The Press. — London, England, 1856-04-05 00:00:00

.. ~ .. ~ ~ \ 314 THE PRESS. SATURDAY, were enlisted in a moment of emergency, who have deserved well of their country, and who, by the practice of arms, and the wild life of a camp in the enemy's country, have become in a great degree unfitted for the pursuits of in dustrial existence at home. For some time to come we may be assured there will bo a large army, and a large military expenditure. The question is, how to utilise the lipg.er as much as possible—in other words, how to carry through the greatest practicable amount of army reform with the least offence . to indivi duals, and that before the average English mind subsides into its usual profound indiffer ence to everything connected with the business of arms. respect the navy has an advantage ; for every ship afloat engaged in continual conflict with the elements is a camp of instruction in itself. Lastly, as some reduction must be made, make it in the fipe, RF# in the militia. Too much colonial (pity is still done by British troops. panad, otild 4ustralia, at least, nugl}t suffiep, by %pans of local forces paid by themselves, for . their owo protection in time of peace. ;pdia oust have a European army— knd it ;patters httle whether that army be called the Queen's or the Company's, espe cially as the double Government will sooner or later cease to exist altogether. But since. in prudence, and in deference to public feel ing, a considerable body of armed men must for some years be retained within the four seas, let a part of them, at least, be withdrawn for six weeks only in each twelvemonth, not for the whole of their time, from industrial occupations. Militiamen, well-driaed, are little inferior to regulars. In any popular quarrel they would enlist rapidly enough to fill up the ranks of the line. In fact, they did so throughout 1854 and 1855 ; and, since our oldest and most constitutional force is also the cheapest, it were folly to throw away an advan tage so easily retained. These hints, roughly outlined, we put forth for consideration and discussion. Now or never army reform must be worked out. Two years hence it will be too late, for then Alma and Inkermann will have consecrated as many abuses as the Peninsula and Waterloo. the picture for him, his views of the desira bility of annexing everything having been announced to India in the Satta►•a case. He seized, therefore, and annexed the province, revolutionising it after his peculiar system. And the consequence is, that the revenue ob tained from it would have long ago left it in hopeless bankruptcy but for the aid of the surplus revenues of Bengal. His Lordship's method of preparing the public accounts, it may be noticed, is peculiar, for he credits all the revenue received in his newly-annexed provinces as so much gain ; while all the most material items of the cost of occupation are debited against the general government of India, and paid for out of the surplus accruing from the revenues of Bengal. At this rate, of course, there is no province so costly, no dis trict so barren, that will not pay. The most irredeemably bad bit of land in England would pay likewise in the hands of a capitalist who was content to leave the interest of capital and money expended on wages and stock and implements—in short, the entire cost of his operations—wholly out of account. Farm ing is always successful with gentlemen who do not look to profits, and who, let them spend what they may, have always a handsome balance at Coutts'. But when that balance turns to a deficit things wear another appear ance ; and that is precisely the case with Lord DALHOUSIE, who has at last exhausted what seemed the inexhaustible surplus of Lower Bengal,—Bengal, that has ever cost us little, paid us most munificently, and made more progress in material wealth than all the rest of India put together, simply because, ►n the outset, it fell under a good plain man, the Marquis CORNWALLIS, one of the noblest beings that ever lived. He was net a grasp all ; on the contrary, his tendency, like COKE of Norfolk's, was rather to be over-generous to the tenantry ; but his generosity has had its reward. He made the settlement light, and confirmed it in perpetuity ; and this simple process has been the secret of the zemindara' progress, and of his great success. Lord DALHOUSIE'S next annexation was Pegu, which was described by him and his organs at the time as the richest acquisition that India had ever made. It was to furnish teak for shipbuilding, and rice for food, not only for its own inhabitants, or even for all India only, but for England and America as well—in short, for all the world. We long since pointed out the absurdity of such expectations in this Journal, and what is now admitted by the Indian organ of the Government to be the result? Why, in a paragraph copied the other day in the Times, we were informed that the bubble had burst, that it was found that all the valuable timber in Pegu had been loaf; since cut down, and that we should have to grow our forests, if we were to have forests at all, before we could expect to have a tree to sell. As to the rice, it was discovered that Pegu was either de serted, or could never have been much inha bited, and that the only chance of our getting rice from it lay in the importation previously of some four millions of people to cultivate it from Bengal ! In the meantime the few millions sterling expended on the acquisition form what repudiating foreigners call passive capital," our only present consolation being that if we hold Burmah two hundred years longer the province may then be peopled, and our teak forests be iu order for cutting down. The last new bubble is Oude, but that will soon burst too, as all the others have done : indeed, the whole statements put forth re garding it are much more befitting the period of the South Sea bubble than our own more sober times. We have not hesitated to enter into the question as regards these proceedings in all its bearings, because we are compelled by duty to do so, but we feel at the same time that by far the most fitting person to dispose of this ridiculous revenue seeker from un planted forests and uninhabited swamps is our laughter-loving contemporary Ma. poses. The fact is, that, however good a thing it may appear to be to have the ownership of land, the only revenue that can possibly be derived from land is the result of the skill and capital that are applied to it. Whether the question be of mines, of agriculture, of building, or of forest culture, the maxim holds good. To revolu tionise a State, therefore, on the Dalhousie Our suggestions on this head will be brief, and we shall leave them with very little argu ment to the good sense of our readers. First,—let - us, once for all, agree to drop invidious comments, replies, and recrimina tions about the merits or demerits of respec tive officers in the crisis of fifteen months ago. " Life is short, art is long "—the necessities of the present may very well absorb whatever energies Nature has given to any of us—let the past be past—let peace be declared at home as well as abroad. Even NAPOLEON has proclaimed an amnesty ; the war is over, and well over; the characters of all who took a prominent part in it are decided by public opinion ; and neither newspaper controversy, nor reports founded on hearsay evidence, will alter the world's judgment, though it is quite natural that the parties themselves and their champions should think otherwise. Next, — let every political man who has sense to see truth, and honesty to declare it, exert himself to remove, as far as may be, from the popular mind that plausible and dangerous delusion, that a large army is necessarily an effective one, and a small army necessarily a feeble one. At no time is this theory true ; least of all is it true in time of peace. An immense estab lishment, kept up on a war-footing for a series of years, will merely leave us at the end of the present generation with heavier taxes, a debt not diminished, vast stores of weapons and munitions of a kind which later inventions will probably have superseded, and a pension list burdened with superannuated colonels and generals. What England wants now, is not a prodigious number of soldiers kei>t under arms, but a thoroughly trained and efficient corps of officers, camps of instruction for the men, a militia disembodied, but yearly called out for exercise, and, above all, stringent tests of scientific aptitude imposed on the engineering and artillery departments. In these departments, if nowhere else, every commission should be thrown open to compe tition, due care being taken to provide for the exclusion of candidates physically incapable. The effect of open competition in stimulating industry needs no proof; and if it did, the Indian Civil Service examinations have sup plied that proof in abundance. Farther—by this means you do away with the risk either of dangerous levelling or of invidious ex clusiveness ; for to recognised superiority of professional knowledge a degree of precedence will be granted by the soldier which he would reluctantly yield either to mere wealth or to mere rank. k For other branches of the service a com petitive test is not necessary ; indeed, while purchase lasts, it would be impossible to es tablish one. But examinations there should be ; not of the pedantic character of those hitherto imposed, but plain, practical, and searching as far as they go. Elementary mathematics, drawing and mapping, physical geography, tactics, strategy, fortification, and at least one modern language, may be re quired, and are all useful t o the future com mander. Camps of instruction serve a threefold pur pose—they accustom the soldier to live as in real war, roughly, and supplying most of his wants by his own skill; they teach officers to handle large masses, and regiments to act in concert ; and, most important of all, they en able those in command to distinguish the mere barrack-lounger—the officer who comes into the service allured by the notions of idle ness, independence, society, and a red coat— from the working, zealous subaltern, to whom war is a profession, not a pretext. In this DOES ANNEXATION PAY? IN preceding issues we have satisfactorily dis posed of the question of the confiscation of Oude, in so far as the morality of the proceed ing is concerned. We have also shown how little likely the people of that country are to benefit by the measure so hypocritically alleged to have been taken solely in their behalf. So alleged, at least, in the proclama tion; for the organs of Government which defend the spoliation very clearly tell us that it is the two million five hundred thousand pounds surplus income expected from it that are the true grounds of this enormous wrong. These are to form the real justification of this unparalleled outrage upon every principle of moral obligation and international law. On this point, too, we have somewhat touched. Let us go farther into it, and see whether annexation on the Dalhousie principle ever did, or I ever possibly can, pay. He has already tried it in three provinces, and in each of them has it unmistakeably broken down : is he likely to be more successful in Oude ? Sattara was one of the richest kingdoms of its size throughout the South. Small as it was, it produced fifteen lacs yearly to its native Bove reign, or, in English money, a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. If we had wanted a tribute from it, he would have gladly compounded with us, and paid us annually a third of that amount. At the same time it was an admira bly conducted Government, and most popular with the natives, so there was no bill of indict ment against its sovereign's family on that score. We were also bound by solemn treaty to maintain it, as affirmed by the maksrs of, and parties to, the treaty on the British side, the Honourable MOUNTSTEWART ELPHINSTONE and GRANT DUFF. Lord DALHOUSIE, however, preferred to adopt his own interpretation, he being then as unconversant with such matters as the statue at Charing-cross. The kingdom was annexed, or, in other words, revolu tionised. And the result was, not a surplus, but a deficit annually of something like six thousand pounds. The whole native surplus had been swallowed up, and the deficiency be sides. His Lordship's next annexation was the Punjaub. which Lord HARDINGE had left un annexed, when by the conduct of its rulers it had been justly forfeited. The reasons for his forbearance were partly of a military nature, but he was also considerably influenced by the calculation made for him by the Secretary to the Indian Government, that it would not pay. Two years afterwards Lord Dat.HonstE found a more pliant financier, who reversed llli