolution of Parliament, if it can be avoided, was overcome by Lord Palmerston representing that the majority against him was exceedingly small--that it was made up of a coalition of factions, whose leaders, agreeing only on one point, could not possibly form a stable Government. On the other hand, from a General Election a Government of some kind would be evolved with a solid working majority, an advantage of supreme importance in the eyes of the Sovereign.