The Press.
London, England, 1857-11-07 00:00:00

here ; for we now learn from the speech of
Lord GRANVILLE at the Mansion-house, that at
the very . time that 1.1.),ex were filling their
organs with rhoatiiiiiiittilat itbout not leaving
one stone upon another at Delhi, our army
was so pressed there, OA in the opinion of
some of its best officer*, the only way of
getting possession of Delhi at all was by
acceding at °nee- tO the propositions of the
King. We long age aaA that the Government
were treating the jailblis in relation to this
matter like children ; we shall be curious to
see how long its endurance under such treat-
ment will last. Not many weeks, we suspect,
after the news of any serious disaster shall
arrive here, if disaster is to be our fate. The
failure of Ministers before such a crisis might
be pardonable, and fairly so ; but not the bad
faith that does more than anything to make
such failure irremediable by keeping the
public in the dark. Had they adopted an open
and manly course from the outset, the thing
would have been different; but no mercy should
be shown to either the servants of public
companies or the servants of the State who
try to stave off the evil (lay by concealments
and evasions, till their constituents are irre-
trievably ruined, and all power of recovery
from their mismanagement is past.
We do hope, therefore, as we said before,
that this business may be terminated more
speedily and more successfully than we con-
fess, for our parts, we expect. Indeed, there
are not wanting indications that our doubts
are to some extent shared by some of the
members of the Cabinet themselves; for other-
wise we can hardly understand why they
should be already casting about for a scape-
goat on to which to lay the burden of their
sins. It is not in the hour of anticipated tri-
umph that Ministers usually look for objects
towards whom to divert the people's wrath ;
and we can hardly see why, if everything is
going on so swimmingly in India, there should
be such dissensions between the Cabinet and
the Court of Directors at home. As regards
the abolition of the latter, we can have no
objection to that. Indeed, nothing can be
more anomalous than the existence of an inde-
pendent body, with power to trammel the
Minister in respect to orders or appointments
for which he alone should be responsible to
the State. The double Government has been
the curse of India, and no journal has more
consistently advocated than we have done the
transfer of the whole authority to the Crown.
But still we do not see how any shuffle of the
cards in this way can absolve the Ministers
from the consequences of their own personal
acts. Whatever crimes the Company may
have to answer for, Lord PALMERSTON has
shared, and more than shared, with them their
guilt. He has been in the Ministry at every
renewal of the charter during the pre-
sent century. On the last occasion of
it he joined in defeating the motion fur
further inquiry, before renewal, that Lord
STANLEY, Oil behalf of the Conservative party,
made. He was a member of the Cabinet that
appointed Lord DALHOUSIE Governor-General ;
and he continued to be in the Cabinet during
nearly the whole of his Lordship's vice•
regal reign. He was a member of it at the
periods when the most flagrant acts of
spoliation were committed, those of Sattara,
and Nagpore, and Oude. He was also a
member of the Cabinet that dealt so shame-
fully with the late Sir CHARLES NAPIER for ex-
posing and endeavouring to remedy the
mutinous state of the Bengal army—an act to
which this crisis is so greatly due. He was
Premier at the time of the annexation of
Oude ; he accorded his hearty assent as such
to the measure; and he proclaimed himself
openly as prepared to be responsible for the
result. He was a member of the Cabinet that
gave its sanction to the conversion of the
Indian Five per Cents., and so struck the
blow to public credit there which has laid it
prostrate ever since. He is the Premier that
granted a pension of five thousand a year to
Lord DALHOUSIE. out of the bankrupt Indian
exchequer, as a reward for all the seeds of the
present disasters that he had sown. He is the
Premier who tried to abolish her Majesty's
Supreme Courts in India, and to place the
lives and liberties of Englishmen at the dis-
posal of the slavish and incompetent native