The Press. — London, England, 1857-11-07 00:00:00

1074 mously refused ; and not an act of treachery or rebellion against their suzerain can be proved against them. The union of the provinces is not an active and aggressive measure to impair the in tegrity of Turkey—it is simply a measure to secure a solid and substantial Go vernment for the provinces` themselves ; and no practical evil seems likely to arise from the non-interference of the Porte in their internal administration. On the other hand, it is undeniable that, apart from the maladministration of Turkey, poli tical evils of great magnitude, essentially im pairing to the political independence of Turkey, have constantly been produced under the existing system ; and if the status quo be continued, the interference of foreign Powers and the permanent establishment of foreign influences in the internal affairs of these countries will be once more repeated. Those who argue in favour of such a coarse, pregnant with danger to Turkey, and replete with hazard to the Principalities, argue that Turkey can only be powerful by their weakness and exalted by their degradation, and that corruption and oppression are com• patible with the authority and indispensable to the existence of the Porte. If the general disposition of the Reunion people were in favour of the status quo ante bellum, nothing would remain to be said but that they were content to seek in the impo tence of Turkey a security which they could not find in their own patriotism and their own courage. But it is not so ; they have spoken out clearly. They ask that the extortionate system of farmers-general of the revenue shall be abolished, that a revision of taxation shall take place, and that Custom-house abuses which prevent commerce and impoverish trade shall no longer be permitted. Finally, they have expressed a desire to consolidate their Governments and unite their people under a foreign sovereign prince as the only means to obtain these desirable results ; and they appeal to the justice, the good sense, and the generosity of Europe to support them in their effort at self-government. This is no momentary caprice of a newly elected assembly anxious to realise a new sensation ; it is a national sentiment, the very opposite of caprice and the ma ture product of long years of misrule and oppression. In striking a balance between nations, justice requires that the greater share of advantage should fall to the less powerful; and the ardent 'mites we have raised in the hearts of the Roumans should not be met with the sting of injustice or the bitterness of disappointment. We may rely upon it that the peace of Europe depends much upon the permanent character of the Government and the security of the institu tions under which the inhabitants of Walla chia and Moldavia will ultimately be placed. The necessity, therefore, of providing a solid and Substantial Government for these provinces is obvious. The political union of the two provinces is that alone which, in our opinion, offers these advantages. It is the least likely, when settled, to involve us in any future embarass ments, and the best calculated to promote peace, extend commerce, and prevent the re petition of foreign encroachments. It will place on a firm basis the connection of the Principalities ; and while it promotes the prosperity of both, it will strengthen the position of the Turkish empire, and effectually secure the peace of Europe. LEADENHALL STREET AND CANNON ROW. IT is to be hoped, for the sake of the country, that the fall of Delhi will be followed by the speedy submission on the part of the rebels that the Ministerial journals profess to anti cipate from it ; because there is no concealing the fact that the state of affairs is likely to prove most disastrous if the resistance be prolonged. Troops have been sent out in large numbers, to be sure ; but all the neces sary means of forwarding them up the country are deficient—or even of getting them under proper cover at Calcutta till equipped for the THE PRESS, NOVEMBER 7, 1857. field. Carriage, camp followers, commissariat, tents, batteries, horses, money—all seem to be wanting ; in short, every one of those ap pliances required to set an army in motion and render it of the slightest use. Mean time, white these are being collected, theib will be the climate of Calcutta to be encoun tered, nearly the worst in the world ; and the troops will tied facilities for drunkenness and dissipation which always in India kill more than the sun. Nor would the evils of pro tracted operations be felt in this shape alone. Here, also, the Indian war is beginning to tell. Whatever may have been the assertions of the Ministers while Parliament was sitting, it is now clear that it will be impossible to raise any considerable amount of money in India, and that nearly the whole of the war charges, therefore, will have to be provided by this country ; so much of them as are to he dis bursed in India being remitted there in the shape of bullion or cash. Already is this beginning to act upon the Money Mark't both here and on the Continent; and with the Bank rates of discount at nine per cent., with the bullion fast ebbing in its vaults, with mer• chants failing and mills ceasing to work on every side, it is clear that the drain of specie forl ndia, if long continued, must end inevitably in general bankruptcy at home. That the yes terday's City article of the Times in substance admits. The remedy, however, that the writer of that article proposes would certainly fail in effect. The European mercantile commu►►ity in India can have little money to spare for the use of Government during the existing crisis; and if they had, they have come to a thorough determination to afford no such aid to it until the system shall be changed. While as to native capitalists, their main object now is to make safe their hoards ; and the more un usual the methods that the Government resorts to for the purpose of obtaining money, the greater will be the panic and the more difficult will it be to maintain the circulation at all. To pay the dividends in India in notes that were not convertible on demand, would be to aggravate matters by occasioning a general crash. It would send the value of Go vernment paper at once down to nil; and thus ruin all the holders of it, and all the banks that had transactions based upon it, outright. While as to any attempt to follow the Russian plan of a forced payment for requisitions for the army in such notes, that would be treated as a virtual seizure of the people's property, and be resisted ri et (mins by all in respect of whom it was sought to ho carried out. The result, of course, would be that after a short time no supplies for the army would be pro curable at all The proposed proviso that such paper should be received as revenue, would be wholly ineffectual to make it float, as the disbursements will necessarily very far exceed the revenue for many years to come. The fact is that the Government are begin ning to pay the necessary penalty of their dishonesty. and the English public will have to bear their share of the indiction as a reward for the apathy they have shown. The Govern ment have all along deceived them, and they have shown an equal ieadinessto be deceived. The Anglo-Indian press, the only source from which they might have arrived at something like the truth, they have allowed to be gagged without any remonstrance on their parts. All means of true and correct information as to what is passing being thus taken away, they have been studiously deluged with such falsehoods as the Government have thought fit to give currency to from time to time. Daily is this made more and more apparent, as through the indiscretion of some of them the fact is allowed casually to leak ont. Thus in an article in the last number of Blackwood, which details the state of things at Peshawur, it is said in reference to the telegraphic despatches that are received there—" These public mes " sages, in fact, always undergo a culinary " process before they are published, any bad " news being carefully suppressed." And what is thus admitted to be done by the officials at Peshawur is, as we know from our own correspondents, done at Calcutta as well. Nor is a different policy pursued by the Government iu its dealings with the public here ; for we now learn from the speech of Lord GRANVILLE at the Mansion-house, that at the very . time that 1.1 . ),ex were filling th e i r organs with rhoatiiiiiiittilat itbout not leaving one stone upon another at Delhi, our army was so pressed there, OA in the opinion of some of its best officer*, the only way o f getting possession of Delhi at all was by acceding at °nee- tO the propositions of the King. We long age aaA that the Government were treating the jailblis in relation to this matter like children ; we shall be curious to see how long its endurance under such treat ment will last. Not many weeks, we suspect, after the news of any serious disaster shall arrive here, if disaster is to be our fate. The failure of Ministers before such a crisis might be pardonable, and fairly so ; but not the bad faith that does more than anything to make such failure irremediable by keeping the public in the dark. Had they adopted an open and manly course from the outset, the thing would have been different; but no mercy should be shown to either the servants of public companies or the servants of the State who try to stave off the evil (lay by concealments and evasions, till their constituents are irre trievably ruined, and all power of recovery from their mismanagement is past. We do hope, therefore, as we said before, that this business may be terminated more speedily and more successfully than we con fess, for our parts, we expect. Indeed, there are not wanting indications that our doubts are to some extent shared by some of the members of the Cabinet themselves; for other wise we can hardly understand why they should be already casting about for a scape goat on to which to lay the burden of their sins. It is not in the hour of anticipated tri umph that Ministers usually look for objects towards whom to divert the people's wrath ; and we can hardly see why, if everything is going on so swimmingly in India, there should be such dissensions between the Cabinet and the Court of Directors at home. As regards the abolition of the latter, we can have no objection to that. Indeed, nothing can be more anomalous than the existence of an inde pendent body, with power to trammel the Minister in respect to orders or appointments for which he alone should be responsible to the State. The double Government has been the curse of India, and no journal has more consistently advocated than we have done the transfer of the whole authority to the Crown. But still we do not see how any shuffle of the cards in this way can absolve the Ministers from the consequences of their own personal acts. Whatever crimes the Company may have to answer for, Lord PALMERSTON has shared, and more than shared, with them their guilt. He has been in the Ministry at every renewal of the charter during the pre sent century. On the last occasion of it he joined in defeating the motion fur further inquiry, before renewal, that Lord STANLEY, Oil behalf of the Conservative party, made. He was a member of the Cabinet that appointed Lord DALHOUSIE Governor-General ; and he continued to be in the Cabinet during nearly the whole of his Lordship's vice• regal reign. He was a member of it at the periods when the most flagrant acts of spoliation were committed, those of Sattara, and Nagpore, and Oude. He was also a member of the Cabinet that dealt so shame fully with the late Sir CHARLES NAPIER for ex posing and endeavouring to remedy the mutinous state of the Bengal army—an act to which this crisis is so greatly due. He was Premier at the time of the annexation of Oude ; he accorded his hearty assent as such to the measure; and he proclaimed himself openly as prepared to be responsible for the result. He was a member of the Cabinet that gave its sanction to the conversion of the Indian Five per Cents., and so struck the blow to public credit there which has laid it prostrate ever since. He is the Premier that granted a pension of five thousand a year to Lord DALHOUSIE. out of the bankrupt Indian exchequer, as a reward for all the seeds of the present disasters that he had sown. He is the Premier who tried to abolish her Majesty's Supreme Courts in India, and to place the lives and liberties of Englishmen at the dis posal of the slavish and incompetent native