COLONEL DUNNEsaid, he rose to call attention to the case of Mr. Anstey, late Attorney General at Hong-Kong, and to ask what reparation has been made to him for the injustice acknowledged to have been done him by the authorities in that colony. Mr. Anstey was formerly a Member of that House, and was respected by every one for his fearlessness in debate and honesty of purpose. He was celebrated for a speech which he made inculpating the noble Lord at the head of the Government. The noble Lord on that occasion delivered a speech of four hours' duration, which produced a greater effect and sensation than any speech which he recollected to have been delivered within the walls of Parliament. There was nothing in the speech of Mr. Anstey to excite the personal dislike of the noble Lord, and accordingly the noble Lord, some time after, sent Mr. Anstey to China as one of the high legal authorities of Hong-kong. Soon after his arrival, Mr. Anstey perceived, as he thought, the members of the Government at Hong-Kong in many instances corrupt, and he brought charges of a very serious character against them. From the authorities at Hong-kong Mr. Anstey received no support; a quarrel was the consequence; Mr. Anstey pressed his charges with still greater vehemence, and the result was that Mr. Anstey was dismissed from office, Mr. Anstey still pressed his charges against the chief officials, including the Governor, and 994 the Secretary to the Governor, but especially against Mr. Caldwell. When the Earl of Derby came into office, an inquiry was ordered, not only into Mr. Caldwell's conduct, but also into that of the other officers implicated; but the Duke of Newcastle soon afterwards succeeding to the Colonial Office, Sir Hercules Robinson succeeded Sir John Bowring as Governor of Hong-Kong, and was sent out with orders to inquire into the conduct of Mr. Caldwell alone. The inquiry was a very protracted one; it lasted from August to the beginning of the following year, and the result was that the charges which Mr. Anstey brought were proved to be established. Those charges were, that Mr. Caldwell was in league with pirates in those seas, and that he exerted his influence over the Government at Hong-Kong to induce them not only to connive at the pirates, but actually to assist the pirates with the Government vessels. The circumstances of the whole case were altogether so suspicious as to make any man who voted against the Government on the occasion of the lorcha Arrow affair congratulate himself on that vote. The fact was, as was proved by the papers which had been laid on the table, there were at that time in the seas about Hong Kong two classes of pirates, who might be called Government pirates, and Opposition pirates; and Mr. Anstey attacked, with perhaps more warmth than discretion, those officials whom he believed to have been guilty of abetting the Government pirates. The Duke of Newcastle, however, threw a shield over all that were accused except Mr. Caldwell, and therefore it would be impossible to say whether they were guilty; but there seemed to be grounds for suspicion enough to fix a stigma upon the Duke of Newcastle for not having inquired into the whole affair. He (Colonel Dunne) invited an examination of the papers, which would be found to bear him out in what he stated. He was not surprised that the Government had removed Mr. Anstey from office for having made accusations apparently so monstrous and so unlikely to be proved; but when they were proved, surely the Government were hound to make him some reparation for what he had suffered. Mr. Anstey applied to the noble Duke, and any Englishman would have supposed that his Grace could not have hesitated to make some amende for the injustice he had suffered. But he actually refused, on the ground of expense, to publish a large part of the evidence which had been 995 brought before the court of inquiry. At last Mr. Anstey forced from the Colonial Office an ackowledgment that he had been right. He (Colonel Dunne) was not aware that that ackowledgment had ever been included among any papers published by authority, but it bad been printed. The letter was genuine, and every Englishman who saw it would be astonished that such a letter had been written. The Duke of Newcastle stated, through the hon. Gentleman the Under Secretary for the Colonies (Mr. Chichester Fortescue), that there were other grounds upon which he founded his dismissal besides the fact that Mr. Anstey had made the accusations, and then the letter proceeded thus—
Having made these observations, I am directed to inform you that the Duke of Newcastle is perfectly ready to express his opinion that the proof of the charges of which you were the principal author, brought against Mr. Caldwell before the Commission of Inquiry of 1858, has been substantially established by the recent investigation before the Exchequer Court, as far as the culpability of his connection with Mu Chow Yong is concerned. Consequently, it cannot be said, in the words of Sir J. Bowring, that none of these charges had been subtantially proved. His Grace will go further, and say that in forcing a public inquiry into that officer's conduct, you did in that respect render a material service to Her Majesty's Government at Hong-Kong.He knew that it was said Mr. Anstey made a bargain, that if he were allowed to clear his character, he would not ask for more, but it was disgraceful to Government on that account to exclude Mr. Anstey from office. Of all men the Duke of Newcastle ought to be aware that faults committed in office were not held afterwards to constitute a reason for exclusion from office. The noble Duke must know that the people of this country were very forgiving, and that a man of tried and proved incapacity in one Administration could yet be a Minister in another Administration. Therefore, he thought that the noble Duke ought to have taken a more Christian and considerate view of the errors, if errors there were, of Mr. Anstey. Whether there were other faults committed by Mr. Anstey as Attorney General of Hong-Kong he knew not, but in respect to the charges which Mr. Anstey brought forward the Government stood convicted of having done him injustice; and it was neither generous nor fair to have acted towards that gentleman as they had done. The conduct pursued was so unlike anything he had ever known to proceed from the noble Lord at the head of the Government that he was perfectly 996 certain the noble Lord was no party to it. No man stuck more by his subordinates than the noble Lord, and that, he believed, was one of the causes of the popularity which placed and kept the noble Lord on the Treasury bench.
§ MR. CHICHESTER FORTESCUEsaid, that the question of the case of Mr. Anstey and the Colonial Office had been for five months past in the hands of two hon. Members of that House, sitting on opposite sides, whose opinions were deserving of the greatest weight—he alluded to the hon. and learned Member for East Suffolk and the hon. Member for Birmingham. During the last two months they had both been in communication with the Colonial Office, and were both perfectly satisfied with the treatment which Mr. Anstey had received from the noble Duke at the head of that office. When the hon. and gallant Gentleman attacked the noble Duke the present Colonial Secretary, he aimed his fire in the wrong direction, for the gallant Gentleman ought to have attacked the Colonial representative of the late Government. Mr. Anstey was dismissed from office by the right hon. Member for Hertfordshire (Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton) He (Mr. C. Fortescue) thought that the right hon. Gentleman was quite right in what he did, but the only charge that could be brought against the Duke of Newcastle was that he had not thought right to overrule the dicision of his predecessor. The statement made by the hon. and gallant Member of the causes which led the late Colonial Secretary to dismiss Mr. Anstey from office had been a very defective and fallacious one, and all who read the reasons given, in his despatch, by the Governor of Hong-Kong, for dismissing, with the unanimous advice of the Executive Council, Mr. Anstey from office, would find that those reasons extended far beyond the single issue raised by the hon. and gallant Gentleman. The fact was that Mr. Anstey, from the moment when he arrived at Hong-Kong, manifested, in spite of his great and undoubted ability, such a want of temper, discretion, and judgment in many respects as confidential adviser of the Governor, that it was more than once a question whether it would be possible to retain him in office. In one case in particular it was with great difficulty that Lord Taunton, then Mr. Labouchere, had been able to feel it his duty to retain Mr. Anstey in office; and the circumstance to which the hon. and gallant Member had alluded, so 997 far from being the original cause of Mr. Anstey's suspension and dismissal from office, was but the last drop of water in the bucket. The hon. and gallant Gentleman put the issue entirely on the question whether another official in Hong-Kong, against whom Mr. Anstey brought a list of charges, was or was not a fit person to remain in office in Hong-Kong; but that was not the issue on which Mr. Anstey's dismissal took place. No doubt, Mr. Anstey brought a long string of accusations against another official in the colony, some of which were disproved, and others were proved; but the real ground of Mr. Anstey's dismissal was not whether all those charges were true or false, but whether as Attorney General of Hong-Kong and legal adviser of the Government Mr. Anstey had not brought forward those charges in such a way, and treated his superior, the Governor, in such a manner as to warrant the Government in not continuing him in a confidential position in the Colony. From the evidence contained in the blue-book, it appeared that Mr. Anstey had shown a violence and virulence of temper, and an excess of personal animosity and want of respect towards the Governor, which, irrespective of the truth or falsehood of the charges brought against the official in Hong-Kong, caused the then Colonial Secretary to come to the conclusion that Mr. Anstey, in spite of his remarkable ability, was not a safe person to be continued in the responsible post of Attorney General and legal adviser of the Governor. With regard to the official against whom charges were brought, a rigorous investigation into his conduct was ordered. One of the first acts of his noble Friend was to direct the Governor of Hong-Kong (Sir Hercules Robinson) to institute a thorough and searching inquiry into the conduct of Mr. Caldwell, who was then what was called Protector of the Chinese, and against whom charges had been brought by Mr. Anstey. That investigation took place. It lasted some time, and was conducted with great care. The result was that Mr. Caldwell was pronounced to be an unfit person to be retained in the service of Her Majesty, but in the most cautious terms, and without endorsing one-half of the charges against him by Mr. Anstey. That cause, however, had really nothing to do with the question of Mr. Anstey's fitness for a high official position. His noble Friend instructed the Governor to dismiss Mr. Caldwell, which was done ac- 998 cordingly. Shortly afterwards Mr. Anstey applied to his Grace to be reinstated in his office, proceeding on the assumption that he judgment against Mr. Caldwell amounted to a decision in his own favour, and that because the former was deemed unfit to be Protector of the Chinese, it followed that he, Mr. Anstey, was fit to fill the office of Attorney General at Hong-Kong. The noble Duke, in reply, very naturally point-id out that there was no connection between the two things, and stated also that the grounds upon which Mr. Anstey lad been suspended went far beyond the question immediately at issue, the case, lamely, of Mr. Caldwell, and that there lad been an accumulation of reasons showing that he was not qualified to act as the confidential legal adviser of the Governor. His noble Friend therefore refused the application. Some time afterwards Mr. Anstey addressed another letter, in a very different tone, to the Duke, stating that he no longer pressed for reinstatement or compensation; but that as he had entered on a new career at the Indian bar, he hoped his Grace would furnish him with some expression of opinion as to his conduct at Hong-Kong, which would relieve him from any undeserved slur that might have been cast upon him to the injury of his professional prospects. His noble Friend gave the most careful and generous consideration to that application; and although he had made up his mind that it was not his duty to reverse the decision of his predecessor in regard to Mr. Anstey, he was anxious at the same time to say as much as he could, consistently with his own convictions, to establish that gentleman's character. It was with that view that the letter of his noble Friend to Mr. Anstey was written, and he was sorry to find that it had been turned against the writer, and construed into a confession of error, and a ground for claiming further compensation for the gentleman in question. That letter was gratefully received by Mr. Anstey, who, in acknowledging it, expressed his satisfaction with its contents, and certainly gave the Government no reason to suspect that either he or any friend on his behalf intended to base on it a complaint of ill-treatment and a demand for compensation. He was personally acquainted with Mr. Anstey, and entertained a high opinion of his remarkable ability and original mind; but he must express his conviction that full credit had been given to him for the truth of his principal charge 999 against Mr. Caldwell, and for the public service which he performed in making that exposure, but that his violent temper and want of discretion warranted the former Secretary of State in suspending him, and his noble Friend in confirming the decision of his predecessor.