The Press. — London, England, 1857-09-19 00:00:00

THE PRESS, SEPTEMBER 19,107. judge and magistrate of a place so pillaged, and by such means reduced to an utter mass of mural and ph)sieal degradation ; and Sir Charles Napier has proved that my experience was not, as it could not be, singular, by de claring that the Governor-General of India did not know that his own camp was at once a scene and a cause of curses on our very name. Who, then, shall wonder at an outbreak which practical men declared imminent unless India were better governed'? When we hear of outbreaks in native States (an opportu nity which we always seize to appropriate them to our selves), we invariably impute them to tyranny. If the people of a country throw off one Government, it is with the hope of obtaining a better; and I can take upon my self to say that a worse they never can have than that which has brought matters to this pass with us. In no Government that ought to be permitted to exist, or that can possibly exist for any length of time securely, can outrages and judicial robberies, such as I have wit nessed, be perpetrated and upheld. Yet the British Par liament and the British public have suffered such a Government to flourish unquestioned. Now, however, that the spectacle afforded by that country has at last turned the eyes of the world towards Indian matters, the truth may perhaps leak out, in spite of the Court of Directors and the Board of Control, who have been so long playing into one another's hands, and been corrupt ing everybody. At all events I will lend my assistance to the promulgation of the truth, and only regret that I cannot (to quote the language used of me in the London Mail of January 9, INS-t) reveal, under circumstances which would insure a wide publicity and extensive perusal of my evidence, those monstrous perversions of justice to which I have been for years endeavouring to direct the public attention. Mr. Luard then proceeds to make a number of statements, as he avers, on his own know ledge, regarding the iniquities, and misgovern. ment, and corruption that prevail. He winds up these by telling us that one of his own assistants, a Bombay civilian, caused the death of a native by beating him and having urine put down his throat by the lowest caste that. could be procured, having previously with his own hands dragged him to prison by a rope tied about his heels, beating him with a bridle on the hack all the way. And for doing this he adds that the civilian escaped scot-free. He says that a commander-in-chief in India once ordered his aide-de-camp to shoot a trooper of the Bengal cavalry, and that the trooper was shot accordingly and the case hushed up. He affirms that he has known respectable native officers tied up and Hogged before the whole regiment, and then dismissed, without any sort of inquiry ; and that, though they com plained, the commanding officer was related to Lord Dalhousie, and that of course there was no redress. Such are some of the charges brought by Mr. Luard against our rule, and he winds up his pamphlet as follows : - - . - Colonel Sykes says an inquiry into the causes of this mutiny must take place. It ought; but no inquiry ever has taken place yet into Indian crimes, simply because they are too disgraceful and too numerous ; but the affairs of India have now become history. Its people have thrown off our rule, and this they never would have done had we governed them better than their native princea ; nor would anything have caused the Hindoos and Mahomedans to combine saving a great common cause ; and no other cause yet assigned wculd affect the preju dices of both. This outbreak has been foreseen for years. Sir Charles Napier foretold it ; so did the tree press ; so did the natives themselves ; so did I ; so did every honest, practical man who had courage to speak his real opinions. The annexation of Gude was the last inciting cause of it by bringing so large a number of Bengal sepoys under our rule; but the origin of the revolt is to he found entire in these pages, and need not be sought fur elsewhere. And now, reconstructors of the Indian empire, stiy what shall be done with this people of whom rightly or wrongly you have aasutned the government and all its fearful responsibilities towards God and min? Shall the sun which never sets on our dominions only shine on this portion of them to display a scene of suffering, degradation, and brutality on the one hand, and crime, corruption, and rapacity on the other, which the world has rarely seen equalled and—in its atrocious details of misery—never surpassed ? Shall we who proudly consider ourselves the salt of the earth ( how aptly do the words apply, if the salt have lost its savour wherewithal shall it be savoured ), the champions of Christianity, the promoters of civilisation, shall we first commit by the hands of our Government and then wilfully ignore, and by ignoring sanction, the bribery, corruption, falsehood, murder, and tyranny of which these pages contain an outline too scanty to convey the faintest idea of the fearful reality ? Whatever the late atrocities may have proved the natives of India to he, we have undertaken to rule them—sad we cannot escape the responsibilities that rule imposes on us. The day of reckoning must come, if it be not already at the doors. Our armies may reconquer Indian ground, but Indian hearts and the great object of our mission to India are lust fur ever. That object was to benefit our fellow. creatures, advance the interests of civilisation, and aid in the propagation of Christianity. We have disgraced God's holy name in a heathen land ; we have deliberately made ourselves a curse to those whom it was our duty to have protected and defended; we have driven them to The great song of " The Land o' the Leal," too well known for us to quote, was also from Lady Nairn's pen. Most of her productions were anonymous, and she enjoyed the gratifi cation of hearing them praised, but did not avow the authorship, except in a fow instances. The Editor says : Some years subsequent to this event, it occurred to the relatives and literary friends of the deceased Baroness that as theme could no longer be any reason for retaining her incognita, full justice should be done to her memory by the publication of a collected edition of her works. This scheme was partially executed in an elegant folio, entitled " Lays from Strathearn ; by Carolina Baroness Nairn. Arranged with Symphonies and Accompaniments for the Pianoforte, by Finlay Dun." It bears the imprint of Lon don, and has no date. In this work, of which a new edi tion will speedily be published by Messrs. Paterson, music ' sellers, Edinburgh, are contained seventy songs, but the larger proportion of the author's lyrics still remain in MS. From her representatives we have received permis sion to select her best lyrics for the present work, and to insert several pieties hitherto unpublished. Of the lays which we have selected, several are new versions to old airs ; the majority, though unknown as the composition of Lady Nairn, are already familiar in the drawing•room and the cottage. For winning simplicity, graceful expression, and exquisite pathos, her compositions are especially re markable; but when her muse prompts to humour, the laugh is sprightly and overpowering. We rejoice to know the fact that we shall have all the poems of this great female song. writer collected, and we anticipate great piba sure in perusing them. An Address to the Reconstructors of our Indian Empire. By Robert Davies Luard, late of the Bombay Civil Service. London : Effing ham Wilson. THosE who are inclined to think with the Times that the present revolt in India is the fruit of pampering and petting, the caprice of a spoiled people towards a too indulgent and paternal Government, will do well to read this pamphlet, which is written in rather un • measured language by an extreme partisan of the opposite view. There is nothing like hearing both sides of a story, and it is only by studying the cons as well as the pros that the public is likely to arrive at the truth. Some extracts from Mr. Luard's work we shall lay before our readers, in order that they may see the notion as to the causes of the out break that he has formed. His introduction is as follows : Whenever the reconatructors of our Indian empire succeed in getting through the mass of garble which will as usual be interposed to mislead them, they will find that the present disasters in India are the inevitable conse• quences of the culpable apathy of the British nation, the utter indifference it has always manifested to the affairs of that country, and its consequent ignorance of what most concerns the happiness and welfare of a population numbering one-seventh of the whole human race. At the close of the charter granted in 1833 for twenty years, the people of India, groaning under the moat galling tyranny the world ever beheld—a tyranny which has been ably depicted by the late Sir Charles Napier, in a letter which appeared in the Times of August 17th, 1857—at the close of that charter the people of India did endeavour by every means in their power to rouse the people of Eng• land to a consideration of their wrongs. Tne press teemed with accusations against men in power ; names and facts were brought forward; it was confidently foretold that unless the requirements of the people of India were at tended to they would at last take matters into their own bands ; that they could no longer submit to be robbed by process of law ; to have their homes desecrated and their religion insulted, with the fullest approval of men who proclaimed themselves to be quite irrespective of tight and wrong. The charter, however, was renewed, as usual, with indecent haste. The natives of India saw that they were once more leased out to their former tyrannical masters ; and as this renewal has always been a signal for the officers of Governmeht to throw aside all decency, I can only suppose the doings in India in 15.5.1 55.46 to have been pretty much what they were in 1834 3.5 36, and subse quently. until inquiry, snch as it was, came round. No people, not even Hindoos, will year alter year sub• mit to be plundered and sneered at ; to have such viola tions of the law as I have witnessed brought home to every man's house; to be denied all justice on the spot; to be referred to England, and then to spend the rest of their lives between the Court of Directors and the Board of Control—which latter upon one occasion (Meer Jaffeer Alee:s case) informed them coolly, by the mouth of its president, that if the petitioner succeeded in obtaining justice it would induce numbers of other natives to follow his example, and the India Board would then be besieged by petitioners for redress ; to find, in short, that although the British Parliament enacts laws they do not take care that these laws are not made, as they have been, instru ments of tyranny. So outrageous is the villainy which I have witnessed, that, nest to the inhuman conduct of the natives in these mutinies, nothing gave me no low an opinion of their characters as the manner in which they quietly looked on and saw whole communities pillaged by the officers of Government, European and native. I was at one time 921 rebellion by our own acts; and let ns beware lest when the books are opened the blood 01 our countrymen and countrywomen slain at Delhi be not demanded at our hands ; together with that of the thousands our soldiers will slay, urged by the stern necessity we ourselves have provoked ! It is in vain to send oat while's. Send out honest men, if any honest men can be found, to undertake the task of purification; let justice hold the balance with an equal hand; cease to shelve the just complaints of those whom you have oppressed ; abolish the torture whose existence no shuffling can dissemble; equalise taxation ; punish bribery as you now punish honesty ; and put down the reign of ignorance, incapacity, and nepotism at home. So perhaps it may yet be time to save India. If n rt. hope not to conquer her in any other way, but rather desire it to be expunged from the list of our possessions as the foulest blot that ever disgraced the British name. These are the statements made by Mr. Lnard, and which are based, he says, on his own experience as a civil servant of the Con►- pany for many years. If the nation desires to maintain its character for honesty, it will corn- pd inquiry into them, for any attempt to blink the question can only be accepted as a sign of conscious guilt. It may suit the pur pose of the Ministers to try and stifle niscus sion, both in India and in England, because they know that the farther discussion pro ceeds the deeper will he the evidence that this revolt has been occasioned by their own mis conduct, incapacity, and neglect. But what may suit the purpose of the Ministers will be very adverse to the interests of the people of these realms. The Ministers are here to day and gone to-morrow, and what is said of them is soon forgatten ; but the character of the nation will be irrecoverable when once it has been allowed to pass away. lf, then, it is the same England that it once was, let it do its duty manfully, be the consequences to the Cabinet what they will. Let it show that if it has erred in ignorance it will not continue to sin with its eyes open; and that if like Francis I. of France it has lost all besides its ho:►our, it is not prepared at the bidding of a Premier to sacrifice that as well. Soyer's Culinary Campaign. Being Historical Reminiscences of the Late War. With the Plain Art of Cookery fur Military and Civil Institutions, the Army, Navy, Public, &c. &c. By Alexis Soyer. London : Routledge. THE Vatel of modern times, Alexis Soyer, though he has immortalised himself by his dishes, appears resolved to win a reputation by his books. Hia works upon cookery are in every home. He has given us a dietary scale both for rich and poor ; with the origin• ality of his race, he has invented for us every year a relish, or a nectar, or a new sauce, and yet he is not content—he must write a book upon the Crimea. To give freshness and novelty to a subject so hackneyed re quired not so much peculiar qualifications as' a new point of view, and there can be no two opinions on the subject that Soyer has seized the only one left intact from which the Cri mean war could he regarded, and that both a prominent and an important one in our ope rations before Sebastopol. M. Soyer endea vours to express from this, the "culinary," point of view, his experiences of a campaign in the Crimea, and we are bound to say that he has given us a very entertaining and a very instructive book. A vein of culinary criticism, of course, runs through the volume. Soyer never sits down to, or sees others sit down to, a breakfast, a dinner, or a supper, on board ship or on shore, without telling us whether the appetites were good and of what the dishes consisted. A dinner at Marseilles was very " recherché," but the " bouillabaisse " threw all the accessories into the shade. On board every ship he sails in he makes the ac quaintance of the cook, superintends the bill of fare for the play, and estimates the value of the captain as a good fellow according to the nature of his tastes, whether for luxurious epicurism or coarse voracity. He visits Ajaccio, and moralises upon the kitchen grate " which first aliment ed the brain " of Napoleon. He describes with gusto the well constructed charcoal•stove, upon which, " no " doubt, the most delicious fish and genie " were submitted to the highest perfection of " the culinary art." Evidences of roasting by wood fire and broiling in the ashes he detects with the keen eye of a master, while in an old I semicircular oven he is confident were baked