The Press. — London, England, 1855-10-20 00:00:00

990 plain truth with logical perplexities, and for sapping and undermining what appeared to be stable and determined. He is always going through some obscurely difficult task, as in geniously protracted atV an algebrdic problem, but at the end therbo Ifi•no rewai4 for hit labour. In his political equatitin4, l afternii frequent recurrence tiPthe rulee"6 l f.." permits\ tation" and " alternation, 4 the anal x— y of the Gladstonian press remains equivalent only to the indefinite. He argues to - Mislea& and not to elucidate, and it is as hopeless to derive practical value from the brilliancy of his intellectual light as it would be to try and ktadte - a' 'cigar from a rainbow; His woof of casuistry is thus only marvellous as a waste of ingenuity. *To expect to take in sound knowledge or substantial truths from his art fully-spun sophistry would be like trying to catch a shoal of fish with a network of e3bwebs. Though Mr. GLADSTONE has always been the dupe of his own subtlety. his present position is mainly the consequence of his precipitate conduct in recent times. He seems to have acted on the impulses of a hot and hasty am bition ; as if he would find in precipitation a clue to escaping from his labyrinthine casuistry. With all his affectation of principle, it is plain that impulse alone has recently been his guide. There was nothing in his antecedents to warrant the supposition that the ex member for Newark—the quondam Tory pet of two Dukes of Newcastle—would commit himself to ft Coalition based principally upon a large measure of Parliamentary Reform. Then, after Lord ABERDEEN and the Duke of NEW CASTLE left office, Mr. GLADSTONE, to the amaze ment of many, joined Lord PALMERSTON! Yet his subsequent bolting away from the Premier was even more extraordinary than his first ad hesion to him. In neither case did the Right Honourable Gentleman give sufficient reasons to the public for such remarkable conduct. But even since then Mr. GLADSTONE has conducted himself in a most extraordinary manner. He was a party to the Crimean expedition. With his eyes open he joined Lord PALMERSTON, and then, after leaving him on the ostensible ground of "no inquiry," Mr. GLADSTONE poured forth a most emphatic con demnation of the expedition. This contra dictory conduct in all that relates to the Russian war can only be matched by his authorship of the work on " Church and State" —his promulgation of" A State Conscience " his leaving the Ministry of Sir R. PEEL rather than vote for the grant to Maynooth—and his subsequent championship of the Papal Aggres sion. More of a metaphysician than a statesman, and more of a casuist than either, Mr. GLAD STONE has always received credit for entire freedom from personal motives. Submerged in the whelming tide of public opinion, Mr. GLADSTONE desperately catches at crotchets in hopes of gaining political buoyancy. But he is doomed to sink. In Mr. DISRAELI'S memora ble words, " Public men in this country de " pond upon public confidence ; without that " they are nothing." And what confidence can be reposed in a man of such intellectual eccentricity as Mr. GLADSTONE ? His speech at Hawarden is a climax to his continuation of crotchets. Eng land is thinking of the war, and Mr. GLAD STONE lectures at length upon colonies. His mode of doing so was eminently characteristic. Invalid card•players play picquet with a dummy ; and a favourite mode of Mr. GLAD STONE'S exercitation is to set up a sophistical dummy, bristling with rusty fallacies, and armed clip-ii pie with old prejudices, and then he gallantly strips the lay figure of its pon derous blunders, and looks round trium phantly for admiration at his prowess. In the morbid anatomy of defunct errors he works his scalpel with singular energy. His stabs at what are slain are really fearful ; but he has not the muscularity of mind, the athletic vigour of intellect, and the bold hardi hood of temperament required for a great party strategist in England. He has a fluctu ating temperament and a feeble volition. He never, like a really great man, applies the whole of his mental faculties to a subject ; but as a mathematician thinks with only a corner of his understanding. With a more THE PRESS. consistent conduct, and with a steadier cha racter, he might have obtained enough of political support to render him both practical and powerful. + 1 - aa' nig Npaioyn,oß-GENERAL., Ix -Eti our last issue W e ' jointed out some of the ,ii ore pAninerit feat es which should charac terise 'Ole foreign Plof the new Governor- General ; and we sla ow proceed to enume rate some of the 4estic measures most needed in India, and most calculated to insure Pii4e'rity to the people under Min, as 'Well as his own success. In doing so, we must neces• sarily be brief, and content ourselves with drawing attention generally to the line of action that should be pursued. To begin with the subordinate Governments of Madras and Bombay, these will be found to be shorn of all power, and compelled in a great measure to remain stationary from the. want of means to progress. To these the new Governor-General will do well to restore much of the control over their Presidencies which the act of 1833 deprived them of ; and, while exercising a general supervision as to the amount of their expenditure on public I works and establishments, leave the details of that expenditure pretty much to the local knowledge and experience of the local Governor and Council. In the same way he will be inclined to give to commissioners and col lectors a much greater power of control over the establishments under them than they possess at present. The great fault of the Indian official system is, that the higher func tionaries of Government possess far too much power over the liberties and fortunes of the public at large, and far too little over their own subordinates, by whom the enormous power delegated to them is so constantly abused. A cultivator, or merchant, or banker, may be imprisoned and tortured and ruined by an official in the most summary manner ; but, if it is a question of punishing the sub ordinate who has thus abused his powers, the collector is almost powerless from the numerous and complicated provisions against dismissal which the Government has of late years made. In endeavouring to correct a too arbitrary exercise of power by collectors over their establishments, the Government has now run quite int.) the opposite extreme, and sub ordinates kncwn to be tyrannical and incom - petent, and more than suspected of corruption, are allowed to continue their career unchecked as long as they can escape being caught in the actual perpetration of any flagrant crime. To civilians really anxious to act well towards the people (and there are not wanting many such in India) their exists no greater stumbling block than this powerlessness of control over those over whom their right of promotion, removal, or dismissal, ought in fact to be almost unlimited. The next point to which the new Governor- General should devote his attention is the land revenue—if, indeed, it be not the first of all. The principles which should guide him in respect to this have been so often laid down in the columns of this Journal that repetition were needless. They may be summed up in assessment by a lump sum on the whole estate or holding, instead of by the acre, so as to encourage, instead of, as now, impeding the cultivation of waste lands; in the granting leases of their estates or holdings to all who may desire them ; in the insertion of a clause in every such lease, entitling the holder of it to become at any time the purchaser of the freehold on payment of the sum stated in it, and which should not exceed the number of years' purchase money indicated by the selling rate of the public funds in India for the day; and by the granting facilities for such pur chase to the smaller class of cultivators by allowing them to pay the purchase-money by instalments—reserving, however, the delivery of the freehold till the whole was paid. It is by such means alone that we shall ever get a firmer hold of India than the numerous dynasties have had that have existed before us, because it is by such means alone that we SATURDAY, shall bind up irrevocably with our own in terests the interests of all who are connected with the land. Another measure not less necessary for the salvation of the hat4hieners aid cultivatora is the extbnsihn to theititerinr of the bankruptcy I ,ll‘ laws air ti ftninist*e "i)y fie Crown Courts in the clt4es Ibf Bombri ,' Mat Fas, and Calcutta. At pritient Vieariy the. holtSlbf the villages and distritts off 'the hiteriOr alte'overrun by a race Of smilill tioney-leitteltii Off the most exacting and nthcrupulous kind. They act in league generally With the minor native officials, with whom they are in many cases connected by ties of relationship as well as by bonds of mutual interest and profit; and, having got the culti vators of a whole district into their meshes, the latter become, with their families, virtually the slaves of the money-lender, from whom, aided as he is by the officers of Government, there is no escape. Laws allowing of un limited interest, and conferring at the same time unlimited power over the person, the property, and all the future earnings of the debtor, are as cruel in operation as in princi ple they are false. The farmer in India can never enter into' those costly operations in volving some outlay, by which alone the resources of the country can be developed, until he shall obtain the same protection in the event of his honest efforts being unsuccess ful as is accorded to the ordinary trader at the Presidencies, or to the cultivator of a farm in England. Imprisonment for life, and the sacrifice of all the future earnings of oneself and one's family are too heavy a penalty to pay for a miscalculation of chances In a business so dependent for success on influences over which the follower of it can have no control. If credit be the soul of enterprise, whether agricultural or commercial, it is of the highest importance to remove those shackles from it which prevent all but the reckless or the fraudulent from availing themselves of it. A state of the law which repels the honest, the industrious, and the thoughtful, the only persons in whose hands credit can be useful, must, it is clear, be wrong. The exten sion of the bankruptcy laws to the Mofussil, while it checked the gambling loans now made on most usurious terms to the cultivators on the chance of what the terrors of the law may extract from them, would extend the willing ness of the careful and industrious to embark in sound undertakings beyond their' own means to enter into, and which the present state of the law prevents their taking the risks of on themselves. If Lord CANNING shall but carry out these two measures alone out of those we have pointed out to him, he will have fairly earned from the merchants and manu facturers of this country, as well as from•the people of India, a statue of gold. Such mea sures would quadruple native produce, and quadruple the consumption of manufactures sent out from home. It would, moreover, greatly increase the revenue, and add to the value of land in our Eastern empire. It is an empire in which the whole genius of the people is agricultural, in which capital is abundant, and in which the productive powers of Nature are exhaustless. In such a country nothing could possibly prevent the growth of the highest possible agricultural prosperity but absurd regulations, which make it impos sible in most parts of India for a capitalist to invest any portion of his millions amassed by commerce, or acquired by descent, in the pur chase or in the cultivation of land. In our next we shall cursorily advert to the judicial system, the police, and other points to which to discuss at large we must devote se parate articles ; and there we shall close this passing sketch of the policy that should be pur sued by the new Governor-General if he would secure prosperity for our empire there, and for himself success. " S. G. 0." ON THE RUSSIAN SOLDIERY. EVERY one knows that "S. G. 0." was long a favored contributor to the Times. His con nection with it lately partook of a public character, as he was one of the Commissioners appointed to distribute the Times Fund in the East. The attack made on him by that paper of Wednesday was therefore well calculated