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

THE PRESS, NOVEMBER 7, 1857.

field. Carriage, camp followers, commissariat,
tents, batteries, horses, money—all seem to be
wanting ; in short, every one of those ap-
pliances required to set an army in motion
and render it of the slightest use. Mean-
time, white these are being collected, theib
will be the climate of Calcutta to be encoun-
tered, nearly the worst in the world ; and the
troops will tied facilities for drunkenness and
dissipation which always in India kill more
than the sun. Nor would the evils of pro-
tracted operations be felt in this shape alone.
Here, also, the Indian war is beginning to tell.
Whatever may have been the assertions of the
Ministers while Parliament was sitting, it is
now clear that it will be impossible to raise
any considerable amount of money in India,
and that nearly the whole of the war charges,
therefore, will have to be provided by this
country ; so much of them as are to he dis-
bursed in India being remitted there in the
shape of bullion or cash. Already is this
beginning to act upon the Money Mark't both
here and on the Continent; and with the
Bank rates of discount at nine per cent., with
the bullion fast ebbing in its vaults, with mer•
chants failing and mills ceasing to work on
every side, it is clear that the drain of specie
forl ndia, if long continued, must end inevitably
in general bankruptcy at home. That the yes-
terday's City article of the Times in substance
admits.

The remedy, however, that the writer of
that article proposes would certainly fail in
effect. The European mercantile commu►►ity
in India can have little money to spare for the
use of Government during the existing crisis;
and if they had, they have come to a thorough
determination to afford no such aid to it until
the system shall be changed. While as to
native capitalists, their main object now is to
make safe their hoards ; and the more un-
usual the methods that the Government
resorts to for the purpose of obtaining money,
the greater will be the panic and the more
difficult will it be to maintain the circulation
at all. To pay the dividends in India in notes
that were not convertible on demand, would
be to aggravate matters by occasioning a
general crash. It would send the value of Go-
vernment paper at once down to nil; and thus
ruin all the holders of it, and all the banks
that had transactions based upon it, outright.
While as to any attempt to follow the Russian
plan of a forced payment for requisitions for
the army in such notes, that would be treated as
a virtual seizure of the people's property, and
be resisted ri et (mins by all in respect of
whom it was sought to ho carried out. The
result, of course, would be that after a short
time no supplies for the army would be pro-
curable at all The proposed proviso
that such paper should be received as revenue,
would be wholly ineffectual to make it
float, as the disbursements will necessarily
very far exceed the revenue for many years to
come.

The fact is that the Government are begin-
ning to pay the necessary penalty of their
dishonesty. and the English public will have
to bear their share of the indiction as a reward
for the apathy they have shown. The Govern-
ment have all along deceived them, and they
have shown an equal ieadinessto be deceived.
The Anglo-Indian press, the only source from
which they might have arrived at something
like the truth, they have allowed to be gagged
without any remonstrance on their parts. All
means of true and correct information as
to what is passing being thus taken away,
they have been studiously deluged with such
falsehoods as the Government have thought
fit to give currency to from time to time.
Daily is this made more and more apparent, as
through the indiscretion of some of them the fact
is allowed casually to leak ont. Thus in an
article in the last number of Blackwood, which
details the state of things at Peshawur, it is
said in reference to the telegraphic despatches
that are received there—" These public mes-
" sages, in fact, always undergo a culinary
" process before they are published, any bad
" news being carefully suppressed." And
what is thus admitted to be done by the
officials at Peshawur is, as we know from our
own correspondents, done at Calcutta as well.
Nor is a different policy pursued by the
Government iu its dealings with the public