The Press. — London, England, 1856-02-23 00:00:00

FEBRUARY 23, 1856. proceeding. Lord HARDWICKE, with his dis tinguished naval experience, protested against it. Earl GREY, acutely and logically, exposed the difficulties of such a tribunal. Is it to be analagous to a court-martial? if so, why not have one? How is evidence, pro and contra, to be received? Is the Judge Advocate tieneial to be employed? Is the inquiry to be judicial? and by what precedents is an inquiry upon an inquiry, an appeal in England from a commission in the Crimea, to be guided? Lora BROUGHAM, then, with his judicial experience, pointed out clearly that there was no analogy between the Cintra In quiry and the proposed Board, which is to set like a court of appeal, from the ruling of the M'Neill-Tulloch Commission. Our readers must at once see that the course pursued by the authorities is of a most extraordinary character. But Lord CARDIGAN, in the opinion of all reasonable persons, as far as he is concerned, has done away with the necessity for the pro posed Board. To the country his Lordship has frankly given an explanation. The whole question turns upon dates, and the charge of neglect applies to the fortnight between the 14th and 28th of November, 1854. At that period Lord CARDIGAN was struggling with bad health; and he was compelled, much to his regret, to place himself before a medical board, and resign his command. The charge, for such it seems to be (whether intentionally, or otl►crwise, we cannot say), is, that the horses of the Light Cavalry Brigade were neglected by Lord CARDIGAN, and left to starve. His Lordship's answers to the charge are clear and close. He at once grapples with them, and demolishes them. 1 The evidence of the accusing witnesses admit that down to the 22nd of November the horses had received full, " or nearly full," ordi nary rations of barley The Brigade-Major of the Light Cavalry (Colonel MAYow) admits that do►en to the 22nd of November barley was supplied to the cavalry. Throughout the whole campaign it was upon barley that the horses maintained their condition, and the charge at Balaklava attests how well they stood it out. But at a subsequent period of his evidence Colonel MAYOW admits that he understood from the Commissariat officers that no hay could be got at Balaklava. 2. A vast quantity of indignation against LOl'd CARDIGAN has been excited, because his Lordship objected to the proposal that troop horses should be led down to Balaklava, and return laden with forage. On this point, Lord PeNNtuax fairly enough said in the House of Peers on Thursday evening :—" He (Lord CAR " DIGAN) might have had the best possible " reason for declining to do so." His Lord ship's reason was plain. " The horses were " then (when the request was made) totally " unfit to march seven or eight miles and " back again, heavily laden with forage." By adopting the course recommended, a greater number would have perished. The plain truth is, that the Commissariat in every direction had broken down. Routine ran riot ; difficulties had not been foreseen by the War Department at home, and the whole army, officers and men, paid the penalty. But to charge Lord CARDIGAN with neglect, can be refitted by attending to the collateral state ments of the accusing witnesses, which destroy each other. How his Lordship did his duty, let us hear the testimony of Sir EDMUND LYONS : I was sorry to hear that your lordship was obliged to leave this army—obliged you certainly were, for no man fouglit against th e effects of rude campaigning, as well as against the enemy, more manfully than your lordship ; to wit, the beat and privations on the Danube, the cold and exposure before Sebastopol, and the glorious charge before I Sal a k lava. These are strong words, and they are dated on the 3rd of January, 1855, two months after the alleged neglect took place. Sir EDMUND I,ross was then ou the spot in the Crimea, and would he ever have written such a letter as that, if he believed that any charges were hanging over Lord CARDIGAN'S head, or even if any accusations were then made against him? THE PRESS. THE JUDICIAL BENCH AT HOME AND IN INDIA. THE straining at gnats and swallowing camels is an old practice which is just now being exemplified by the dealings of the Ministry with the Judicial Bench at home and in India. Here, by their own account, they are suddenly smitten with an intense desire to establish the greatest possible judicial efficiency. In England, the High Court of Appeal, the House of Lords, they would have remodelled; while all judges who have arrived at the age of the Premier are to be removed from the Bench in Ireland. The names of LYNDHURST, and BROUGHAM, and St. LEONARDS, and CAMP BELL, in addition to the Government's own Chancellor, Lord CRANWORTH, are no longer to be held as guarantees of appellate efficiency ; and such men as PENNEFATHER, and LEFROY, and TORRENS, are held up as equally unfit to hold seats in the courts below. The remedy proposed for one of the alleged evils is, to be sure, rather inconsistent with what is said of the other; for, while age is the objection made to the Irish Judges, even though it be unac companied by auy physical inability to per form the duties of their office, the alleged defect in the House of Lords is to be cured by the introduction of a gouty old gentleman between seventy and eighty, whose infirmities have some time since induced his retirement from the Bench, and, for the present at least, pre vent his taking his seat, even if no other ob stacle existed. But while the Ministry are thus straining at gnats in respect of the Bench at home, let us see what they are doing in respect to the Bench of India. There they have a Bench to deal with which is not merely of doubtful efficiency from the age of its members, but the gross incompetence of which is patent and known to all the world. There they have to do, not with a Bench who, whatever their infirmities, have vast legal learning, and long jud'xial experience, and great stores of wis dom to aid them in their judgments, but, on tho contrary, they have to deal with judges who never read a page of law in their lives, who know nothing whatever of the principles of jurisprudence, and who have nothing on earth to guide them in their decisions but the common sense with which Nature may have blessed them, unless, as is the case in most instances, they are content to rely on the interested advice of their highly-bribed native clerks. If this be thought language too strong to use in respect of them, let us turn to that used by Lord CAMPBELL on the very same subject in the House of Lords. After strongly praising the Supreme Court Judges in India, and par ticularly the Chief Justice of Bengal, Sir LAWRENCE PEEL, he said that— Whenever the proceedings of the inferior courts had come before the Committee of the Privy Council, he had been compelled to feel that the gentlemen who occupied the Bench in those courts were wholly uninformed of the principles on which justice should be administered. And again : They possessed none of the qualifications of judges, and the consequence was that their decisions were entirely op. posed to every principle of justice. And again : The Duke of Argyll had, he thought, been somewhat prudish in his criticism of the phrases which had been used by the natives of India in describing theirgrievances; it was not reasonable to expect them to he very mealy mouthed; and for himself, as regarded the administration of justice in the inferior courts, he thought no language could be too extravagant in describing its enormities. Such is the language used by the Chief Justice of England in describing the courts of the Company which the same Ministry that affects such a regard for the administration of justice in England allows to trifle with the properties and lives of a hundred and fifty millions of British subjects in India. For, be it remembered that the Supreme Courts have only jurisdiction over the Presidency capitals, and that the courts for all the rest of the natives are the shamelessly incompetent courts which Lord CAMPBELL thus depicts. With such judges on the Bench, it must ob viously be a mere toss up whether every decision in a civil case do not entail a judicial robbery, and every decision in a criminal case 171 a judicial murder. Yet in this instance the camel is swallowed; these incompetent judges are allowed to continue their course un checked ; the mass of misery they entail upon the natives is unthought of; the quantity of blood unjustly shed by them is unheeded; and any one more conscientious than the rest who thinks fit to expose them is met by the cry of wishing to impede the spread of civilisa tion and enlightenment in the East. To suppose that the present Adminstration are acting in ignorance in allowing this fright ful state of things to continue, is a thing, in our opinion, utterly impossible. They must know as well as we do what the Company's courts really are, and how fatally injurious are their results. Indeed, if they had ever had any doubts on the subject, the appeal case of the Kurruckboor Rajah, in which judgment was delivered lately by Mr PEMBERTON LEIGH, and the case of Mrs. DYCE SOMBRE, in which Sir JOHN DODSON pronounced the award the other day, and the ease of the Coorg Rajah, in which Sir John RositrAY delivered an interlocutory judgment in the present week, would be quite sufficient effectually to open their eyes to the fact that the Directors, like their judges in India, " are wholly uninformed of the princi " ples on which justice should be adminis " tered." This, indeed, is a fact which they appear to be painfully reminded of whenever their writs are carried out of their own juris diction into her Majesty's courts oflaw. In truth, however, it is not a blindness of the judgment, but the blindness of supposed self-interests, that closes our Ministers' eyes to the state of the Bench in India. There are some politi cians who would perpetuate any amount of wrong rather than sacrifice a supporter's vote. And the only three of the Directors that have seats in the House of Commons are to be found uniformly voting with Ministers in every division that takes place. This is the mess of pottage for which the birthright of a hundred and fifty millions of our subjects is deliberately sold ; this is the reason why Ministers are deaf to their cries, and blind to the enormities which the Chief .Justice has described as being habitually perpetrated by the Company's courts in India.. THE GERMAN PRESS ON THE ATTITUDE OF PRUSSIA. WE can only briefly allude to the comments made by the Journal de Frankfort, upon the article which appeared in THE PRESS of the 9th insc. on the admission of Prussia to the Conferences at Paris. Our German contem porary, in quoting the declaration from THE PRESS—" We desire the Peace in prospect to " rest upon the broadest and most solii foun " dations, and to be assured by the only " guarantee which from the nature of the " case it can have—the collective might and " opinion of Europe "—says that it would adhere to the truth of that principle, and argue from it for the admission of Prussia, even though the neutrality of Prussia had been as complete as THE PRESS represented it. But our German contemporary contends that Prussia has not been neutral. It says : On the 13th January, 18.54, Austria, Prussia, England, and France, signed, through the mediation of their repre sentatives at the Conference of Vienna, a protocol in which they declared themselves for the maintenance of the sovereignty and independence of the Ottoman Porte, for the protectorate of the Christians of the East, exercised collectively by the five great Powers, and for ulterior con cessions to be accorded to the Eastern Christians by the sovereign will of the Sultan. On the oth April, 1t 4, Austria, Prussia, England, and France, signed, by their representatives at the Vienna Conference, another protocol, in which they declared the continuance of their union, with the view of maintaining the temtorial independence of Turkey, for which end the evacuation of the Danubian Principalities by the Russian troops became a sine qua nun. On the 23rd May, in the same year, Austria, Prussia, England, and France, signed at Vienna another protocol, by which they recognised that the convention concluded on the '4 0t h April, between Austria and Prussia, was based entirely on the principles established by the protocol of the 9th of April. On the 3rd June Austria summoned Russia to evacuate the Danubian Principalities, and on the 19th June Prussia became a party to the Austrian summons. _ '1