The Press.
London, England, 1855-05-05 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

sariat, to a knowledge of whose state he
actually confesses, and on the next day he
qsuietly shuffles off the responsibility upon Sir
CHARLES TBEVELYAN !

But the same extraordinary contradictions
run through the entire of his Grace's evidence.
Lord DERBY called the Coalition " a Cabinet of
" suspended opinions," and certainly the Duke
of NEWCASTLE was a singular illustration of
that felicitous description of an unfortunate
Ministry. Let us see his glaring contradic-
tions in another form :

POSITIVE RESPONSIBILITY.

NON-RESPONSIBILITY.

It is difficult to define 1)o you consider yourself
what, from the moment of responsible if any ladies be
war, the Secretary of State proved against the Commis-
had to be responsible for—of sariat?—As I said, the Se-
course, of the whole conduct cretary of War must be held
the war—to dirrct every- responsible for all that is
thing. lamat a loss to say done by those who are as-
what did not come within sumed to take their orders
the sphere of his duties.— from him. Responsibility
(Times, April 24th, p. 3, admits of two interpretations
col. 1.) —moral and official respon-
sibility. Mot ally responsible
I was not, but officially, as
Minister of War, I am, and
cannot claim to be freed
front it, on account of all
these departments, however
ill-arranged.—( Times, April
25th, p. 11, col. 1.)
And so on throughout the whole of the three
days' confessions of the follies of a mediocre
mind.

In the presence of these bewildering dis-
tinctions between moral, personal, and official
responsibilities, men of plain sense would
soon be puzzled if once they admitted such
special pleading as an excuse for enormous
blunders. At a single stroke we shall tear to
pieces the web of sophistry with which his
Grace endeavours to embarrass those who
accuse him of ridiculous vainglory, and culpa•
Lle, not " commendable," ambition.
If the expedition to the Crimea had been
well planned, vigorously supported, and care-
fully provided for, does his Grace mean to say
that he would not have accepted the applause
which the public would have accorded to him?
And when the expedition was sent in haste to
make " a leap in the dark," without transport
or sufficient horses, and with an inadequate
staff of Commissariat and medical officers, by
which starvation and misery and ignominious
failure resulted, are the friends and the
survivors of the victimised heroes to allow the
Duke of NEWCASTLE to escape from the disgrace
of his failure.

A WORD MORE ABOUT TORTURE
IN INDIA.

IN our last we noticed some results of Lord
HARRIS'S Committee of Inquiry into the sub-
ject of torture by our officials at Madras. We
showed, on the evidence of a letter from the
Superintendent of Police to the Chief Secre-
tary to Government at that Presidency, that
people were flocking from all parts of the
interior to lay their complaints before the
Committee—that three hundred such com•
plainants were then at Madras—and that more
were coming in daily. We showed, in short,
that such a state of things prevailed there as
would have been impossible in any Crown
colony, or in any of those parts of India which
are subject to the jurisdiction of the supreme
courts, and within the protection of Crown-
appointed judges. To Indians of course the
information was not new. They are all aware
of the existence of the practice, and also of
the modes in which torture is inflicted. Many
of them, indeed, defend the practice as one
which under the existing system of govern-
ment our officials find very useful. The same
argument is urged in favour of similar prac-
tices by the slaveholders of America, and by
the familiars of the Inquisition in Italy and
Spain.
The modes of torture commonly used in
India are numerous. A frequent one is to
take off a man's turban and clothes, and tie
him to a stake, deprived of food and water,
and exposed to the rays of a burning sun. A
second mode is to put a man in the stocks for
days and weeks together, exposed to the sun;

415

and not in such stocks as are used in England.
The ordinary Indian stocks consist of square
holes with sharp edges, cut in a fallen tree,
through which the feet are thrust, when a peg
is driven in vertically, to prevent them being
pulled out again, and which fits close to the
ankle-bone. Then, as there is no seat for the
Indian stocks, and nothing for the back to rest
against, the unfortunate prisoner of them finds
his feet raised up and his body thrown into a
position which if long continued is exquisitely
painful. A third mode is to bind the fingers
of each hand and the toes of each foot close
together with twine, and then drive pegs in
between them, which is a process of exceeding
torture. A fourth plan is to stretch a man out
on his back, and, fastening his hands and feet
with tent-pegs to the ground, to leave him
with face upturned to the sun's vertical rays,
which literally sear the unprotected eyeballs.
A fifth mode is to tie a man up by the feet, or,
as is more general, to fasten him to a bedstead
or stretcher, and then stand it on end against
a wall, so as to leave the sufferer, till he con-
fesses or pays, with his bead downwards. A
sixth plan, ar.d one which will infallibly make
a man do or confess anything, is one which
among the police is an especial favorite. This
plan is to tie a man's arms behind him above
the elbow-joint tightly, so as to bring them
as close together as is possible, end then throw
the end of the cord over a bough of a tree, and
haul the victim up till his toes barely touch
the ground. His shins are then beaten with
the buts of the police horsemen's riding-whips,
or with sticks of any kind, which causes him
to raise his feet every moment, and throws the
weight of the body with jerks upon the cord.
The result of this is, a degree of torture and
prostration which in the space of half an hour
would overcome the firmness of the strongest
man. Murders have been confessed to under
th:l process which it was clearly shown after-
wards that the prisoner could by no possibility
have been connected with. There are many
other modes of torture used too numerous to
mention, some of them such as decency would
preclude us from describing; but we cannot
omit to notice one method more, which is,
perhaps, the most cruel and almost the most
common. It is the thrusting a man's head
into a horse's leather nosebag in which
pounded capsicums, or in other words coarse
cayenne pepper, have been placed, along with
burning charcoal, and the smoke from which,
entering the eyes and nostrils and mouth, and
penetrating to the throat and lungs, is pro-
ductive at once of semi-suffocation and of the
most excruciating anguish possible. •
Such are some of the modes of torture in
daily and hourly use among the Company's
officials in India. It will be said in extenua-
tion that they are practised under native
Governments as well. But they have never
been practised under the worst native Govern-
ments to a tithe of the extent that they are
practised in the Company's possessions in
India. Indeed, the doing so would be impos-
sible, for the subjects of no native State would
stand it; it is only a Government possessing
unlimited and uncontrollable power like the
Company that can connive at such practices
as these with impunity. The question, how-
ever, for the Legislature to determine is not
what has been done by native Governments,
but what it is fitting should be done by a
Government deriving its authority from the
Crown and Legislature of Great Britain. If
it should assent to the continuance of the pre-
sent state of things, then it will affirm practices
which equal, if not exceed, the worst evils
of slavery and serfdom. But we cannot
believe so badly of Parliament as to suppose
that it will tolerate these cruelties one mo-
ment beyond that in which the facts shall be
made plain to its apprehension. As regards
the remedy, that is as simple as the remedy
for all the other Indian difficulties will prove
to be whenever Parliament may please to face
them. It is merely to extend that protection
to all our subjects in India which the natives
of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay enjoy at
opfreisnen Torture
those
osecities,
bbey oeauffiseciailns
tiisiemnevtehrerheeard
are
tribunals to appeal to independent of the
aCso n
epial nays, and to
their
1 whichthe
lowest
offiCompany's
al s
ar
ehighest
amenable.
Let an act be passed making all the Company's

..•

16

officials throughout India, natives equally
with Europeans, as amenable to the supreme
courts for any illegal act or abuse of authority
as are the Company's officials at the Presi-
dencies at present, and the public may take
our word for it that the Crown judges of those
courts will do their duty, and the first case of
torture proved to the satisfaction of a jury
will be the last that will ever be perpetrated
by au official in India.