The Press. — London, England, 1853-07-02 00:00:00

was raising the annual expenditure from 8,0001. to 12,0001. The governor was ner vously anxious to promote the culinary com forts. All the tales of privation are dispelled in this work by pages of larder-and-cellar de tails. It is a mean and melancholy fact that the petty court, from the ex-Emperor downwards, lived and died squabbling about rations. From first to last, the belly was their god, and their only one. M. le Page, the chief cook, was, in truth, the first person and the most serious consideration of these epicureans, who ex pected as choice cheer on this hungry rock as at sensual Paris : privately, however, each ad mitted that the climate was mild, and their usage and treatment excellent; far better, in deed, than they would have shown had they been the masters. The real rub and sting, the offence unpardonable, was the ici etre, the exile —the being at St. Helena lasola Maladetta— and they acknowledged had an angel come down from heaven as governor ho would have been deemed a devil, and ; his fair reputation lied away. The exiles lived together on the worst terms, the women as tigresses, the men challenging each other; meantime their master, acting on his old principle of divide et impera, kept them at loggerheads, quizzed and " becoglioned " them all. The sensitive organisation of this incarnation of selfishness is now shown to have been better suited for the sybarite than the stoic. His vaunted "soul of marble " proved wax in the crucible of adversity, the school of princes. The " prisoned eagle," with no self-resources, beat his breast against the bars of his sea-girt cell. His hatred for his gaoler, Sir Hudson, one at first sight, grew to such absolute antipathy that in the six years only five personal interviews took place. Then his genius stood rebuked in the presence of an honest man, whom ho never looked in the face : while venting his Corsican vendetta he stabbed with smileless words un worthy either of an officer or a gentleman. To abuse Sir Hudson behind his back was found by every tool and toady to be the surest road to the graces of the prisoner, and this the Count good lertrand carried so far that no English officer would visit him. The mischief he did was infinite ; he kept up every irritation and delu sion ; nay, the very ornamental railings of the new house were represented to his listener and believed to be meant as an " iron cage." The patience and forbearance exhibited by Sir Hudson to the rudeness and insolence of this jackall echo of Napoleon is indeed mar vellous. _ _ Tho details of the private life of Napoleon arc very curious : kind and playful when in good humour, his auger assumed forms the most undignified. At one time we have Ciesar playing at hide and seek to prevent the orderly officer catching eight of him ; at another quarrelling about rats and the inspection of linen buck-baskets. The god of his followers' idolatry in lip service, all were ready to desert him in their hearts; thus even his vain, ignorant, egotist physician, Antommarchi, ac tually applied for leave to depart, at a moment when his master, on his death-bed, needed most his assistance. Mr. Forsyth has executed his work with much talent and impartiality. It deserves a place in every historical library, and is one, we suspect, that, posterity will not willingly let die. The Administration of the East India Company : a History of Indian Progress. By John Wil liam Kayc. London : Bentley. (Second Noticed MR. KATE'S ingenious defence of the Company is least successful where he deals with the judicial administration—that branch of Indian government which even Mr. Macaulay, in his late speech in the House of Commons, ex cepted for censure. He reviews the whole system historically, from the days of Clive and Hastings to our own, passing lightly, but not approvingly, over the iniquities committed by the " Mayors' Courts," whose rude muni cipal jurisdiction had originated in days when as yet no territorial powers attached to the possession of trading factories and forts. Of these courts the power was originally limited an practice, if not in theory, to servants of the company and their immediate dependents, _ THE PRESS. who were thus allowed to establish an imperium in imperil) without attracting the jealousy— perhaps without attracting the notice—of native rulers. They professed only to ad minister the law of England, a little modified to meet local emergencies ; and that law, un reformed by Romilly and Bentham, was then the most sanguinary code known in civilised Europe. Death was the punishment awarded for offences which are now scarcely held worthy of transportation; and it did not make matters better that, the legal maxim regarding igno ranee being strictly adhered to, natives suffered death for acts which they themselves consi dered meritorious, or at least not criminal. Thus, a Bengalec who had detected his wife in adultery (a capital offence according to Eastern ideas) proceeded to inflict punishment by cutting off her nose. The act was not denied, indeed was vindicated, by the injured husband. Before any native tribunal he would have been dismissed without even a reproof. Before the Calcutta Sessions he pleaded, not unrea sonably, the improbability of his having com mitted an act so certain to become notorious, had its criminality by English law been made known to him. The plea, however, proved unavailing, and he was banged. A few acts of this kind exhausted even the patience of the patient Hindus. They did not " agitate," as Sir C. Wood expects them to do if his bill is thrown out, but they poured in petitions vigorously, especially after the hanging of one Radachuur Mcttra, a merchant, for forg ery ; and their complaints, and the absolute necessity of doing something, pro duced the establishment of the Sudder Courts, and the passing of the regulations of 1772 — in fact, the foundation of the actually existing system. But of these regulations the good effects were not immediately apparent. Powers had been granted to the Supreme Court, the creation of the Crown, which, exercised by men unversed in Indian affairs, and who be lieved the law of Westminster-hall to be the perfection of wisdom, well-nigh threw the country into confusion, and aggravated the evils they were intended to cure. The early administration of the Company's courts, it is probable, had been lax and tyrannical, savour ing somewhat of the Oriental character. The pedantic and impracticable, though honest, adherence of Impey and his colleagues to the traditions of an English circuit, produced a tyranny at once unintelligible and intolera ble to its objects. Collisions between these rival authorities were frequent ; until, in 1781, the British Legislature interposed finally to define and limit the powers possessed by each. But, before that time, either private influence, or consciousness of error on the part of the innovators, had materially diminished the violence of early quarrels. Up to this date it could scarcely be said that the Company's servants in the Molussil exer cised any regular judicial functions. The col lectors were ex qificio presidents of the civil provincial courts; but until 1780 the judicial office was not separated from the collectorate ; and during the union of the two it is reasonable to suppose that the former engrossed, if it did not monopolise, the attention of men who were held to be, and who held themselves to be, the financial agents of the Company. The criminal courts remained exclusively in the hands of natives until the days of Lord Cornwallis ; and though, in 1700, the Mahometan judges were superseded, the Mahometan law remained in force up to the passing of the regulations of '93. It is with these, in fact, that we have to deal, as the true origin of the judicial system of British India. They did good, and they did harm. They interfered to shelter the accused from summary sentences and barbarous punishments. They threw round the prisoner all those safeguards which English experience had devised for the protection of his possible innocence, and the control of those who were to decide his fate. So fir the intention was upright, and the tendency of the new legisla tion humane. The rest shall be told in Mr. Kayc's own words : • - It is no new thing—it is nothing peculiar to Bengal that justice should defeat its ouit ends—that the very earnest ness and laboriousness of its efforts should recoil upon itself. In two ways, now, was this observable. That jus. ticc should be cheap, and the judgtnent•aeat accessible, are SATURDAY, two of the first essentials of a pure judicial system, and Cornwallis endeavoiued to secure both the accessibility and the cheapness of the courts. But he did this for the benefit of a people out of measure addicted to litigation ; and it soon followed that the number of suitors so blocked up the doors of the court that the judge was not accessible to the most clamorous, and justice was not attainable at any cost. It seemed, too, that the new English judges, eager to administer the law strictly and conscientiously according to the regulations, and to observe all the prescribed for malities, brought so few cases to an issue, that business accumulated tearfully upon their tiles, and the people wrung their hands in despair to think what a laggard was English justice with the weight of the regulations on its back. In good truth it could not keep pace with the litigiousness of the native character. And so it happened that the very measures which seemed to entitle our administrators to the gratitude of the people worked grievously to their hurt. It then appeared that justice was too cheap, and that our courts were too accessible. A supposed remedy lay very close at hand. Its application has been severely con demned. It was proposed to make justice dearer, and, therefore, the courts less accessible, by taxing litigation and so frightening suitors from their doors. The old sys tem of the deposit-fee on the institution of a suit was re vived, and for a time this measure seemed to have the desired effect. But although the subordinate judicial agency had been greatly increased by the authorisation of the registers of the courts to determine snits, and the ap- pointment of duly qualified natives to decide on disputes of small amount, the accumulation of business was only temporarily kept down ; and it was found, at the beginning of the new century, that such was the enormous number of undecided cases on the files that many of the suitors must wait years fora decision; and in one district it was said that in the ordinary course of events some of them would hardly live to witness the adjudication of their suits. The evil was always admitted—always striven against. The judicial agency was from time to time increased; but still justice was in arrears. The judges despatched a greater amount of business, but still there was an accumulation. The fatal tendency of the people of India to rush into the meshes of the law was not to be repressed. This apology is ingenious ; but we cannot allow it to pass. Fees on judicial proceedings arc certainly one way of diminishing the num ber of litigants, and thus of bringing the quan tity of business to be despatched within the working powers of the judges. But they operate just as unfairly as would a law to the effect that every litigant should draw lots for his chance of being heard, and that only one suit in every ten should be allowed to come before the court. Nay, in this imaginary case, the actual injustice would be even less, inas much as men bear more hardly the mischances which they impute to their station in life than those which arise out of simple accident. Taxing suits with a view to diminish their number is merely, as was once said in the House of Commons, declaring that courts of justice shall be open, like the London Tavern, tsi every one who can pay his way. It is put ting into the hands of the rich an instrument by which they may oppress their poorer neigh bours, unpunished and unchecked, except by fear of public opinion, which in India scarcely exists on such questions. We dwell on this topic because the dearness of law remains still, after half a century, one of the worst blots on Indian administration. Ample details are furnished in Mr. Norton's pamphlet, which we cannot here stop to discuss. Other objections have been taken to the re gulations not unfounded in truth, but of which we make less account, because they apply equally to any written code whatever. It is said and Mr. Kaye rather favours the idea that men accustomed to adminis ter a law in which the precise penalty for every offence is laid down, so that the operation of adjudicating becomes almost mechanical, are liable to lose their inde pendence of judgment, and act as mere rou tiniers or formalists, dealing with the letter rather than the spirit of the law. The argu ment is plausible, to a certain extent it is true; but it admits of this reply, that the same check which prevents the judge from admi nistering justice precisely according to his own ideas of right, prevents him from adminis tering injustice. The public may occasionally suffer, but on the whole it gains more than it suffers. The forty years which elapsed between the reign of Lord Cornwallis and that of Lord William Bentinck passed unmarked by any important judicial changes. Meantime, abuses had sprung up like mushrooms. Everywhere the complaint of the present day was echoed, " that the revenue department absorbed all the ability of the civil se►vice, leaving none for the Mofussil bench." The Provincial Courts had come to be a mere refuse for the A./ 0.. .+0 .