The Press. — London, England, 1857-06-20 00:00:00

594 langour which reigns over those departments where " economy ' is supposed to be most studied ! _ _ Let it not be forgotten that Mr. WILSON gave neither " the House " nor the country any aid as to the best mode of dealing with the question of " frightful expenditure." The speech of Mr. WILSON was the apology of an arithmetician, and not the luminous exposi tion of a statesman. It seems plain to us that the propriety of certain items of tran3- ferred expenditure will have to be brought into discussion. It required no wizard to tell us that the augmentation had grown up under the two leading tables of " transferred " charges and " new" charges. But the country, we suppose, is not to have the advantages of either Administrative or Economical Reform until the question of Par liamentary Reform be settled definitively and laid at rest. The State, under the Whigs, is to be allowed to fall into all kinds of extrava gance, and the public expenditure, instead of being made to flow with an equable and steady current, is to be swallowed up in a complete morass of " miscellaneous " profu sion. The prospect is a gloomy one for tax payers; and we sincerely trust that the Earl of ELLEssonouon and the Earl of NIALMES• BURY, who have both done good service on this most important subject, will not permit the spendthrifts of Liberalism to act without re sponsibility. The whole question of " Economical Reform " must be treated comprehensively, for there is not the least chance that the Whigs will improve as " Economists." Time, experience, and former miscarriages seem to make them worse, not better; and the subject of the finances is one to which Conservative statesmanship must be applied. Mr. DISRAELI was the first Minister who sought to bring all the income of tho country into the Public Exchequer. The proposal had at former periods been suggested by various Indepen dent Members, and by some public writers, but the Right Hon. Gentleman the Member for Bucks was the first official who assumed the responsibility of urging the Legislature to bring the collection of the revenue under the control of Parliament. Mr. GLADSTONE frankly and honourably admitted the services of the Right Hon. Member for Bucks on this important matter, when the Member for the University was himself engaged in carrying out those views. The country wants further financial improvements of the same kind. As Mr. WILSON throws all the responsibility upon "the House," it would be just fetribu tion if "the House " were to take him at his word, and teach him that if "the House " is to bear the blame of an indiscriminate ex penditure, it will also be ready to incur the responsibility of insisting that professed " Economists" in power should be more fertile in practical suggestions for retrench ment ; and the result of the division on the question of " The National Survey," on Thurs day night, shows that " the House " is likely to teach some new lessons to the Secretary for the Treasury. INDIAN PRINCES IN ENGLAND. A WEEKLY contemporary lately attempted to e3nnect the Indian mutinies with intrigues on the part of the Indian Princes and Nobles at present in England. It was stated that they hate ourrule, that they are surrounded by people who bear equally little love to it, and that these had probably transmitted to India those rumours of the proselytising views of the Government in which the disaffection of the Sepoys was said to have originated. That the several Indian Princes who have come all the way from India to petition against the injustice to which they have been subjected there, should hate the rule of those who have worked their ruin is a thing to be expected ; and that their followers should share in their feelings is also natural. But none of these have any connec tion, whether social, territorial, or religious, with the Hindoo Sepoys of Bengal, the Princes of Oude alone excepted. Any intrigues, how ever, carried on by them with the army would THE PRESS. be carried on, not from London, but on the Moh ; and the only chance of success for such attempts would be in our own misgovernment of the province lately subject to the King of Oude, but now annexed by us, and from which so many of the Bengal Sepoys come. If our sway is productive there of greater comfort and happiness, all the intrigues in the uni verse will fail of effect; but if, on the contrary, the annexation to our empire has brought with it only increased extortion and oppression, we may be sure that the tale told by the people to their sons and brothers in our ranks will speedily lay the foundations for an organisa tion against us more dangerous than any that has yet been seen. In India, as in England, the intriguer and toe demagogue are only powerful where the misconduct of the Govern ment has itself prepared the field for them in the shape of wide-spread social discontent. If we are to believe the accounts we read in the Indian papers, we must confess that there does seem to have been gross mismanagement by our authorities since the annexation of Oude. Not only does the annexation itself appear to have been accompanied by acts of violence and spoliation wholly indefensible, but the foundations of all property seem to have been unsettled to an extent unheard of under any civilised rule. If the Red Repub licans themselves had got possession of the country they could not have made greater havoc with all proprietary rights, and espe cially with ail proprietary rights in land. We hear on all sides of landowners dis possessed, of rent free tenures arbitrarily set aside, and of the assessment of whole districts being altered at pleasure—in short, of the Company's dealing in all respects with the province as if it were not merely entitled to the revenues of it, but as if all the property within it had become the spoil of its bow and spear; as if, in fact, it was an uninhabited island newly discovered with which the dis coverers had a right to do what they willed. Now, if this is really the manner in which our officials have been dealing with Oude, there will be no necessity for looking for the causes of Sepoy disaffection in the intrigues of the King; for in that case we have only to lay the blame of it on ourselves. Whether the stories we have heard on this subject have been ex aggerated or not, it is impossible for us, in the absence of any official information, to deter mine ; but there is this fact staring us in the face which goes a great way to confirm them —namely, that the administration of the province has been changed three times in about as many years. The British func tionaries appear, so far, to have agreed as little among themselves as they have with the land owners and the people of Oude. Such discord is not the best spectacle to hold out to a people who know by experience that disunion is weakness, if they have not learned the converse of the proposition, that union is strength. But though the late mutinies in the Bengal army have, as we believe, no connection what ever with any intrigues on the part of the Indian dispossessed princes now in London, yet we cannot help saying that the state of things which brings so many of these to our shores as petitioners against injustice is one calculated to prove in the last degree detri mental to the security of our rule. In the first place, the mere fact of there being so many complainants ready to incur all the cost and inconvenience of a voyage from India would be sufficient to convince any reas9nable per son that there must be some foundation for the charges made so generally against our officials there. But unhappily for the national character this is not merely a matter of infer ence, for we have before us the most con vincing proofs of their truth. In the most prominent of the cases that are now before the India Board for consideration the opinions of the most eminent lawyers in England have been taken, and they are all in favour of the petitioners' claims. Among those who have given expression to this view are both the pre sent and no less than three of the former law officers of the Crown. The proof of wrong rests thus on the most unimpeachable testimony— the testimony of the law officers of the very Government whose subordinates have done the acts of which the petitioners complain. S V TURDAY, It might, be thought that a country assuming for itself so high a position in the scale of civilisation as Great Britain would see but one course open to it under such circum stances—namely, frankly to admit the wrong which its own law officers declare to have been committed, and at once afford that redress which on a full review of the transactions they deem equitable and right. To do justice to those we have wronged is a duty not less bind ing on us collectively as a nation than it is on us individually when the question is between man and man. Yet what honest individual would persist in the retention of property which circumstances had placed in his power, when his own legal advisers, with all their natural partiality towards his interests, avowed that in respect of it he had not, either in law or equity, the merest semblance of a right? The principle upon which, we believe, the Government has confessedly acted, is one which is politically erroneous as well as wholly unjustifiable in a moral point of view. It is the principle that in India we cannot retrace our steps, and that whatever is done there by the authorities must be supported whether right or wrong. Now, it is easily capable of demonstration that but for their knowledge that they would be so supported the autho rities in India would have acted in all cases more scrupulously and more conscientiously than they have done ; thus much of the mis chief complained of would but for this prin ciple have never occurred at all. Irresponsibi lity there as well as everywhere else is the fruit ful parent of wrong. But leaving this point out of the question, there can be nothing possibly more erroneous than the idea that in India, any more than in any other country, persist. ence in injustice can be advantageous to the State. It has been tried more than once amid the despotisms that preceded us there, and through injustice those despotisms fell. It has been tried, too, by the despotisms of the Continent, and what has been the result? To fill other lands with refugees, whose whole fortunes and whose whole faculties are devoted to the destruction of those at whose hands they have suffered. To do, in fact, what our authorities in India are doing for us there as fast as they possibly can. Nor is it only in the intrigues of such that there is cause for danger ; the spectacle of these countless Indians is not lost to Europe, and is beginning in every capital of Ithe Continent to have its effect. Foreigners are beginning to perceive that the seagirt isle has its unguarded point as well as other countries—that the British Achilles is vulnerable in his heel. They know that England, deprived of her Indian empire, would sink to the level of Holland in the rank of European States, and they begin to see the weakness of the bonds that bind it to us, the accounts of the disaffection there, and the materials of disorganisation that on all sides exist. Nor are the natives who come here on their part less observant. They see our great ingenuity in arts and commerce, to be sure, but they see also on how narrow a basis our military power rests—the only part of our power that touches them. They see us obliged to enlist foreigners for our European wars, and they perceive at once that but for the aid of their fellow-natives, the Sepoys, we should be unable for an hour to hold Hindos. tan. In short, by our injustice we are not only making countless enemies, but we aro furnishing them with the knowledge requisite to give their hostility effect. If this is wisdom our Ministers are the wisest of men, but, be lieving it to be the extreme of folly, we im plore them, in heaven's name, to retrace their steps. We pray them, with the aid of the Crown lawyers, to settle the cases of these people according to the principles of equity and good conscience, and let them return, as they are only too desirous of doing, to their Indian homes. MINISTERS' MONEY. THE name of Lord DEBBY is most honourably associated with the preservation of the " United " Church of Great Britain and Ireland." Twenty four years since the Noble Earl introduced in ternal reforms in the management of the Irish Church, while he bravely defended it from external assailants. Those who aro ignorant 1