The Press. — London, England, 1856-04-19 00:00:00

362 hid been provided fur the conveyance of a f ;no transport service had been organited , no supplies had been collected. Lord CLARENDON would object to the plans of the Turkish Government, hut had nothing to pro pose himself. Not till the garrison of Kars was reduced to the last extremity of suffering, and till its relief had become impossible, did our Government signify its readiness to approve any schate which the panic of al. Divan suggested. What a satire is the telegraphic despatch of Lord CLARENDON On the 9th of August last, authorising tin hopeless expedition of OMER PACHA to Redout-Kaleh, upon the deliberate documents which informed WILLIAMS, four months previously, that no assistance would be rendered ! The real question for the House of Com mons, sitting as the great inquest of the n aim', to determine is, whether more should n.,t have been dune for the relief of Kars than c add possibly have been anticipated from the despatches of Lord CLARENDON ? Had a reso lu.ion been taken in the spring of last year to comply with the requisitions of General WILLIAMS, and to have afforded the army of Asia the direct assistance of this country, the army of MOURAVIEFF would surely have been ' kept in check, and perhaps have been signally discomfited. To affirm that the Ad ministration is free from the blame of the Ears disaster will be to approve a weak, vacillating, and inglorious policy, and to de clare that the wisest course fur our Govern ment, when a great military operation in which rr e are nearly concerned is in pi ogress, on the issue of which the reputation of Eng land in the East must mainly depend, is to follow the precedent established by Lord CLARENDON and Lord PANMURE, and do— NOTHING. MAYNOOTH. THE question of Maynooth is one on which nothing new is to be said ; but there are some special points which deserve to be recollected now, when insidious attempts are made to sow dissension amongst th• 3 great Conserva tive connection of the country. And it can. not be denied that (looked upon from any side) Maynooth is environed with difficulties f a high political nature. The institution of hat college was, in point of fact one of the precursory measures by which Mr. PITT was enabled to achieve his splendid success of tle Irish Union Whether that great states m to acted rightly or wrongly, there can be no doubt about his acts; and the " Castlereagh Correspondence" shows how powerful was the aid which both Lord CASTLEREAGH and Mr Pm himself received from the Irish Catholic body at that time. There is not a little danger, therefore, that cert in retrograde politicians in Ireland would have a locus standi given to them, if the whole transactions of the Irish Union were now over hauled for rigid examination. There are " Liberal " politicians in England who are no friends to the Irish Church Establishment; and yet they refrain from actively attacking it, because they feel that the whole question of the Union is involved in maintenance of the Irish Church. In the foundation of May flood) there was nn extraordinary concurrence of influences, which placed it upon a certain basis. The Prime Minister of England pro posed it; Mr. BURKE (whose attachment to the Established Church will not be disputed) zealously advocated it; and the Parliament of Ireland (then exclusively Protestant) sane tioned k its establishment. It was continued after the Union, and voter; were taken in its f tvour during the rule of Mr. PERCEVAL and Lor.l LIVERPOOL. A few years since it was ti erred upon an Act of Parliament. We are I s ar from contending that these con siderations close the inquiry into the case. lki THE PRESS. But their mere enumeration points to a prac tical ditlieulty not easily dealt with. To repeal an Act of Parliament is often far more difficult titan to enact it in the first instance. The repealing bill has .d be worked through the House of Cosatnons; and the House of Lords, in high political cos**, is firm in exercising its • opinioa. But, withbat dismissing the subject et haustingly, w. a* remark that the feeljig of tliti eountt Waynooth, and Of §. largo portion of Mile Rouse of Commons, is far from being inetketual. The fact is, that the public inind has repeatedly been irritated by rumours pointing to at pro bable endowment of the Minion Catholic Church in Ireland We are convinced, by observation, that much of the strength of the Anti-Maynooth feeling is owing to the dread of some " Liberal" Minister going down to the House of Commons and recommending that a large share of the public money should be given to the parish priests of Ireland. The feeling, therefore, which demonstrates itself against Maynooth is in reality a protest against further endowments being given to the Roman Catholics; and even the Radicals of England refrain from actively attacking the Irish Church, when they thus find that a limited endowment is conscientiously and vigorously objected to by suet influential interests in this country. It ought, also, be remembered, that the feeling against Maynooth rose contemporane ously with the furious assault of O'Cosser.l. and the Irish Repeaters upon the Protestant Church The priests had become politicians, and the public spirit revolted against their organised power and its reckless exercise. But the Conservative elem •nt has since begun to predominate in Irish society. The trade of the Agitator is. at a discount, and the Irish branch of the United Church of Great Britain and Ireland was never more prosperous than now. It would, perhaps, be bad policy at the present time to be manufacturing a" grievance" for the mouths of Irish declaimers. We can not forget how powerfully Lord JOHN RUSSELL aided the Pope by his reckless mode of deal ing with the aggression; and action upon this grave subject is almost impossible, except upon a cool and guarded view of the %hole caie, by a council of statesmen, deliberative and free. The taunts cast upon the Conservative leaders in relation to this question are idle. Their position upon it is precisely the same as that of their political predecessors We recol lect that in 1840 Sir HENRY GEORGE WARD (then a Member of the House) taunted the late Sir ROBERT PEEL, with having acted in the same way as the present Conservative chiefs, whom it is factiously sought to dis parage. We need not rake into Hansard for Sir HOBERT PEEL'S reply. But the " Liberals" have never been able to appreciate the sense of prospective responsibility which guides Con-ervatives in opposition. We cannot close these remarks without directing attention to the important fact that moat influential anti zealous Irish Conserva tives have expressed a strong wish that the progress of social harmony in Ireland should not be interrupted by polemical discussion, which can lead to no practical conclusion. The opinions of those gentlemen are entitled to the careful consideration of the Conserva tive body of the empire. TORTURE IN INDIA. AT a time when the Company are so hypocriti cally breaking through a solemn treaty with the Government of Oude, on the ground of its having failed to establish such a system of administration as should be conducive to the prosperity of the people of that State, it is not uninstructive to see the mirror held up by the Peers of England so clearly to themselves. The general tone of the debate in the Lords on Monday night was excellent—the only ex ception being that exhibited by the organ of the Ministry, the Duke of ARGYLL He spoke in a spirit of heartless flippancy of the sufferings SATURDAY, of the people that we are happily unaccustomed to hear from the largehearted aristocracy of these realms. It was a spirit very much resembling that current among the French noblesse about the Court just prior to the first Revolution, and wNeh was as much as anything the cause ofthla ferocity displayed to astds them by the poo,p 1 e when these in turn qo t the upper Wind: To tell the natives in reply t theft Eeittleii Praying for protec tion aftinst cdltlitl that it was a time honottneil institution, not only necessary but right in native eyes, and that it excited no ab horence, no astonishment, no repugnance, in their miuda,—thin was to wieak ghoul witla a hearltess and ill-timed pleasantry which de served, and should have met With, a 'tern rebuke. Does his Grace suppose that hone of the sons of ADAM possess the feeling recog nised even in brutes but those of his own figure and his own degree? He quotes, to be sure, the Commissioners Report as his text for this libel upon his fellow-men, but his quotations from the same Report, a little further on, shows that he perverts the sense of it and makes them say what they never meant; for there they tell us that, so far from being satisfied with this state of things, the whole people were ay ing out to them for protection from the cruel ties of their brother natives in the Company's employ—men, be it remarked, who would have less inducement to torture were the revenue requirements of our Government less imperative on themselves, and who in any case would be without, the power to Wain(' but for the support of their European in islet's and the three hundred thousand bayonets which these command. The best proof of what the true feelings of the natives are on the subject of cruelty, or indeed ill-treatment towards them of any kind, will be found in their• very summary resort to a remedy whenever it is in their power to obtain redress. No native, for instance, ever submits to torture or ill-usage within the limits of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Courts, as many a European coming temporarily to Bombay or Calcutta has learned to his cost. Nor will any native hardly allow himself to be ill-treated in a military camp, for there, too, he knows that he is under the effective protection of martial law. Nor is torture so very frequent in the non regulation pro vinces which are ruled chiefly by military men, who bring with them that intimate knowledge of the natives which is never so thoroughly gaine I as by serving in native regiments, and that habit of listening to com plaints of all kinds, and front all persons, which forms so essential a part of the business of an Indian officer's life. If everywhere else throughout India torture has been prevalent, RS undoubtedly it has, the cause is to be found in the explanation given to the Coaunis sioners by the people themselves. They said that complaints to their civilian rulers were so few because nobody listened to them, and that they had not the slightest hope or chance of obtaining redress. Perhaps the penalty attached in the Mofussil to the failure to male out a case against an official to the satisfac tion of his superior had also something to do with the matter. If we mistake not, a heavy fine or a public flogging and hard labour are the prescribed punishment fora native making what the superior of the official may choose to call a false complaint, in addition to the ruin he is pretty certain to incur. As soon as this Indian prohibitive duty upon justice was taken off, and Lord HARRIS showed that the Government was in earnest in what it pro fessed, then there was no dearth whatever of complainants against the system, many poor men walking for the purpose a distance of above four hundred miles. The fact is, that, apart from the fiscal exae• Lions of the Government (which, by the way, are infinitely greater at the Presidency capi tals, where no torture is practised, than any where else), the true cause of the police and revenue underlings in India exceeding their powers and swelling their incomes by extor tion, is one that would under similar etreum stances operate equally in England too. Ab solve, for instance, our English tax collectors , and policemen, and excisemen, from all amena bility for their acts to any one but their own 1 f t t 1 s l I, I i i 1 t r 1 [ ; ; p °lll 1 ;