The Press.
London, England, 1855-06-09 00:00:00

THE LATE NEWS FROM INDIA.

IF any doubt had ever existed in our minds as
to the entire correctness of the views we have
all along taken of the affairs of our Eastern
empire it would have been set at rest by the
late news from India. In respect to every
point our anticipations have been completely
verified. The return of the Burmese ambas-
sadors to their country has been signalised
by extensive preparations for war; on the
north-west frontier the Candahar chiefs are
openly threatening us ; the aggressive policy
of the Governor-General towards the frontier
tribes has raised up more than ordinary bitter-
ness among them, and one of the largest
forces ever sent against them has been com-
pelled by them to retreat. To crown all, the
Company's financial position at the end of the
year has proved even worse than we predicted,
and the deficit on the preceding year of eight
hundred thousand pounds has been increased
to a deficit on the last year of two millions and
a half sterling, The Government organ in
India announces as a set off to all this a treaty
with Dosr MAHOMED of Cabul, but every one of
ordinary penetration sees that this is a mere
plan on the part of the Affghan chief to ex-
tract money in the shape of subsidies from us,
and that if the occasion should ever arrive for
his services being really required by us the
treaty would be found to be just so much waste
paper. No treaty with Cabul will ever mee-
the views of the Affghans which does not in
elude the cession to them of the portion of
their integral territories held by us—the dis-
trict and city of Peshawur—and that is a ces-
sion which, under existing circumstances, we
are not prepared to advocate, however much it
might, on many grounds, tend to the advantage
of both States.
For the deplorable state of things which
this late news from India indicates we cannot
but hold the present Administiation and their
predecessor the Coalition responsible. for it
is the unsatisfactory manner in which the duty
of control has been exercised by the India
Board which has been mainly, if not entirely,
the cause of it. It is the theory which Sir
CHARLES WOOD propounded and followed—that
India must be governed in India—which has
been at the bottom of the mischief. The
notion may be a very convenient one for a
President utterly ignorant of his duties and
above making up for his deficiencies in this
respect by increased energy and study ; but
India will never be properly governed when
it ie not 'in all material points of policy
governed entirely from England—that is, until
there shall be a President of the India Board
prepared to resume those active functions
in the government of India which were virtually
abdicated by Sir CHARLES WOOD. Lord ELLEN-
BOROUGH, when examined as a witness at the
expiration of the last charter, gave the true
idea of what a President of the India Board
should be. His reply was, that when he was
President of the India Board he governed
India entirely himself.
With a President fitted for his post at the
head of the India Board there would have
been nothing more easy than to curb effec-
tually that spirit of aggression for the pur-
poses of aggrandisement which is really at the

THE PRESS.

bottom of the present state of things in India.
Had our demands on the Burmese Govern-
ment been limited to the necessities of the
case, the capture of Rangoon, with a small
portion of the territory around it, would have
probably afforded a sufficient material gua-
rantee for its compliance with them, and
we should have thus conquered a speedy,
honourable, and advantageous peace. As it is,
we are involved in an endless labyrinth of
military and naval operations in a country in
which neither honour nor profit is to be
gained ; and these operations appear likely,
under the present system, to prove endless.
Our troops are decimated by sickness and our
military chest is exhausted in acquiring suc-
cessive portions of a country which will never
pay the cost attending its possession, and the
acquisition of which could only be of use for
the single purpose of enforcing satisfactory
terms of peace from the sovereign who is its
proper owner.
As to the chiefs of Candahar and Cabul their
main, if not their only, power of annoyance
arises from the state of ' exasperation into
which we have driven the Mahomedan tribes
whom we claim as subjects and their kindred
tribes upon our north-west frontier ; and this
exasperation has been caused, as we have over
and over again shown, by proceedings on
the part of the Indian Government towards
them of the most wanton description. It is
all very well to set down these mountaineers
as murderers and robbers by profession, but a
very little knowledge of them will show that
they are neither given to murder nor robbery
as long as they are left to possess their homes,
and lands, and herds, peacefully and un-
molested. When, to be sure, their herds are
carried off, their villages burnt down, their
wives and children driven to the hillsides
shelterless, and their brethren shot down like
wild beasts by our soldiery wherever they are
met with, they act as all men under such cir•
cumstances w ill do, and none more readily, as
history shows, than the mountain races of
Britain. But why should these brave moun-
taineers be slaughtered and harassed by our
Government in this way when their only
crime is that they refuse to pay rent to the
Company for the lands which they have held
from time immemorial, under numberless suc-
ceeding dynasties, without payment? The
Government of India has no more right to levy
rent from them now because the dynasty
under which they lived is changed than
WILLIAM of Orange would have had to levy
rent from the nobility of this country because
there had been in his person a change in the
dynasty that sat on the throne of England.
Let the Company, when overthrowing a
prince and conquering his kingdom, be content
to limit its vengeance to the sovereign, and
respect the rights and privileges of the nobility
and commonality who are content to transfer
their allegiance to it, and there will be little
more heard of these frontier disturbances
which drain away our best soldiers, exhaust
our treasuries, and are a perpetually running
ulcer in the constitution of India. Need we
add, that with the frontier pacified and the
Burmese war put an end to we should be in a
position to care comparatively little about the
Candahar chiefs and Don MAHOMED, and
should be able very well to pay our way, with-
out having a deficit annually to be met by
fresh burdens on the rapidly-decreasing in-
come of our Eastern empire.

535

who excited false hopes by promises of reform,
and taught that popular agitation was to be
employed to intimidate the Legislature and
the Crown, were the men who excited that re-
volutionary ferment which they subsequently,
when in possession of the prize they played
for, found it convenient to repress.
There is not a step in the progless of
Chartism from its commencement, not an
eccentricity of its movement, for the worst
results of which it might not refer to the
Whig party and to Whig placemen or ex-place-
men yet alive. Their hard, inhuman, doc-
trinaire measures provoked the sufferings of
the labourer, and their reckless, seditious, self-
seeking policy mapped him out his plan. If
Parson STEPHENS talked (with rather a
Hibernian figure) of "firing a musket against
" the Poor Law," he had precedent in " heads
" rolling in the dust," and if constituted autho-
rity was very unconstitutionally threatened
at Kersall Moor and at many another stirring
scene, it fared little better in 1830 at
Birmingham or in Piccadilly. To rouse and
exasperate the masses—to refuse to adopt all
acts of prevention of outrage—nay, to positively
encourage the agitators in their course, and
then to take a sudden and desperate legal
vengeance—this was the treatment adopted
by the Whigs to the Chartists.
This cannot be considered an extreme
charge by any one who reads the history
of the first ten years of the reformed con•
stitution. Chartism in fact, though not in
name, dates from the assembling of the
Reformed Parliament. The old Whig families
who had condescended to the old Whig tricks
were content enough to have a bourgeois
House of Commons, but the bourgeoisie had
been only powerful by the aid of the working
men, and to kick away that ladder was the diffi-
culty both of the middle classes and the
Whigs. Lord JOHN RUSSELL, with that savoir
faire which always distinguishes him at a crisis,
had in the first Parliament of the Queen
announced his famous finality determination
—a finality like the Vienna Conferences
" with the door open." The " Working Men's
Association" was formed, and a certain peti-
tion to be presented by Mr. ROEBUCK em-
bodied the points which were afterwards
called (by a fanciful application of a title
derived from the royal prerogative) " Tho
People's Charter." A committee to draw up
this charter was formed, we believe, on the 7th
of June, 1837. It was drawn up accordingly,
and received the ominous good wishes of the
late Mr. DANIEL O'CONNELL, as he dramatically
handed it to Mr. LOVETT, the cabinetmaker.
This " charter" was now circulated throughout
the provinces, where it was received as suffer-
ing bodies of people receive any novelty
which promises them immediate physical
relief. The history of the agitation which
followed, and the sketches of individuals
given in this little work by, Mr. GAMMAGE,
though intended by the author as a for-
midable account of democratic rage and
tribunitial glory, is of more interest to the
morbid political anatomist, as showing the
effects of the false cry of equality to which
the Whigs had accustomed the people from
the end of the last century. The leaders,
with very few exceptions, were persons who
abandoned the drudgery of various handicrafts
for what is amusingly called " labour " in the
cause of the people. The amount of popular
myths which these gentlemen distributed is
truly remarkable from the historical assurances
that universal suffrage was the law and
custom up to the time of HENRY VI., to the
prophecies that the aristocracy, with whom
they had in fact, as they afterwards showed,
no quarrel, were frightened, and about to
surrender certain vaguely-defined rights and
privileges to the torchlight meetings. These
agitators were at the outset assisted by certain
dilletanti seditionists like Sir WILLIAM MOLTS-
WORTH, who in 1837 was anxious for enlarging
the franchise, adopting the ballot, and shorten-
ing parliaments.
The great meetings of 1837-8 were an
excitement, and, as our French neighbours
g ifeocrt e tdh ew w
orokr kinan / lcausns e.
esd;
loss
oausytt:
to w a•hetal tterhna eedyt ionne
them,
they expected a proper
tionate amount of excitement and cheap
promises. At these meetings, accordingly,