The Press. — London, England, 1858-01-30 00:00:00

THE PRESS, JANUARY 30,1858. again be heard throughout the country, the peace of homes will be invaded, and classes will be severed from each other. As if there was not enough of aatagonism and alienation existing already. Englishmen will again be divided into two great political camps, mid when the interests of the empire point in the direction of social reform and progressive amelioration, the community will be harassed with the passions awakened by purely factious legislation. The cry of " India for the Middle Classes," raised by the East India Company, is to be drowned in a clamour for " England for the Ten-pounders," and another coalition will be made between the Whig oligarchy and the organised platform of Radical mal coutents. Lord PALMERSTON. So far from being con fined merely to " regulating the law of fran chise," the plan contemplates a disfranchise ment of boroughs upon a large scale. Instead of the artificial impartiality which presided over the ingenious and impossible scheme of Reform propounded by Lord ASERDEEN, and wept over by Lord Jong RusseLL, the new measure is to aim a heavy blow and great discouragement at the Conservative party. The territorial interests, the whole system of county representation, and the constitu tional reciprocity of the two great parties of the State, will all be menaced and jeopardised by the scheme of the present Cabinet. To swamp the Conservative party at any risk, and to support Liberalism at any price, will be the whole purpose of the Pahnerston Reform Bill. It will at once be asked, What could have induced a trimming and temporising ex-Tory statesman to lend himself to a scheme, con ceived in virulence, and which can be carried only by force ? Unhappily it is no longer any secret in politics that the Premier is resolved to crush Lord JOHN RUSSELL. For twenty years Lord PALMERSTON was content to sit under Lord JOHN RUSSELL, but the Premier is now determined to allow no margin to the late Leader of the Liberals. If the Cabinet proposed a moderate measure, it is on the cards that Lord JOHN RUSSELL, true to the instincts described by SYDNEY SMITH, would at once endeavour to seize the place of Par liamentary chief of the Liberals. Any such attempt Lord PALMERSTON has determined to make hopeless. The rivalry between political aspirants at the same side is often worse than the antagonism between avowed opponents. The jealousy between BURKE and SHERIDAN from 1783 to 1701 was far more bitter and invi dious than the contest for supremacy between Fox and Pirr. Even in our own times the struggles for superiority between the late Earl GREY and Lord BROUGHAM are known to all men ; and every person who has the opportunities for observation can behold with his own eyes the almost feminine rivalry subsisting between the aged Premier and the deposed favourite of Brookes's. The new scheme will thus be anti-Conservative in its provisions, and anti-Russell in its purposes It is not unlikely that the personal object of its most responsible author may, with the aid of public opinion, strip the measure of much of its Radical malignity of design. But the scheme, unfortunately, will be the Premier's own. Lord PALMERSTON always dis liked " Reform," and no Parliamentary chief within the memory of living man has carried so far the de /taut en bas style of personal de meanour towards the mere outsiders of his own connection. After doubt and vacillation , and irritated by the questions being forced upon him against his will, the Premier, after the law that infallibly rules natures of his peculiar type, has become utterly reckless. He has succumbed under the influences of the selfish and intriguing clique by which he is surrounded. He is resolved to defy opinion, and to scout the precedent of his own half century of conventional professions and com promising politics. This determination that the new measure should proceed on the basis of a large dis. franchisement of boroughs has been reached on no sudden suggestion. In point of fact, the ultraism of the new scheme is the result of two great differences in the Cabinet. At first the quarrel was about certain boroughs, and then the section of the Cabinet of which Lord LANSDOWNE was the representative suc ceeded. But even then it gained only after finesse and adjournment; and strong dissatis faction was expressed at the damping tone assumed by the Premier towards Mr. Lome Kino's motion for the deterioration of the county franchise. Since then the Premier has resolved to propose his sweeping measure, which will in all its details be even more anti- Conservative than the plan of Mr. LoexE Kinn. It will be the least consequence of this scheme that the Reform Bill of 1832 will be completely unsettled, and the compromise then agreed upon utterly destroyed. The snost serious consequence will be plunging 'moiety into internecine strife. Agitation will INDIAN PROSPECTS. ANYONE desirous of seeing a thoroughly good illustration of the adage, "with how little wisdom the world is governed," would do well to note the late India-house debates. It was not merely the mageates of the Direction appealing piteously to that public opinion which they had done all in their power in India to put down ; nor was it their engaging as their leader the president of a rabid society whose chief panacea for every evil appears to be the bringing Lord PALMERSTON to the gallows as a Russian agent. It was not their attempt to engage sympathy for a petition which in every second paragraph contradicts itself, and which is the most imaginative ever written : or their winding up with a resolution which showed them to be the most ignorant men in the country regarding the rights and privileges which, under the present constitu tion of the Indian Government, they possess. These things, however incongruous and ridi culous, formed, as it were, but the minor features of the affair The great absurdity lay in their open abandonment of all reticence regarding the administration of British India; their candid confession of the gross mis government that had prevailed there; and their equally plain admission of their utter igno rance of the causes of the revolt, the propor • tions it had or might assume, and the means by which it could be quelled. On these points the Directors were all at issue with each other ; the only one in regard to which they were unanimous, being that the habitual in competence and mismanagement displayed were not their fault, but the fault of successive Whig Ministries, whose incapacity had re duced that empire to the disastrous and humi liating position in which it is placed . Non nostrum eat &vitas oomponere lites, and we assuredly shall not make the attempt. Indeed, we have the less inclination to interfere be• tween the parties, as the quarrel seems a very pretty quarrel as it stands. Being our selves unconcerned in the matter, we shall show our impartiality by yielding the same credence to both. We have no doubt that much of the Directorial abuse of the Ministers is well founded ; and have as little that that will be equally so, which the Ministers or their organs will doubtless heap upon the Directors in return. When certain people fall out, we know that honest men come by their own ; and so we dare say it will prove in the present case. Our only reason for alluding to the matter is to show the public what, by the con fession of the chief agents in the past Ad ministration of India, the character of that Administration has really been ;—to exhibit the total disunion of sentiment that prevails among them as to the cause of our disasters, the real nature of them, and the means of cure ; and their utter unfitness in consequence to be accepted as authorities upon any point relating to this revolt. With this exhibition of their ignorance (for many must be grossly in error where all are diametrically disagreed), we hope we shall hear no more of Directors setting themselves up as the instructors of the public and the Legislature regarding matters which it must now be obvious that they do not understand. To their respective theories and opinions they have of course every right to cling ; but the weight that before attached to such opinions is irrevo- V\ cably gone. They must henceforth be eo n . tent to rank, in this respect, no higher than any other member of &Gaiety or of the House. We are not sow diet this should be so, because it will lead gtrtiy to clear th e gronad Wore us, sad Aboilstate the action both of journalism sad debate. Every one will now oso that it their Seeders in either sphere do act happen to arm the same con olusioas as a.Mangioa er a Sykes, they need not necessarily be wrong; because, according to the rest of the Directors, neither the Member for Guildford nor the Member for Aberdeen has the slightest claim to confidence in the view he takes. In the same manner, when other Directors or their organs come forward to instruct the public, the public will equally understand that they are, with all their pretensions, as uninstructed as them selves. Official misleading, the one great cause of our present dangerous position in India, will thus be disarmed of its conse quences; and people, instead of relying on the Government or the India-house for their opinions, will leant to think for themselves. They will not allow themselves to be imposed upon by fallacious telegrams or by still more fallacious deductions from the news that comes. They will not be again deceived by the gossip of the India-house, that has been telling us incessantly for the last six months that the neck of the rebellion is broken, and that the work is done. They will learn to attach less significance to the intelligence that is published than to the items that leak out. They will ask themselves, if enlistment is going on so satisfactorily, what necessity there can be for lowering the standard of recruits. They will reflect that matters cannot bo pro. greasing so very prosperously when the cry from India on every side is for more and more men. They will consiier whether it is consistent with the fact of all being over that the Government there should now be striving to organise transport for Sir COLIN CAMPBELL on so large a scale. And they also will he able to judge what that Government and the Home Administration merit, for neglecting for so long a period a duty which the Conservative leaders so strongly from the first enforced. If the public will but take this tone—if, instead of pinning their faith to Directors and Ministers, they will but think and act for themselves, then we have no doubt that in spite of all our past mishaps India may yet be saved. But it is not by cuckoo cries of all being over that they will attain this object ; still less by closing their ears to those who have shown from the first that they under stand the subject, merely because these do not happen to belong to the same political creed as themselves. If India was ever a fitting sub ject for party action—a doctrine we have always repudiated—the time for its being so is certainly not now. Our existence as a nation is dependent on our success there, and on our speedy success too. It is not a special question regarding either Whigs, or Conservatives, or Radicals ; it affects us all—all, from the pea sant in his hut to the Monarch on her throne. The issue at stake is a mighty one. It is whether our finances are to be doomed to ex haustion and our rising youth to a drain which they can never stand ; and whether we are to be left in this position, prostrate and helpless, to encounter the storms that are already beginning to threaten our island home. Let us not deceive ourselves as to possible even tualities ; let us bear in mind what in August last the Conservative Leader in the Commons said. The surest guarantee for lasting friend- ships is prosperity, whether it be nations or individuals that are concerned. Is there, then, no danger in the continuance of a war that sends, as fast as they can be raised and equipped, all our disposable regiments to battle , and die for us on the plains of Hindostan . We will not say more—we could not say less ; but by all that is dear to the nation we do im plore our legislators to take at once such steps as can alone be effectual to bring this Indian contest to a close. THE NEW PEERS. A CONSIDERABLE section of our readers v6ll doubtless be surprised at the title of our present article. Their astonishment is per.