The Press. — London, England, 1855-06-09 00:00:00

JUNE 9, 1855. We do not, however, despond of the public mind of England. We recollect that all great evils provoke a reaction. Whirligigs are getting out of fashion. The creatures of " General Clamour," listening to his whispers, and slavish to his words, are covering themselves with merited contempt, and from all quarters a demand is begining to arise for firm govern ment and steady administrators. It is our belief that Ministerial power to be stable can be based only on Conservative influence. The tribunitian interest has split the " Liberal" party, and its unity is at end. The opinion that England can be best ruled by a Conserva tive Ministry is spreading as a general convic tiou, and persons not friendly hitherto to the chiefs of the Conservative Party are now ,anxious that the telegraph should convey the news that Lord DERBY has been ordered to " Head-Quarters" iu place of " General Cla " mour," cashiered. THE LATE NEWS FROM INDIA. IF any doubt had ever existed in our minds as to the entire correctness of the views we have all along taken of the affairs of our Eastern empire it would have been set at rest by the late news from India. In respect to every point our anticipations have been completely verified. The return of the Burmese ambas sadors to their country has been signalised by extensive preparations for war; on the north-west frontier the Candahar chiefs are openly threatening us ; the aggressive policy of the Governor-General towards the frontier tribes has raised up more than ordinary bitter ness among them, and one of the largest forces ever sent against them has been com pelled by them to retreat. To crown all, the Company's financial position at the end of the year has proved even worse than we predicted, and the deficit on the preceding year of eight hundred thousand pounds has been increased to a deficit on the last year of two millions and a half sterling, The Government organ in India announces as a set off to all this a treaty with Dosr MAHOMED of Cabul, but every one of ordinary penetration sees that this is a mere plan on the part of the Affghan chief to ex tract money in the shape of subsidies from us, and that if the occasion should ever arrive for his services being really required by us the treaty would be found to be just so much waste paper. No treaty with Cabul will ever mee the views of the Affghans which does not in elude the cession to them of the portion of their integral territories held by us—the dis trict and city of Peshawur—and that is a ces sion which, under existing circumstances, we are not prepared to advocate, however much it might, on many grounds, tend to the advantage of both States. For the deplorable state of things which this late news from India indicates we cannot but hold the present Administiation and their predecessor the Coalition responsible. for it is the unsatisfactory manner in which the duty of control has been exercised by the India Board which has been mainly, if not entirely, the cause of it. It is the theory which Sir CHARLES WOOD propounded and followed—that India must be governed in India—which has been at the bottom of the mischief. The notion may be a very convenient one for a President utterly ignorant of his duties and above making up for his deficiencies in this respect by increased energy and study ; but India will never be properly governed when it ie not 'in all material points of policy governed entirely from England—that is, until there shall be a President of the India Board prepared to resume those active functions in the government of India which were virtually abdicated by Sir CHARLES WOOD. Lord ELLEN BOROUGH, when examined as a witness at the expiration of the last charter, gave the true idea of what a President of the India Board should be. His reply was, that when he was President of the India Board he governed India entirely himself. With a President fitted for his post at the head of the India Board there would have been nothing more easy than to curb effec tually that spirit of aggression for the pur poses of aggrandisement which is really at the THE PRESS. bottom of the present state of things in India. Had our demands on the Burmese Govern ment been limited to the necessities of the case, the capture of Rangoon, with a small portion of the territory around it, would have probably afforded a sufficient material gua rantee for its compliance with them, and we should have thus conquered a speedy, honourable, and advantageous peace. As it is, we are involved in an endless labyrinth of military and naval operations in a country in which neither honour nor profit is to be gained ; and these operations appear likely, under the present system, to prove endless. Our troops are decimated by sickness and our military chest is exhausted in acquiring suc cessive portions of a country which will never pay the cost attending its possession, and the acquisition of which could only be of use for the single purpose of enforcing satisfactory terms of peace from the sovereign who is its proper owner. As to the chiefs of Candahar and Cabul their main, if not their only, power of annoyance arises from the state of ' exasperation into which we have driven the Mahomedan tribes whom we claim as subjects and their kindred tribes upon our north-west frontier ; and this exasperation has been caused, as we have over and over again shown, by proceedings on the part of the Indian Government towards them of the most wanton description. It is all very well to set down these mountaineers as murderers and robbers by profession, but a very little knowledge of them will show that they are neither given to murder nor robbery as long as they are left to possess their homes, and lands, and herds, peacefully and un molested. When, to be sure, their herds are carried off, their villages burnt down, their wives and children driven to the hillsides shelterless, and their brethren shot down like wild beasts by our soldiery wherever they are met with, they act as all men under such cir• cumstances w ill do, and none more readily, as history shows, than the mountain races of Britain. But why should these brave moun taineers be slaughtered and harassed by our Government in this way when their only crime is that they refuse to pay rent to the Company for the lands which they have held from time immemorial, under numberless suc ceeding dynasties, without payment? The Government of India has no more right to levy rent from them now because the dynasty under which they lived is changed than WILLIAM of Orange would have had to levy rent from the nobility of this country because there had been in his person a change in the dynasty that sat on the throne of England. Let the Company, when overthrowing a prince and conquering his kingdom, be content to limit its vengeance to the sovereign, and respect the rights and privileges of the nobility and commonality who are content to transfer their allegiance to it, and there will be little more heard of these frontier disturbances which drain away our best soldiers, exhaust our treasuries, and are a perpetually running ulcer in the constitution of India. Need we add, that with the frontier pacified and the Burmese war put an end to we should be in a position to care comparatively little about the Candahar chiefs and Don MAHOMED, and should be able very well to pay our way, with out having a deficit annually to be met by fresh burdens on the rapidly-decreasing in come of our Eastern empire. 535 who excited false hopes by promises of reform, and taught that popular agitation was to be employed to intimidate the Legislature and the Crown, were the men who excited that re volutionary ferment which they subsequently, when in possession of the prize they played for, found it convenient to repress. There is not a step in the progless of Chartism from its commencement, not an eccentricity of its movement, for the worst results of which it might not refer to the Whig party and to Whig placemen or ex-place men yet alive. Their hard, inhuman, doc trinaire measures provoked the sufferings of the labourer, and their reckless, seditious, self seeking policy mapped him out his plan. If Parson STEPHENS talked (with rather a Hibernian figure) of "firing a musket against " the Poor Law," he had precedent in " heads " rolling in the dust," and if constituted autho rity was very unconstitutionally threatened at Kersall Moor and at many another stirring scene, it fared little better in 1830 at Birmingham or in Piccadilly. To rouse and exasperate the masses—to refuse to adopt all acts of prevention of outrage—nay, to positively encourage the agitators in their course, and then to take a sudden and desperate legal vengeance—this was the treatment adopted by the Whigs to the Chartists. This cannot be considered an extreme charge by any one who reads the history of the first ten years of the reformed con• stitution. Chartism in fact, though not in name, dates from the assembling of the Reformed Parliament. The old Whig families who had condescended to the old Whig tricks were content enough to have a bourgeois House of Commons, but the bourgeoisie had been only powerful by the aid of the working men, and to kick away that ladder was the diffi culty both of the middle classes and the Whigs. Lord JOHN RUSSELL, with that savoir faire which always distinguishes him at a crisis, had in the first Parliament of the Queen announced his famous finality determination —a finality like the Vienna Conferences " with the door open." The " Working Men's Association" was formed, and a certain peti tion to be presented by Mr. ROEBUCK em bodied the points which were afterwards called (by a fanciful application of a title derived from the royal prerogative) " Tho People's Charter." A committee to draw up this charter was formed, we believe, on the 7th of June, 1837. It was drawn up accordingly, and received the ominous good wishes of the late Mr. DANIEL O'CONNELL, as he dramatically handed it to Mr. LOVETT, the cabinetmaker. This " charter" was now circulated throughout the provinces, where it was received as suffer ing bodies of people receive any novelty which promises them immediate physical relief. The history of the agitation which followed, and the sketches of individuals given in this little work by, Mr. GAMMAGE, though intended by the author as a for midable account of democratic rage and tribunitial glory, is of more interest to the morbid political anatomist, as showing the effects of the false cry of equality to which the Whigs had accustomed the people from the end of the last century. The leaders, with very few exceptions, were persons who abandoned the drudgery of various handicrafts for what is amusingly called " labour " in the cause of the people. The amount of popular myths which these gentlemen distributed is truly remarkable from the historical assurances that universal suffrage was the law and custom up to the time of HENRY VI., to the prophecies that the aristocracy, with whom they had in fact, as they afterwards showed, no quarrel, were frightened, and about to surrender certain vaguely-defined rights and privileges to the torchlight meetings. These agitators were at the outset assisted by certain dilletanti seditionists like Sir WILLIAM MOLTS WORTH, who in 1837 was anxious for enlarging the franchise, adopting the ballot, and shorten ing parliaments. The great meetings of 1837-8 were an excitement, and, as our French neighbours g i f e o c r t e t d h ew w or o k r kin an / l c a u s n s e . e s d ; loss oausytt: to w a •he t a l t t e r h n a e e d y t ionne them, they expected a proper tionate amount of excitement and cheap promises. At these meetings, accordingly, CHARTIST HISTORY. A LITTLE WORK has just reached our hands, written apparently by a person well versed in the particulars of Chartist history, which sug gests s )me remarks on that singular agitation. In no other country, and at no other period, could we find a " movement " which concen trated so much honest enthusiasm under leaders so unworthy, and which displayed, in spite of diversity of objects and absurdity of counsels, so much uncompromising deter mination. That its coming existence should not have been foreseen by men who asssumed to call themselves statesmen is at least re markable. Those who roused the passions of the masses to favour their own party purposes, a I the masses to favour their own party purposes, I promisc3. . _