The Press. — London, England, 1854-09-30 00:00:00

SIMPTtMBER 30, 1854. This is very interesting. The water rushing down the gulleys of a mountain has furnished Homer with one of his favourite similes for describing the noise of a battle ; and we may remark that in ascending even our British mountains the most rapid way of reaching the peak is to take the water-channels, generally dry in summer. On the permanence of the French occupa tion of Algiers Professor Ansted remarks : Whether the French, the present masters of the country, will so far adapt themselves to its peculiarities of soil anti climate as to form the permanent inhabitants, and introduce an element of European civilisation and habits into Northern Africa, is perhaps more than doubtful. The Romans tried it, and failed; although they formed settlements, con• atructed roads, cultivated the land, worked the mines, built numerous towns, and impressed upon the face of the country an image of their power and magnificence which will probably never be effaced. At the present day no doubt much is possible that was formerly impossible ; but the French are not perhaps more likely to be successful than sly of their predecessors. It is indeed quite certain that the French are not a colonising people. Unlike the Saxon emigrant, who gene rally strikes off at once to establish himself alone in some spot beyond any traces of civilisation, and who often leaves his partially cleared or cultivated tract as boon as neigh bours approach, to go yet further into the wilderness, the ' Gaul appears to prefer always some town occupation, and the people accumulate in villages in moderate numbers, but always in groups, and rarely on the extreme limit of the land open to them. There are in Algeria many more persons engaged in petty commerce of all kinds than in agriculture, and this, while it renders the country easy and pleasant to travel through, as ensuring comfortable accom modation at the villages, will long prevent that complete occupation of the land that can alone repay the great ex pense of life and treasure incurred in the conquest of the country. In strong contrast with this population we find the native tribes, like the waves of a mighty ocean, ready at any obstacle to recede for the moment, but equally certain to rash back again into their forme': position whenever the obstacle is for an instant removed or weakened. It is comparatively easy to conquer them and occupy their land, but by no means easy to alter their habits and change their nature. They cannot well he got rid of, as they retreat into the interior of the country, whither they can hardly be followed ; and they disappear and reappear as if by magic, and when least expected. They are now rapidly earning money by the sale of grain, which they cultivate very easily, and bring towards the coast in large quantities; but it is difficult to trace what becomes of the money they receive. Most likely it is hidden, and thus withdrawn from circula tion ; and this is the more to be regretted as the greater part is silver—a metal much wanted at present. Perhaps some day this money will find its way into the European markets to purchase arms and ammunition, by which, when the moment arrives, an effort will be made to reoccupy the country. Collective colonisation is more suitable to the Gaelic than to the Teutonic races. The former require society, sympathy, and inter communion of ideas ; and the ancient plan of colonisation is therefore more suitable to those than the modern one in which the Anglo-Saxons have obtained such success by their self-dependence. Professor Ansted's work is illustrated with some coloured lithographs of considerable merit, anti the volume may be recommended to general renders for its agreeable style and variety of instructive matter. • A Gazetteer of the Territories under the East India Company, and of the Native States, on the : Continent of India. By Edward Thornton.' London : Allen and Co. THE work now before us is a great improve ment on the old Gazetteer of Hamilton. It gives much and varied information nowhere else accessible to the general reader, and which the author's connection with the East India Company—by whose authority the work has been compiled—has placed within his reach. We may fairly hail it, therefore, as an itnportant and valuable addition to the list of works illustrative of the topography and his tory of our Eastern empire. It is not, to be sure, without its defects—defects which it re quires all the ability and industry exhibited by the author to compensate for—but these moy be considered necessarily incident to a work put forth under the patronage, and, of course, intended to illustrate and enforce the political - Hews, of the East India Company. Of that body, we are prepared honestly to confess, we are no admirers. In their whole history, from first to last, we can see nothing on which the eye of virtue and of genius can alight with pleasure. Their entire career has been one of grasping ambition, not regulated by any noble instincts, hut influenced solely by the consideration of the profit their aggres- 929 of the then reigning Sovereign Jehangur, the ancestor of that Emperor of Delhi whom a late arrangement of the Marquis of Dalhousie has decided shall be the last to dwell in his paternal halls. Bombay came to us as the marriage dowry of the Princess of Portugal, wife to Charles 11. It was accompanied with the gift of Tangier, then thought a far more important Settlement, so much have the circumstances of our empire changed. Charles. having no wish to burden himself with what he deemed so useless a possession, leased it to the East India Company at a rental of ter pounds sterling per annum, and that was the commencement of an empire that now exceeds in extent and popu lation and value all the other dependencies put together of the British Crown. Fort St. George —in other words, the town of Madras, or, we should say rather, the ground on Which Fort St. George now stands—had been granted to the Company a few years earlier, but still as a feudal dependency of the native prince. The villages on which Calcutta stands were at signed to the Company in 1700; but it Was not till 1765 that they obtained the DeWitt)) , of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, or, in other words, the government of them, as vicegerents of the Emperor, which formed the first nucleus around which their magnificent empire has since grown. Regarding our earliest proceedings in India, Britain has nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to regret. Our first mission there Was the peaceful one of merchants, and, but for the aggressive conduct of the natives themselves, we should long have retained that humble and unintrusive character. But the tranquillity we sighed for was not given us to possess. The Wealth of our factories attracted the cupidity of rulers more inclined to consult their own wishes than their subjects' rights. Demands upon demands were made, each more exorbi tant than the last, till at length resistance or unlimited submission to plunder and ruin was the only alternative left. Then came the awful moment, long foreseen, but at which those humble traders when it did come stood aghast. And well they might. Opposed to them stood the lieutenant of an Emperor whose throne overshadowed the whole of Hind—one Lt whose lightest frown the boldest quailed, while on their side were but a handful of Europeans, men bred up to the counting-house and not to the sword, with a few native fol lowers whom they hardly dared to trust with weapons. Opposed to them stood armies ex ceeding in numbers all the hosts of all the king doms of Europe at that time put together, and whose courage and,.feroeity the stoutest thought they had reasonrto dread. Our coun trymen had none but Gad to trust. in and an honest cause. But the Briton has a heart that While one resource remains, while one stroke for salva tion can be struck, is not wont to sink. Then stood forth, therefore, these quiet men, not to yield their necks to the yoke, but to resist it— to strike, at least, one blow for freedom before they gave up themselves to despair and death. They fought and fell ; and the tale of the Black Hole of Calcutta long raised a shudder in every English breast at the barbarities to which our countrymen had been subjected. But while a spark of feeling, while a spark of honour, while a spark of courage remained in the bosoms of English men, such atrocities were sure sooner or later to draw down the vengeance they merited ; and, bad the odds against us been tenfold greater, Britons would have defied them in a cause so generous and so just. Madras furnished the troops ; in the youthful Clive was found a commander equal to even greater emergencies. A squadron under Watson lent its valuable assistance ; Calcutta was retaken ; and the sufferings of our countrymen avenged. This period was, perhaps, the noblest in our history, though not the, most brilliant. Up to that date we had nothing to reproach our selves with. But we did not bear good for tune with the same equal virtue that we had exhibited under adverse. By the bold and fearless hand of Clive the fabric of native power was soon crushed to pieces. He loved to steer the most dangerous emirses, and Fortune smiled propitiously on her daring child. The more he tempted her the more fond she showed herself of hi n, and, fickle to limilmil•mi••••••=iiimmommomomili THE PRESS. sions might be productive of. In their des patches relative to the wars undertaken by their Governors, the question of the offended honour of the nation never appears to have entered into their minds. The only point they seem inva riably to have considered was, whether the plunder of a province would exceed the cost of its annexation. In short, whether we look on them as the rulers of a mighty empire, or in their more congenial capacity of men clutch ing at patronage, contract monopolies, and profitable sinecures for the n\selves and friends. the same sordid feeling sei\ins to have per vaded the body from first to lest. The men who, in their commercial days, gave thousands of pounds a year as salaries to their tea ware housemen in China, and then passed a by-law that offices so profitable should never be con ferred on any but directors' nephews or sons ; the men who paid forty pounds a ton for shipping taken up from themselves or their friends when other shipowners would gladly have furnished it for ten ; the men who treated, and we believe still treat, the granting contracts as a private perquisite of the directors, and so assign a contract to each director, to give a bar gain away in turn ; the men who have long saddled India with the charge of maintaining, at enormous salaries, as civil servants, the members of their families too incompetent to make their way at home ;—such men are not likely to have been influenced by any very. ex tensive regard for the public welfare in their governmental capacity. That they have had some eminent public servants in India is certain ; but the most emi nent, from Clive to Metcalfe, have fallen under their ban ; while their treatment of their most illustrious Governors-General has beetf such as to drive them eventually from their service in disgust, as the despatches of Lord Welles ley and the recal of one who, had he remained in India, would have perhaps equalled that great Indian Governor—we mean the Earl of Ellenborough—attest. The only Governor- General with whom they appear to have fully sympathised was Hastings. It is not, however, with the East India Com pany that we have now to do, but with their territories and those of the native princes which these encircle, and we have only made these allusions to the Company as a necessary counterpoise to the commendation of their rule which our author in various parts of his work sets forth. Turning from them to their empire, the eye brightens at the prospect, for surely a more glorious one Providence in its most generous dispensations never created. Covering a surface of 1,500,000 square miles, of which the half is strictly British, with a population of 160,000,000 ; possessing almost every degree of climate, from the extremes of the temperate to the forcing heat of the torrid zone ; hearing in its northern hills the pine, the Chesnut, and the oak, and in the south the magnificent teak, with almost every other wood whose beauty and usefulness call for the grati tude of man ; covered with flowers of une qualled beauty ; with fruits of the most exqui site description ; with a fauna which embraces the kingly elephant and the whole range of deer tribe, from the beautiful gazelle to the lordly elk ; with game of every kind, from the bustard to the ortolan, to minister to the wants or luxuries of its people ; while the lion, the tiger, the wild boar, the bison, and the bear, afford to the more daring sportsman a never• failing pursuit; its rivers teeming with fish more delicious far than rejoice the palate in England ; its lakes covered with wild-fowl ; its plains overspread with cereals and sugar cane and cotton, and its hills crowned with plants of medicinal virtue, from which a large portion of the drugs of Europe are supplied ; its bosom teeming with precious stones, from the queenly diamond to the humble moss stone and agate; having iron in its mountains, and lead, copper, and last, though not least, abundant supplies of coal ; with gold found in the sands of its rivers, and traces of silver dis coverable northwards which leave no doubt es to the existence of that metal ;—with all these advantages, surely we may repeat that a nobler province of the world, animal, mineral, and vegetable, God never made. The earliest English settlement in India took piece at Surat in the year 1612, where a factory was established, with the permission