in the fleet. To treat slaves, if such there were, as voluntary pirates, was a great aggravation of wrong.

There was another reason, more distinct and stringent, for humane circumspection and reserve in the darkness of that dreadful night. It is not questioned, it is in truth the main foundation of the defence, that this great assemblage of one hundred or one hundred and twenty boats had gone out on a piratical expedition. Of all such expeditions the capture of slaves was a principal object, and these slaves were commonly women and young persons. That there were women and girls on board these canoes is placed beyond doubt: for on the shore, after the action, Mr. St. John himself saw exposed the mutilated body of a girl, and saw also the coverings which had been cast over three groups of the corpses of captives. It seems therefore a moral certainty that there were on board the seventeen prahus a greater or less number of these innocent sufferers; and it adds to the pain, which the proceedings can hardly fail to give, when we think of it as a certain or even as a likely fact that among those who bled, gasped, and sank under the fire of the Nemesis, or under the crushing blows of her paddlewheels in the water, were some of those whose safety and rescue ought to have been a main object of the whole proceeding; and whom it was surely an unpardonable error to include in any work of slaughter that was to depend for its excuse, not on self-defence or danger, but on the idea of impressing wholesome dread by an exemplary punishment. When Mr. Vigors felt within him the risings of humane emotion: when "he would have pitied them, but they were pirates, and the thought steeled his heart;" it did not occur to him, that some among the victims of the Nemesis were probably also the victims of those whom she was meant to destroy; and, in the wild and terrible confusion of this nocturnal tragedy, the eye of course could draw no effectual distinction.

Upon the whole we have before us, as I think, a painfully and sadly instructive review. A startling account of devastation, dealt out wholesale upon a predatory expedition of Dyak tribes, reaches England. It is received by the dominant forces of opinion with a chorus of applause. Certain schools of men are, however, pained and grieved. Sir Robert Peel, in the last year of his life, is among those who peruse the account; and, as he wrote to a correspondent, he read it with great pain, hoped there would be inquiry, and reserved his final judgment." Mr. Hume makes his humane and honest, but without doubt ex parte statement, and demands inquiry. Already the old head-money Act, under which £20,700 had been awarded for the proceedings, had been promptly and significantly repealed. The inquiry asked more than once

* Hansard, cxviii. p. 450.

was refused by enormous majorities, in a peremptory manner, and with a tone that may even be called jubilant. Nevertheless, a small still voice was audible from the nation's heart; and, despite the vast majorities, after the lapse of another year or two, an inquiry is ordered. Of the two Commissioners, both affirm the piratical character of the tribes assailed. But one of them explicitly deplores, and deplores in the sense of warning, the great destruction of human life. The other, in withholding a similar judgment, withholds it on the grounds only that we are not called on to sympathize with a race of indiscriminate murderers, and that the question whether the amount of punishment was undue was one not within his province. Partly, then, aided by public authority, partly on the view of the facts which I have given from the statements of friendly witnesses, I must adhere, on examination, to the statement which I made from memory; that this, within the limits I have described, was a case of large, easy, and unsparing slaughter, without resistance, or after resistance had altogether ceased.

I will not ask what would have been said in England had the Yomud Turkomans, instead of killing, plundering, and kidnapping ashore, done it on the Caspian or the Sea of Ural, and had a Schuyler or a Burnaby been able to show that the work of the Nemesis had been done by some Russian flotilla.

There remains, however, a point to which I think too little attention was given at the time; namely, the aspect of the proceedings in relation to English law.

It was not a case of war undertaken by this country against any Power, great or small, civilized or barbarous. It was not a case of necessity suddenly arising, without a regular route of war, for self-defence-that is, for the defence of British subjects, their property, liberty, or honour-in whatever portion of the world. It was a case in which a British subject, who was a civil servant of the Crown, and who had also acquired an anomalous dominion in a portion of a barbarous country, determined, in concert with a portion of Her Majesty's naval force, to employ his subjects, and certain barbarous allies, to punish, by an attack with an overwhelming superiority of means, two neighbouring tribes, believed and since adjudged to be piratical, on their return from an expedition which they had undertaken four thousand strong. Now it is important to recollect that our relations with pirates are regulated by law, as much as our relations with other human beings. Piracy itself, horrible as it is, does not, in certain states of manners and society, imply a profound moral depravity, though it is justly treated as a crime; and as a very high crime indeed, when carried on by those who are or ought to be civilized beings. The moral code does not prescribe its being dealt with by

wholesale slaughter: or, which was the process in this case, by wholesale slaughter of a part, and by suffering the larger part, equally criminal, to escape.

The law was invoked on the occasion; a large sum was obtained for that night's work, of which no less than £2,700 went to the officer in command. We must then turn to the law itself. It was, in the first place, the statute 6 Geo. IV. c. 49. Any one referring to that Act will find that it speaks of "the port or place into which the piratical ship, vessel, or boat shall be taken to be proceeded against, or, in case of the destruction of the vessel, the place into which the piratical persons seized shall be carried." And, with this process in view, it provides for the payment of the bounty, or head-money, upon numbers duly proved.

It seems to me quite plain that the Act contemplates the use of force up to the strictest point of necessity, and, beyond this, the judicial handling of the matter. But here, nothing was provided on which to operate. No ships or boats, for they were destroyed; no prisoners, for none were taken in the great slaughter, few, apparently, in the entire operation; and those few, says Mr. Vigors, "were released, with instructions to inform their respective tribes that Rajah Brooke would protect them if they would behave themselves properly." In fact, the whole operation was conducted as an operation of war; nor was there the slightest semblance of regard had to a legal or judicial proceeding, nor any attempt whatever made to secure the persons of the pirates when they were struggling for their lives in the sea, and entirely past the power of resistance. It purported to be a transaction carried on under British law, and bounty was obtained accordingly; but, in the mode of carrying it on, the law appears to have been in no respect regarded. And, from the immediate alteration of the law which followed, I cannot avoid presuming that it was felt quite necessary to prevent the recurrence of such a proceeding.

There is another Act which gives additional point to the argu

ment.

In the year 1837 (1 Vict. c. 88) it was enacted that piracy should only constitute a capital offence in the case of those individuals who, when engaged in the piratical act, should attempt to murder any person on board the vessel assailed, or unlawfully do any act which might endanger the life of any such. In other cases, all other acts of piracy theretofore punishable with death, were to be thereafter transportable offences only. I have already shown that the operation was one which should have been subject to the restraints of British law. Now it is (as I learn from Mr. St. John) only alleged that this fleet of four thousand Dyaks had attacked one vessel, or two. It is therefore morally certain that only an extremely small proportion of the Dyaks in that fleet

could have been concerned in piratical assault, endangering life on board vessels piratically attacked. It therefore follows that the great bulk, if not the whole of those who were destroyed by the Nemesis without resistance, were also destroyed without having committed any capital offence. And it has not appeared that a man on board of her was injured, or that a shot was fired, or even that a hand was lifted against her.

In sum. The Acts contemplate possible limited slaughter with a view to mastery, and for the purpose of capture the slaughter, by the Nemesis at least, was wide and indiscriminate, and without any thought of capture. The Acts contemplate a number of prisoners the prisoners were insignificant in number, and the few who were taken seem to have been taken by the Dyak allies. The Acts contemplate the regular trial of the pirates after imprisonment not a prisoner was tried, and the majority of the pirates, not less guilty than the slaughtered minority, were allowed to go scot free. The Acts exempt from the penalty of death all except pirates resisting capture, and pirates who have themselves taken or endangered life: the operation gave no heed to resistance, and destroyed or spared alike those who had endangered life and those who had not. The law was invoked with a view to head-money: in all other particulars its provisions and its aims seem never to have occurred to those concerned in the operation. Thus, it hardly seems too much to say that, if as te one great portion of it, the operation was needlessly harsh and bloody, it was also, from another point of view, a lawless operation.

Not

But then finally, after all this vigour, are there no "allowances to be made for the men engaged in this remarkable operation? Yes; many allowances. Not only because our law of headmoney was then as if it had been devised insidiously to lead them on, and draw them beyond the bounds of caution. only because all engaged may have shared the belief that this was the way to pacify the country; not only because, according to their allegation, it had that effect. There are other grounds of excuse, which in my view are more relevant and stronger. The commanders of our naval force, dispersed over all the seas, are called upon at a moment's notice to decide, without training and without assessors, questions that would puzzle many a jurist; and it is only marvellous, and highly to their praise, that they so seldom fall into practical injustice or serious legal error. Then again, in this instance, there were three centres of action in theory, and four in practice: Sir James Brooke and his subjects at the mouth of the Kaluka, with the man-of-war's boats; his allies in their prahus at the mouth of the Serebus; a force of Dyaks, seemingly a wild one, on shore; and the Nemesis

waiting outside on her own account. The darkness and confusion of the night, the panic which the very name of pirate carries, the vague idea of punishing wickedness, which, bewildering the mind, has so often led mankind to punish crime by crime, and wrong by wrong;-all this, and probably much more, is to be taken into account if we are presuming to set down the heads of a final judgment on the moral character of these proceedings. But I had and have no such object. My object has only been to exhibit, as fairly and fully as I could, what manner of acts they were, examined in themselves and not in the motives of the agents, which received at the hands of a British Parliament of our own day a repeated and triumphant acquittal; and to do this, not for the purpose of an ill-natured and splenetic exposure, but as a weighty memento to care, caution, and even a measure of forbearance in the judgments which from time to time we may have to pass upon the deeds of others.

W. E. GLADSTONE.