The Press. — London, England, 1858-11-06 00:00:00

1078 THE PRESS, NOVEMBER 6, 1858. THE FUTURE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA. TO THE EDITOR OP " THE PRESS." Calcutta, Sept. 22. Sir,—The British nation have in their wisdom thought fit to transfer the government of India from the East India Company to the Crown. It is most sincerely to be hoped that they have deliberately considered the arduous task they have undertaken, and have sufficiently weighed the sacred responsi bility which it has devolved upon them. They are perhaps not well aware that there is scarcely auy such body as a public in India, and to expect any help in the good government of their country from the ignorant and oppressed natives is of course out of the question, at least for the present. The Indian press, too, know as much of the real wants of India as the Man in the Moon. With one or two exceptions they represent the interests of the handful of Europeans. I do not know that they have ever done any good by their advocacy ; but the vitnperadves and scurrilities in which they have lately been indulging to their heart's content have shown them up in their true colours, and will, I trust, prevent them from doing more mischief in future. The East India Company was, therefore, the only, but the most effectual, check on the ambition of a party, though comparatively insignifi cant in number, but who is nevertheless growing too strong even for the Government. Without the East India Company India would have long before now been reduced by the " adventurers " to the c mdition of the slave states. This check being removed by the decree of Parliament, it is imperative on its members to see that the natives of India may not have any reasonable cause to regret the transfer-- specially, as I have said above, they are quite inca pablom their present condition of helping themselves. Like blind men, they should be looked after by a paternal Government. The first duty that England owes to India is to educate its people. Nu expense should be spared for this all-important object ; but none should be thrown away, as it is now done. The man who directs the public instruction should—even for the sake of decency—be a learned man himself, and not necessarily a civil servant. The next subject to which Parliament should pay its most serious attention is the Indian Law Courts, judicial, criminal, and fiscal. They may or may not be good enough for the natives; but they are certainly not very creditable to the great and enlightened nation which governs India. They are not simply useless, but " particularly mischievous," as the late Mr. Le Bas, Jude of Delhi, happily described them. It would require space to point out all their defects and mischievous tendencies, more than can be allotted to a newspaper correspondent; suffice it to say, what all unanimously agree to, that these courts should be thoroughly reformed, and with as little delay as may be practicable. And to begin with the beginning—the first act of her Majesty's Ministers towards the above reformation should oe to amalgamate her Majesty's and the late East India Company's Supreme Courts. What little confidence the Government of India has in its own established courts, may be gathered from this single fact, that Government has lately sent out instructions that all cases in which the interests of Government are involved should be determined by Eutopean julges. Why, in the name of common sense, I ask, then. the courts presided by native judges are any longer kept ; or does the Government seriously believe that private suitors are more power ful than Government, and are, therefore, better able to cope with corrupt native judges, or the still more Corrupt system ? Does this, or does this not, show, in the Government of the country, a most palpable and culpable disregard for the interests of the public ; and does this, or does this not, prove that in India justice is a mockery and delusion? The best way for conciliating the people of India is not by telling them simply that they are now the subjects of her Majesty the Queen. So long as they will remain in their present abject condition, it will be a matter of perfect indifference to them to know whose subjects they are. Let us, therefore, hope that the transfer of govern. ment will immediately be followed by a radical change in the administration of justice in India, as a preliminary to other and more extensive reforms. It was a fatal mistake in the charter of 1853 to place Bengal under a Lieutenant. Governor. The injury that this has done outweighs by far all the good that other provisions of the charter contem plated to do. The more India is divided into sepa rate provinces, and each province is placed under a separate Government, the worse for the country. It is wrong to suppose that this division of labour affords no small relief to the Governor• General. Unless the Governor-General is pleased to shut his eyes and ears against all appeals against the decisions of the Provincial Governments, his labour is in creased exactly in the same proportion as the number of his subordinate governors is increased. But more on this subject in my next.—Yours obediently, AN INDIAN. preigit vLarrrsgolOcace. PARIS, Thursday. IF your contemporaries do not want to create mis chief, they had better let the Portuguese affair drop. The French Government is much vexed at the exasperation which, it appears, is manifested in Lisbon about it, and at the unfriendly attitude which the London press has assumed respecting it; and any more harping on the subject may change vexation into anger and resentment. The manner in which the French Government has acted in the affair from beginning to end has afforded the highest satisfaction to the French people of all classes and all parties, and they are consequently very indignant at what they call the presumption of Portugal in making an ungracious reparation for what they consider a clear and indisputable wrong committed by her; still more indignant are they at the idea that the English press, unmindful of the alliance and of the many good turns which they consider France has done England, should, on a question in which their national dignity is concerned, have displayed hostility, not to the aggressor, but to them. It is possible that the French Government and people take a wrong view of the whols affair, and that our news• papers and Portugal take a right one ; but it would be as easy to drive back the Seine to its source as to convince them of that. If, then, our journals continue to assail them, we may certainly apprehend an explosion of wrath. Already is England spoken of with exceeding bitterness in private circles— bitterness greater, though less noisy, than that which was manifested about the Orsini affair; and if the Government were only to say a word, almost every newspaper in the land would eagerly give utterance to it. other hand, the Government could not s o i late the rules of ordinary j us ti ce as to allow a great personage to publish things infinitely more seditious than those for which many a poor journalist has en . dured and is enduring fine, imprisonment, exil e, beggary. The Emperor and Empress left on Monday to pay their long-talked-of visit to Compiegne. I have told you that no foreign royal personage is to visit theta during their stay there; but some eminent states. men, native and foreign, have been invited. In the foreign batch are Lord Cowley, our Ambassador; Count de Kisseleff, the Russian Minister; and, it is said, Lord Palmerston ; the name of Lord Malmes bury has also been mentioned, but I believe erro. neously. In the native batch are most of th e Cabi net Ministers, Count de Persigny, and the Duke de Malakoff. Two simple literary men are also to figure amongst the guests, M. Jules Sandeau and M. Octave Feuillet. Lord Normanby's " Year of Revolution," the trans. lation of which into French was announced to you some weeks ago, receives this morning a severe cas. ligation in the Journal die &bats ; it is called a mass of " platitudes," " wearisome," " nauseous," " of grotesque gravity," and the public are assured that it is a sad thing for England to have been repre. sented at Paris during the most dramatic and most serious period of the history of the century by such an amateur statesman as his noble lordship. The enemies of the Whig marquis have reason to rejoice that he has " written a book " on the Revolution, for it has caused throughout Paris the meanest possible opinion to be formed, both of his literary talent and his moral character. Mr. John Bright has all at once " fallen from his high estate" in the estimation of continentals. These people thought that he had to him the stuff of which statesmen are made; but his recent speeches prove that he is worthy to rank with the pitiable personages who were hoisted into favour by the Revolution of 18.13, and no higher. Had be tried expressly to talk himself down, he could not have succeeded more completely than he has done. Hencefortn, no one in continental latitudes will take him au serieuz. He will be regarded as a mere empty declaimer, as unpracical and visionary as the Luis Blanca and the Cabets. I happen to know several republicans, French and German—the latter exiles,—and they, as you will suppose, entertain convictions which seem exceedingly extravagant to a correspondent of Tie Passs ; and yet these meu are astounded that the honourahle Quaker shonll have been so devoid of political tact as to expound opinions which have no more chance of being accepted by the nation than Birnhain-wood has of going to Dunsinane, and which if accepted would, as has justly been remarked here, " make England no longer England." Much mistaken is Mr. Sidney Herbert in sup. posing that if the system of anonymous writing in journals were put down, he would get at the real names of the writers of the really imporsnr. articles. What takes place in the Paris press is a proof that the thing is not possible : in this country siding is by law obligatory under pain of imprisonmat and fine and suppression of the newspaper; and yet not a day passes in which articles do not appear bearing the signatures of men who notoriously do not and could not w:ite them. Io fact, the signing system is a perfect farce, and the Government is so well aware of this that it makes no serious attempt to compel correct signing ; it even allows its own semi•official organs to violate the law with impunity. I know something of the internal economy of more than one Paris newspaper, and could give proof positive of what I here assert. In Paris the signing of articles has made the public familiar with the names of some half dozen industrious gentlemen who with . paste, scissors, and pen, compile newspapers ; hut it left them almost as ignorant as ever they were about the men whose articles give life and vigour and political importance to the journal. And the same would be the case in England if signing were adopted there. Monday being All Saints' and Tuesday All Souls'te, days, the Parisians observed the first as a com p le the second as a partial holiday ; and, in accordance with ancient custom, thousands of them who have recently lost friends or relatives visited the cemetert:s to pray or weep over the tombs in which thel cv ones repose. To some English this usag e of visiting the graves of the dead on a given day is theatrical and displeasing ; but most of our countrymen, and in my poor opinion very properly, reg ard it as a solemn, pious, and affecting demonstrat ion. a . l A stranger in Paris noticed that the thousands and tens streets, and and of question, :were, most of them elegantly, a to rags turta y a , s attirede--sthat, anywhere. n fact, not The single n the thousands n n filled the the two c great hurc.ha,,h orn cys t i n e . this , proof that of late years the general well-being ot tear me, tends to establish the despotic Government suits the Fren ch better than a y n lo re tn persona 'rkthe proof I people has singularly increased ; and proof free one. painful fact that a I need hardly tell you that the melancholy killing of General de Salles by a maniac half brother, Colonel de Chanaleilles, of which you will find accounts in the newspapers, has caused a profound sensation in society. The general must be known personally to not a few of your readers from having commanded the French corps d'artneo on the left position in the siege of Sebastopol. He was, apart from his services in the Crimea, a distinguished soldier, and was, what only few French generals are, of noble birth and an accomplished scholar. The widow of the unhappy maniac also possesses a certain interest in English eyes from being the daughter of the famous Count de Las Cases, the companion and historian of Napoleon in his exile, and from having passed part of her youth in St. Helena. Some persons are representing that the slaying of the general, like the murder of the Duchess de Praslin, is one of those fearful events which precede a political commotion—the fleeting cloud in the clear sky which indic des the approach of the tempest; but surely the act of a raving lunatic ought not to be so interpreted. Still it is not a little strange that nowhere except in France do we hear of such things as a dunliess being killed by her husband, of an archbishop being stabbed by a priest, of a general falling by a brother's hand. Political circles were plunged into commotion last Friday by the announcement in the official Moniteur that no less a personage than the Count de Monta lembert, the distinguished orator, was to be prose cuted for having, in an article in the Correspondent, " excited to hatred and contempt of the Govern. ment," "attacked the rights of the Emperor," " excited citizens to make war on each other," and committed sundry other offences. The article, which was about the great Indian debate in the English Parliament, speaks in terms of the highest admira tion of our country, and abounds in sharp and bitter and vehement observations on the Imperial Govern ment and its partizans. In bringing so eminent an individual as the Count de Montaletubert to the bar of a criminal court for a political offence, the Government does the boldest act it has ventured on since in the coup d'etat it exiled M. Thiers and other statesmen. This set proves that it now considers its power perfectly irresistible; and many persons think that it proves also an intention to make all the great politicians and parliamentary men who have hitherto stood haughtily aloof from the Imperial Government give in their adhesion to it or—leave France. The prudence of prosecuting—that is to say, of fining and imprisoning, for fine and imprisonment invariably follow prosecutions for " offences of the press "—such a man as the Count, is, however, warmly disputed by many of the best friends of the Imperial regime. " You cannot," they say, " mulct him and send him to gaol without exciting a pertur bation in the country, and all perturbations should be avoided, for there is no saying to what they may lead!" There may be truth in that; but, on the