The Press. — London, England, 1856-05-10 00:00:00

it as well as in the West, well as in Europe. It is such terms Russia never she must have assented in the strictest accord for which the war was :n. These were, in sub ;sia to re-enter into and per limits as existing at ie war broke out. In lbject, or, indeed, as the .wally attaining it, she reed to renounce all fur- Ler neighbours on every thereafter to annex the of them to her empire , fined as an infraction of )3r the armed resistance ,ratting Powers. There 'thing - wild, nothing im unjust, in such a stipula more than has been in almost every European lion would have proved !e for the future tran far as Russia was con- ,this rests merely on the signing Czar. There is, in treaty to prevent his its he pleases, so that he `le Sultan, but from the iwers and communities the Ministers that the tothing for us, and that, thing in return to them. neither had the Turks s that we should have and our treasure like The question is, not and the other Asiatic us, but how far it will r Russia be allowed to subjection to its Crown are as deeply interested ircassians themselves; per we were in the question by Russia on the Euro sr desirous we may be of regard for the interests no reason whatever why distinction between the Id Asiatic nations. As should sacrifice every ly contributing in every in any way compensate ife and for our vast ex re had a right to hope to in as good a position— trse, excepted—as that in ut, as the matter stands to means the case. For ttual bar against Russia's will divert it naturally the East, where alone it mister to its cravings ; make any stipulation in :scion upon that side, it ve by States that must n such as we have de effectually met the diffi ted this contest in all 1 lifetime of the present sult would indeed have isation for all our loss of But from Ministers who useless to look for any ightedness ; and so the lost of raising up a "ession on ourselves in 'r in which we are really aggression on India by but on the north and sere is nothing whatever I land. There we have )y army to defend the a mere sprinkling of n• have we a single fort le our arsenals, beyond dpments, are almost en ;Lich circumstances, the .s power to extend her 'as doubly necessary, and the neglect. Ministerial to be sure, of our in- ut it is in utter ignorance Lord HARDINOX knows "MCI • MAY 10, 1856. limits to it in the East On the Asiatic side as N% idle to say that to su would have assented ; to them, they being i ante with the objects f professedly undertaker stance, to compel Russ r emain within her prof the period when the furtherance of this oh only means of effectu should have been fore ther aggression on he side; and the attempt territory of any one c should have been deft] the treaty to be met by of all the other contri would have been noth practicable, nothing un tion ; it is, indeed, no r turn imposed upon a] Power. Such a provisi an effectual guarantee quillity of the East, as cerned ; but, as it is, th disposition of the reign fact, nothing in the 1 making what conquests makes them not from tl other neighbouring Poi on every side. It has been said by Circassians had done n, therefore, we owed notl But, for that matter, n done anything for us poured out our blood water in their behalf. what the Circassians nations had done for ti affect our position if bring them all into su Viewed in this light, we in the matter as the Circa haps more deeply than of any conquests made 1 pean side. And however showing a disinterested of public law, there is n we should make this d ease of European and little is there why we object, however deeply sense to it, that could : us for our losses in lif se. At any rate, we come out of the affair i these sacrifices, of tour: which we went in. Bu at present, this is by the placing an effectual aggression to the West and by necessity to the can find food to min while by omitting to 131 the treaty for its repres will be uncurbed savi in turn succumb to it. A simple stipulation scribed would have d culty, and postponed probability beyond the generation. Such a re: been a fitting compens blood and treasure. B drift into wars it :s u thing involving farsig opportunity has been barrier against aggres almost the only quartet vulnerable. Against a sea our navy provides, north-west frontier the to prevent au attack bj nothing but a Sepoy empire, with only a European troops. Not ress to cover it, while the ordinary field equi tirely bare. Under at linutation of Russia's empire eastwards was nothing can palliate ti speakers talk largely, vulnerability there ; Ua that they speak. L THE PRESS. something of the matter, and he can tell by what a thread our dominion hangs. Ask him what would have been the result at Feroze shah if a staff of Russian officers, with a dozen squadrons drilled and led by them, and a couple of troops of horse artillery had been added to the army of the Seiks, and he will tell you that they would have decided the fate of our Eastern empire. The sun that rose that morning would have seen before its setting our only available army annihilated, our Governor and our Commander-in-Chief among the slain, and another race the masters of all those vast dominions. In saying this we are guilty of no indiscretion, for it is now matter of history; and to no one was the fact better known than to NICIIOI4B, the late Czar. THE ARMY. THE speeches delivered on Thurday night in the House of Lords indicate that the country will very shortly be called upon to choose between two different methods of preserving our military efficiency. The remarks of Lord PANMURE on the one hand, and Lord DERBY on the other, though too brief and general to come into direct collision, point nevertheless to two perfectly distinct lines of policy. Lord PANMIIRE advocates the maintenance of a large standing army. " You have now an " army formed in masses," said he ; " let me advise you to keep it." His Lordship's notion evidently is to maintain during peace an army that shall be constantly ready for war. This is a straighforward and intelligible plan. The Earl of DERBY, on the other hand, seems to be of opinion that the Militia constitutes the true machinery for the preservation of our military power : I trust (said his lordship) that we shall not again fall into the error of suffering the skeletons of those regiments to crumble to pieces, of allowing the staff to be disor- ganised, and of neglecting to retain such a nucleus of each regiment as, called out overy year, or at all events once in two years, for a limited period of service, may, in the first place, keep alive the skeleton of the militia system, to be clothed and filled np when occasion shall occur. And in the next place, maintain among the men that military feeling and those habits of discipline which must enable them in the hour of peril to render good service to their sovereign and their country. His Lordship goes on to say that reduction on a large scale must inevitably take place, but that nevertheless we should so manage that reduction as not in any way to affect the organisation of our forces, but so as to pre serve during peace " the perfect miniature of "an organised and effective war establish " ment." It is. for the public to consider which of these lines of policy they consider most expe dient. To the maintenance of a very large standing army there are two important objec tions : first, the expense, which in the end would certainly be fatal to the plan ; and second, the evil of keeping up a larger force than is required for actual service. In such case the army would have a tendency to dege nerate, and, in spite of its additional numbers, might not be found so effective in the day of trial as a small force of picked men kept in the highest state of discipline. We doubt whether a permanent augmentation of our regular standing army would be either desira ble in itself, or would long be tolerated by public opinion. The efficiency and high discipline of our Militia was acknowledged with admiration by both Lord PANMURE and Lord DERBY. This force has contributed during the last two years not less than 30,000 men to the regular army, and its regiments have performed garrison duty on various foreign stations. All that would be required for the maintenance of a force which has proved so admirable a nursery for our regular army, would be a depot of some fifty or one hundred men in our county towns, with two or three non-commissioned officers, an adjutant, and perhaps a recruiting-captain, to overlook them. The existence of this small body of disciplined men as a nucleus and training-school for the entire regiment would be invaluable. We are satisfied that a mode rate sum laid out in maintaining an efficient 435 militia staff, would be far more useful in the long run than millions annually expended on the maintenance of an army not required for actual service, and therefore likely to change the whole current of popular feeling in respect to our soldiery. THE RE-APPEARANCE OF LORD ABERDEEN. TEE east wind has played with uncommon harshness for the last few days, and the " severity of our English summer," as HORACE WALPOLE called it, has been seasonably ushered in by the reappearance of the Earl of ABERDEEN in the debates of the House of Peers. The Ministers were thinking of triumphal arches and garlands of floral emblems, but a bleak blast from the lips of the Chief of the Coali tion must have made their teeth chatter. In more ways than one the oration of the Noble Earl was most cutting :—" I rejoice," he cried, " that the warlike reputation of my Noble " Friend now at the head o f the Government "has rendered it possible to make a peace " which, if done under my auspices. "might have produced serious reprehension." A sentence sharpened with more double-edged sarcasm could not have been spoken. The " warlike reputation " of Viscount PALMERSTON, who quietly sat in the same Cabinet with the Duke of NEWCASTLE at the terrible autumn of 1854, when our army was rotting ! But there was something severe in calling Viscount PAL MERSTON "my Noble Friend." Some of the small " Liberal" members, wishing to distin guish themselves in " the returns line," ought to move for copies of any previous speeches in which Lord ABERDEEN ever called the Pre mier his " friend." There was an air of humi lity in the Noble Earl's sighing reflection, " if it had been done under my auspices." But, en revanche, he made a desperate lunge in saying —" If (the Peace) is not of the " triumphant character of that treaty " which it was my good fortune to sign " in the same capital some forty years ago." It is rather " antiquated " to commence con fessions about a bonne fortune of such old date, but " the travelled Thane " desired to show that if his rival beat him at the end of his career, the time had been when victory was the other way. The sly Earl, with his sharp tongue, seems almost a match for the vivacious Vis count with his boisterous speeches. The philosophy of Lord ABERDEEN'S speech discovered something like what one of the present Ministers would call, in his free way, " imbecility." He said, "It is a remarkable " circumstance that all our treaties of peace, " however unpopular and objected to at the " time they were made, have ultimately been " sanctioned by the deliberate opinion of pos " terity." Fudge ! The assertion is not his torically true, and even if it were, the expla nation of the fact would lie on the surface. Of course people cannot be clamorous, as some men are only wise, in the purely retro spective fashion. The public is now quiescent upon treaties upon which our ancestors fumed, but if the circumstances were t o occur again we might be equally indignant with our forefathers. The blunders and betrayals of four or five generations are safe from fierce in vectives, and we live in the present, except those who dream over historical novels, or doze under superannuated debaters, who re collect what they heard Mr. PITT say about the Treaty of Utrecht The silence of posterity about treaties, whose consequences have been modified by subsequent changes, cannot be interpreted as " sanction." Ephemeral cla mour out of doors cannot be appealed to as natural opinion. There was clamour against the Treaty of Utrecht beyond doubt, particu larly with reference to its commercial pre visions, but the extent of that clamour was vastly exaggerated at the time. The mercan tile interest was not then so large as now, and although the House of Commons refused to ratify some of the secondary provisions of the treaty, addresses from all parts of the kingdom were in favour of it at the time (as is admitted by Whig historians), and the fact is beyond dispute that large majorities of both Houses