The Press. — London, England, 1857-08-08 00:00:00

In 1833, under Lord GREY'S Cabinet, Mr. MACAULAY delivered a most elaborate address on the history and character of the East India Company. It was spoken to empty benches, and an assembly like the House of Commons could scarcely be expected to sit out such an elaborate dissertation, which was more suited for the Professor's Chair of History at Cam bridge than for the old chapel of St. Stephen's. Yet Speaker MANNERS SerroN estimated the speech as one of the finest that had for many years been heard in Parliament. Mr. MACAULAY treated the Company as a " potentate," and actually spoke of its " sovereignty." He thus described the Mttjesty of the East India Com pany : It is impossible to fix on any one day, or any one year, as the day or the year when the Company became a great potentate. It has been the fashion to fix on the year 1765, the year in which the Company received from the Mogul a commission authonsing them to administer the revenues of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, as the precise date of their sovereignty. I am utterly at a has to understand why this period should be selected. Long before 1765 the Company had the reality of political power. Long before that year, they made a nabob of Arcot ; they made and unmade nabobs of Bengal; they humbled the Vizier of Oude ; they braved the Emperor of Hindostan himself. More than half the revenues of Bengal, as Lord Clive stated, were. under one pretence or another, administered by them. And after the grant, the Company was not, in form an l name, an independent power. It was merely a minister of the Court• of Delhi. Its coinage bore the name of Shah Alum. The inscription which, till the time of Lord Hastings, appeared on the seal of the Governor- General, declared that great functionary to be the slave of the Mogul. Even to this day we have never formally deposed the King of Delhi. The Company contents itself with being mayor of the palace, while the roi _faineant is suffered to play at being a sovereign. This is fine rhetoric, but faulty logic. No one can say that the East India Company is a "sovereign" power, and the use of the word by Mr. MACAULAY is calculated to mislead. The East India Company is an association of merchants, traders, and capitalists, each and all of whom are subjects of Queen VICTORIA One might as well talk of the sovereignty of the Bank of England. The East India Com pany is, after all, a derivative body, and can not be argued for as an original and substan tive power of State. We admit its antiquity, and its claims from long prescription. We recognise the high value of its privileges, and its enormous influence cannot possibly be denied. But the use of the word "sovereignty" is certainly inapplicable to the Company, and any moral problem which commences with that misused word, must receive a fallacious solution. When Mr. MACAULAY spoke his India speech of 1833, the question then, as now, was asked, " How are we to rule India?" It was an age of large views, and loose thinking. Reform was rushed after with revolutionary speed. A prodigious domestic change had been effected in the constitution of the British Par liament. The House of Peers and the Church were attacked, and capitalists were alarmed. In such times it was not likely that the ear of the public could be obtained for a careful and practical treatment of the great Indian question. It was felt, also, by many, that Parliament had committed itself at the end of the last centu►y by its impeachment, tending to a persecution, of WARREN HASTINGS; and we suspect, if the truth could be clearly ascer tained on this point, that many independent minds are still deterred from a steady and severely scrutinising survey of the Indian problem. They think of the exaggerations of BURKE, the splendid but impractical declama tion of SHER - DAN; and some of them recollect the last words spoken by Sir PHILIP FRANCIS, in his last Parliamentary speech in 1804. He had been listened to, and admired as a sort of Quixote of the Brahmins, but his twenty years' crusade on Indian subjects was thrown away : The impeachment of Mr. Hastings has cured me of the folly of thinking that I could serve India, though I devoted twentv•two years to it. I, in fact, was tried, and Mr. Ha4tings acquitted. My spirits are exhausted, and my mind subdued by a long, unthankful, and moat invidious application to the pursuit, in which I have never been able to do any good. A most affecting confession from a man of such energy, eloquence, and complete com mand of his subject. The long Revolutionary War closing in 1815, and the domestic condition of England, both commercial and political, from 1815 to THE PRESS, AUGUST 8, 1857. 1830, the state of Ireland, and other questions, completely diverted the public attention. Practical statesmen avoided the study of India, and our Oriental empire was virtually left to the routine of the Company. It is a proof how little Indian abuses went home to the hearts of the people of England in those days, that SYDNEY SMITH, a popular satirist, and ever in search of subjects, directed his trenchant pen at spring guns, and let India alone. So also with the tongue of Lord BROUGHAM, who exerted himself more for the Blacks than for the Hindoos. To serve the negroes we ruined our own colonies, and virtually increased the foreign slave trade. Upwards of a hundred millions of Hindoos are left to a Company, whose charter we renewed in 1833, after a sprinkling of pam phlets, and a shower of speeches. Philanthropy, ►f the purest, is often the least practical of the virtues. But it used to be snid in those days, as wo hear it said now—" What can you possibly do " with such an immense problem ? You " might as well think of reforming the " universe." Mr. MACAULAY attempted to apply " reason and justice" to this vast Indian problem ; and we are afraid that his views upon it were neither practical nor philoso phical, and were only specimens of sounding rhetoric and spirkling sophistry. After allud ing to the number of intricate legal questions ,onnee.ted with the affairs of the Company, Mr MACAULAY in 1833 spoke the following remarkable words : But the fact is, sir, that the municipal law was not made for controversies of this description. The existence of such a body as this gigantic corporation—this political monster of two natures—subject in one hemisphere, sove• reign in another—had never been contemplated by the legislators or judges of former ages. Nothing but gro• tesque absurdity and atrocious injustice could have been the effect, if the claims and liabilities of such a body had been settled according to the rules of Westminster•hall—if the maxims of conveyanlers had been applied to the titles by which flourishing cities and provinces are held, or the maxims of the law•merchant to those promissory notes which are the securities for a great national debt, raised for the purpose of exterminating the Pindarrees, and humbling the Burmese. That is taking what Crown lawyers would call a constructive view of the moral rule applica ble to such a case as the India Company. On such a plea any absolutism on earth could be defended. We are at once made to think of the still finer rhetoric and far purer ethics of ERSKINE in his magnificent burst of moral passion about " defending an empire which " Heaven never gave by means which Heaven " never can approve." " But then," continued Mr. MACAULAY, " the " whole case is that of an anomaly." After going through a long process of special plead ing, the brilliant casuist, thus endeavoured to approximate to a conclusion:— I, then, take these things as proved, that the Crown must have a certain authority over India, that there must he an efficient check on the authority of the Crown, and that the HOUSi of Commons is not an efficient check. We must, then, find some other body to prform that im portant office. We have such a body—the Company• Shall we discard it ? And lie proceeded to answer the last question thus : It is true that the powor of the Company is an anomaly in politics. It is strange, very strange, that a joint-stock society of traders--a society the shares of which are daily passed from hand t 3 hand —a society the component parts of which are perpetually changing—a society which, judg ing a priori from its constitution, we should have said was as little fitted for imperial functions as the Merchant Tailors' Company or the New River Company—should be intrusted with the sovereignty of a larger population, the disposal of a larger clear revenue, the command of a larger army. than are under the direct management of the Executive Government of the United Kingdom. But what constitution can we give to ou► Indian Empire which shall not be strange, which shall not be anomalous That empire is itself the strangest of all political anomalies. We have nut the last sentences iu itali s, and in that style of reasoning any complex institution may be called, and, in fact, is an anomaly. The British Constitution, for ex ample, could be cited as an anomaly. Feeling the difficulty . of the ease that he was ma ki ng on the Indian theme, he then broke off into the following passage of intensely sophistical rhetoric : That a handful of adventurers from an island in the Atlantic should have subjugated a vast country divided from the place of their birth by half the globe —a country which, at no very distant period, was merely the subject of fable to the nauous of Europe —a country never before 763 violated by the most renowned of Western conquerors—a country which Trojan never entered—a country lying beyond the point where the phalanx of Alexander refused to proceed; that we should govern a territory 10,000 miles from us—a territory larger and more populous than France, Spain, Italy, and Germany put together—a tern. tority the present clear revenue of which exceeds the present clear revenue of any State in the world, France excepted—a territory inhabited by men differing from us in race, colour, language, manners, murals, religion ; these are prodigies to w!lich the world has seen nothing similar. Reason is confounded. We interrogate the past in vain. General rules are almost useless where the whole is one vast exception. The Company is an anomaly ; but it is part of a system where everything is anomaly. It Is the strangest of all Governments; but it is designed for the strangest of all empires. This may he dazzling rhetoric, but it is most deceitful logic. The human nature of the Hindoos or of the Brahmins is not an excep tion to tlie laws of MAN, sunk and prostrate, but still craving after a better lot, and aspiring even in his degradation. The whole passage teems with sophisms and misstatement. Mr. DISRAELE was profoundly right when he said, in his great speech the other night, that our relation to our Indian subjects was like that of WILLIAM of ORANGE, in 1688, to England. A country cannot strictly be called " subju gated " when the religion of the people has been so carefully defended from the missionary ardour of the superior race; and the assertion that " the Company is part of a system where "everything is anomaly" is a self contradictory exaggeration. Such a style of reasoning, even if ingenious, is itself anomalous. It is having recourse to the artifice often employed by rhetoricians of evading a difficulty ; it is en deavouring to demonstrate a foregone conclu sion, and to carry off the argument in a cloud of words. But we must reserve till another day further ernmnents on Mr. MACAULA Y'S views on the East India Company. THE DIVORCE BILL. WHEN people are worsted in argument they frequently grow all the more positive, and endeavour by a loud voice and a scornful air to maintain the ground they can no longer defend by reason. If they happen for the time to have numbers on their side, there is no limit to the blustering violence with which they will trample down an unpalatable truth. They will go through all the antics of Lord Peter's bull to awe and terrify those who are rash enough to differ from them, and, when evidence begins to fail, imitate Titus Oates, and roar all over the country that " they are stifling the plaat." Unhappily experience has taught them that this mode of procedure is but too often suc cessful. Where immediate action is involved, the victory of the moment is as good as a vic tory for all time. The subjects of CHARLES 11. might return to their senses, but they could not restore to life the victims whom their folly had destroyed ; and men may change their minds about the truth and justice of any par ticular statute, but when cnco it is intei woven with the law of the land there is small chance of its rescindment. The journal which is at this moment playing the dignified and enlightened part of the Titus Oates of the Press is that which has been permitted to assume the title of the leading journal. Unable to compete with the opponents of the Divorce Bill in logic, it has recourse to oracular contradie tiwi. This is so—this is not so ; sic solo, sic jubco. When Scripture and reason are against it, then the vote of the majority is better than all argument. When the vote of the majority is against it, as on a recent occa sion, then an opinion based on bigotry and supported by faction cannot be allowed to override the dictates of Scripture and reason ! While carefully avoiding to grapple with the point of scholarship at issue, the Times in forms its readers that it " has no great respect " for the scholarship of nine thousand clergy " men." And, instead of attempting to refute them by superior argument, " we," says the same authority," beg to assure them that what " they are pleased to remember so posi " tively, is a downright untruth," i.e., that by the Word of GOD marriage with a divorced woman is adulterous. " We beg to as " sure them." Indeed ! The clergy must be greatly interested in the fact, and could