The Press. — London, England, 1857-09-05 00:00:00

and that the Government had been compelled to contract comparatively trifling loans in the Turkish money markets, to meet its most urgent exigencies. THE PRE S S, SEPTEMBER 5,1857. pire from destruction. For these imperial and 1 paramount objects the measures they are adopting are feeble and inadequate. Again, I have stigmatised the inconsistency of the Times on this momentous question. In its columns during the past month will be found abundant proof that its talented but unscrupulous conductors appre ciate fully the real extent of the peril, and are aware of the feelings which the atrocities it has recorded are calculated to excite. But under what influence is it that the leading journal abstains from denounc ing the comparative apathy it disapproves, from stimu lating public opinion to compel the Government to exercise the vigour it recommends, that it even palliates, and almost defends as great, the measures it proves to be insufficient and small? On Monday last, it declares that the intelligence it publishes " details deeds of infamy which will set the blood of every Englishman boiling in his veins." It advises that " Delhi should for the future only be known in history as Sodom and Gomorrah." It trusts that "no Englishman would be found to grudge a year's more income tax that the work of retribution may be done." It wishes that a "greater embodiment of militia" had taken place, because " we have still our work to do in India;" we shall want "much more assistance than that of ten regiments of militia;" and we must be prepared for "an annual home drain of 15,000 men." Yet it talks of recent accounts as " satisfactory and encouraging." It an nounces the embodiment of the very ten regiments of militia with only the passing remark, "we could ourselves have wished it had been more." It allows, without protest or remonstrance, Parliament to break up without any financial provision for the present emergency, except the beggarly sum of 200,0001. for this modicum of militia. It neither rouses the people to a consciousness of the urgency of the crisis, nor prepares them for the sacrifices it well knows they must encounter to avert it ; nor denounces the blindness which sends the Sovereign to Scotland, and scatters the Legislature in every direction, without any adequate provision made to meet the terrible exigency which exists and sur rounds us. I say, sir, unhesitatingly, that Parliament ought not to have been prorogued without placing at least five millions-at the disposal of the Executive Government on its responsibility to meet the Indian exigency; nor without an address to her Majesty, expressive in the strongest terms that language could supply of the unshaken determination of the British Parliament and the British people to main tain at any and at every cost the honour and dignity of the Crown, and the integrity and rights of the empire. On the effect of such a declaration in Europe as well as in Asia I need not dwell. It would have tended to restore a prestige which late events have lamentably impaired. The nation yawns listlessly on the edge of a precipice. It should be awakened. The Mansion-house subscrip tion ought to be reckoned by hundreds of thousands. The income tax ought if becessary to be doubled. The militia ought to be quintupled. The China expedition, if even necessary, as Lord Palmerston stimulated the country to believe it was, for main taining the honour and interests of England, ought to be persevered in, both to show that our threats were not a mere mano3uvring, " brutum fulmen," bullying but impotent, and to keep up a stream of military force in the Eastern seas, ready to be again diverted to India, if necessity should still require it. By such measures we should prove to the world that we are really the mighty, the undaunted, the uncon querable people we pretend to be. I have extended my remarks on these points to such a length that I dare scarcely venture on further intrusion ; yet I cannot let slip the opportunity for corroboratingitheltriumphant refutation in THE PRESS of Saturday last of Mr. Vernon Smith's inconceivably silly declaration, uttered on the 11th of August, that " any man would have been denounced as a mad man or a visionary who hal hinted that such an outbreak as has occurred would occur in India." You must of course consent, on the irrefragable evi dence of the numerous quotations you give from the cautions and predictions contained in your columns during the past three years, to be classed, in the judgment of Mr. Smith, with the late Sir Charles Napier, as a visionary or a madman. I have at this moment before me a letter from a distinguished officer of rank in the Indian army which necessarily includes him in the same maniacal category ; for, writing from Poonah on the 13th July, he says : These are terrible times, my dear friend. Not that they have come upon me unexpectedly ; I have seen the state of the native army long since, and hare written and spoken on it until I was tired. Here for some time past we have been extending our territory, and occupying it with the same small body of Europeans that were deemed necessary before. The same prop was to sustain India when her back had become long as when it was short, and who can wonder that tt now breaks in the middle ? I am, sir, your constant reader, Crvis Romitisa:s. Reigate, Sept. 2nd, 1857. AMERICA. Intelligence from New York to the 20th August states that Mr. Dallas will not for the present be removed from London. Mr. Mason at Paris, and Mr. Daniel at Turin, are to be superseded. The American merchants in China were prepared to present claims upon the British Government for losses caused by the bombardment of Canton, but adds, " The Government is precluded from pressing any demand upon England by the decision in the Grey town case." The Washington correspondent of the New York Herald asserts, on authority, that the Nicaraguan Minister had received advices that Nicaragua did not approve the contract of Costa Rica with Webster for the transit route, and altogether ignore - 1 it. The seizure of Formosa by the squadron is denied by the Government papers. The treaty between Persia and the United States, lately concluded at Paris, has been ratified. CHINA AND INDIA. The letters of the overland mail from India and the general intelligence will be found in another coiumn. In China nothing is doing. Lord Elgin has replied to an address of Hong Kong merchants, promising " to maintain the rights to which they are by treaty entitled;" and in alluding to the "diffi culties" which beset his mission, observes, " I see no reason to doubt that by prudence and patience, moderation and firmness, they may be overcome." Meanwhile, in the absence of his army, the noble earl," to while away his time," has gone on a mission to the north, taking with him a powerful squadron. At the mouth of the Pei ho Lord Elgin will endea vour to enter into negotiations with the Chinese Government at Pekin. Gorrtsgonlrtnte. THE GOVERNMENT AND THE INDIAN REVOLT. TO THE EDITOR OF " THE PRESS." Sir,—l distrust Lord Palmerston's principles, and I detest his policy ; but it is by no party standard I measure, nor in any hasty spirit I would comment on either the one or the other. The remarks with which I venture to trouble you are dictated solely by an overwhelming conviction of the dangerous in consistency of the conduct of his Government in a perilous crisis,—an inconsistency shared by the Ministerial press, and especially by the Times. Both appear to be living in the fool's paradise," in which the Indian authorities have so long and fatally slumbered ; but with the aggravation that, now admitting the danger, they are lulling the nation into a false security, and paralysing that feeling which alone can stimulate to the exertion the exigency de mands. Lord Palmerston greatly underrates the gravity of the peril that threatens our Indian empire. The Times forms a juster estimate of its magnitude, but administers anodynes where it should apply stimulants. To crown all, the destinies of that empire are confided to the superintending authority of—Vernon Smith ! The truth must be told; the country is in danger. It is high time that the people should drive the Government upwards to the recogni tion of the solemn truth,—Lord Palmerston temporises, while ruin threatens. On Friday last, her Majesty in a speech addressed to Britain, to India, to Europe, to the world, is made by our jaunty Premier to say that mutinies and dis turbances in Bengal, which have amazed and horrified the whole nation, have occasioned to her Majesty "extreme concern," and that " barbarities" — designating thus atrocities too monstrous for men tion, and infamies too foul for thought—have "filled her Majesty's heart with the deepest grief." Of course they have. " There needs no saint from heaven to tell us that." Her Majesty is a woman, a delicate, sensible, tender woman; strange, indeed, would it be if outrages on females that have disgraced humanity, and made every bosom thrill with shuddering awe, had not touched that heart with "deepest grief." But was this the only sentiment that should have been expressed from such a heart, on such an occa sion ? True, her Majesty expresses admiration of the conduct of many of her military and civil officers. True, her Majesty assures her Parliament that "she will omit no measures, calculated to quell these grave disorders." Sir, the nation justly confides in, respects, luves the Queen ; but I assert fearlessly that her Majesty's Ministers have omitted and are omitting the measures necessary, not for quelling grave die orders, but for promptly and effectually protecting European life and property in India, vindicating British sovereignty, and preserving our Indian em- 871 t'el HOW TO MAKE THINGS PLEASANT. TO THE EDITOR OF 66 THE PRESS." Sir,—Long an admiring reader of THE Pam, I have always regretted the deficiency of its editor in one most important qualification. He cannot make things look pleasant, but with a stolidity which is painful declines to gloss over facts or to conceal the real state of affairs. In no instance has this defici ency been more conspicuous than with respect to the Indian mutinies. Your contemporaries the Times and the Globe will have opened your eyes to your deficiencies, and the disgust they express at your plain speaking must be pretty general all over the country. Nor need you wonder at this, for you must admit that the mode of treatment of the Indian crisis adopted by the Ministerial papers and by her Majesty's Minis ters is much more pleasant than that which you so pertinaciously adhere to. It is refreshing to turn from the sickening horrors of the Indian massacres to the placid assurances that at the worst it is only a mil;tary revolt, in which the natives in no degree sympathise ; that the English are gathering in over whelming numbers round Delhi, while the muti neers inside are hastening the period of their retri bution by internal divisions, and that, defeated by our troops on all occasions, destitute of percussion caps, and dying like rotten sheep of cholera, they cannot long postpone the period when, by their wholesale destruction, we shall avenge the wrongs they have committed on our countrymen, raze Delhi to the ground, relieve Agra and Lucknow, and by the next mail learn the suppression of the revolt. Then, again, contrast the tone of your paper and of the Ministerial prints on another branch of the same subject. You are always commenting on the remissness of Ministers and the pococurante view taken by them of the most tragic and heartrending episode in English history. You even doubt the tremendous energy of Lord Canning, and cavil against the wisdom of Vernon Smith ; nor does the commanding presence of Macallum More induce you to be satisfied with his assurance that all has been done which the emergency requires. Perhaps your wicked perversity will even carry you so far as to denounce Lord Palmerston for adjourning Parlia ment without making any provision for borrowing those large sums of money which will be required to put down the mutiny; and you will argue, in ignorant defiance of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, that it is unreasonable to expect that the Indian Government, which for years back has had an annual deficit, will this year, with its expenses quadrupled and without one-third of its income, be able of itself to raise the necessary supplies. Nay, further, I can suppose you ill-advised enough to affirm that Lord Palmerston should have made provision for a large army of reserve ; and you will quote history to prove that the effective force of the thirty thousand men whom Government have sent out to conquer a country the size of Russia, with a population of a hundred millions, will be frightfully reduced even by the march over the thousand miles they have to make to reach Delhi. Such fear will for some time be the burden of your leaders ; but I submit for your consideration that, seeing the only merit of such a style of writing consists in its truth, and its only advantage in the importance of rightly appreciating the danger of our position, whether it is prudent to sacrifice your popu larity, and to be called by the Ministerial papers and their credulous supporters, who like to take things quietly, "anti-national," "Russian," and amen damnis And I put it to you commercially whether it would not be wiser to praise Lords Palmerston and Canning, to prophesy the easy extinction of the rebellion, the perfect adequacy of the "tremendous force" sent out, and to answer emphatically for our perfect safety at home, when, by the vigour of our Government, England has been denuded of troops ? Such a style of writing has only one fault—namely, falsehood—and there is no denying it has a trifling tendency to aggravate our dangers by inducing us to relax in our efforts ; but then it has the para mount advantage of being popular and of being greedily believed by all those who wish it to be true. I think I have put the case to you plainly enough, and hope that, after perusing this letter, you will see the propriety of following the lead of the Ministerial papers, to the great glory of Lord Pal merston, and the exceeding comfort of tho old women of England.—l am, sir, your obedient servant, J. A. G. For several hours on Thursday night and yester day morning (Friday) a fire of considerable magni tude raged in Gee-street, Brick lane, St. Luke's. The scene of this misfortune was the extensive premises of Mr. J. Strickland, picture-frame menu facturer, No. 25, Gee-street, whose premises were nearly 104) feet long by 50 feet wide. The entire premises were destroyed and tea adjoining houses most severely injured.