The Press.
London, England, 1853-07-09 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

not only the ill-paid and venal police, but
zemindars of respectability, think no shame of
conniving at these nefarious practices. The
head man of the village harbours the thieves
who infest it, advances them money, supplies
them with food and clothing, and puts their
pursuers on a wrong scent : feeling no more
shame in the transaction than a merchant of
any European country would feel in being
part owner of a privateer in war time. This—
the real root of the evil—is still left Un-
touched :

The hare outside fact of this criminal participation of
the landlords was no discovery• of modern times. It had
attracted the attention of Warren Hastings, who saw at a
glance that it was wholly impo►ssibl• to suppress I takonee
without proclaiming the responsibility of the zemitelani
as accesaaries to the crime, and in all cages of conviction
punishing them with as witch severity as the ilethe
offenders. He would have made short work of these
nursing mothers of crime, and hung up the fattest ze ttt i l ober
with as little compunction as the leanest Delimit. As
have said bs•fore, the most vigorous uu•asmea are often the
most humane ; and 1 have little doubt that if these meow-
mendations had been carried out and persevered in, and
heavy blow thus struck at conniving landlords, we sl Id
not now be hearing, after the lapse of tbreeluarters of a
century, that ar►und the immediate twat of the supreme'
Government—almost under the shadow of the vice-regal
palace itself—" gang r►bberies have increased to such an
extent that a feeling of general insecurity has arisen in the
minds of the people of these districts." These are the
words, not of Warren Haatings, but of 'sent Dalhousie.
The governor of 1842 only repeats the eomplaint of the
governor of 1774. The immunity which the landlords
have enjoyed in the interval ham been the main cause of
the perpetuation ut• the evil. We have been much too
slow in our interference with their vested interests in rob-
bery mid murder. Lord Cornwallis, when he reorganieseel
the police department in 1792, proclaimed that landlords
convicted of being accesaaries to the commission of a rob-
bery should be . compelled to make good the value of the
property stolen or plundered." So that, even if the regu-
lations had been put into effect against the zemindars, it
would have been merely a matter of calculation with them
—a mere question of profit and loss—the balance being
pretty certain in favour of the former. It is not strange.,
therefore, that under such regulations the landlords con-
tinued to carry on the old trade, and to participate largely
in the professional emoluments of the Dakoits.

Nor are the police blameless in this matter.
Their corruption is general, avowed, and fla-
grant. It was so in the time of Warren Hast-
ings, and it is so now. No sufficient remedy
has been found. Again hear Mr Kayc :

Associated with them, in the protection of the more
active criminals, are the equally com►pt members of the
police. This was no new discovery. Warren Hastings
had as clear a perception of the fact as any superintendent
of police in the present day. Hut although the Indian
constabulary force has been modelled and remodelled—
though first one system has been tried and then another,
every description of organisation that has yet been at.
tempted has been found to be equally inefficacious for the
protection of life and property, and the detection and
punishment of crime. Instead of protecting life and pro.
perty, these men, under whatever name they draw a
certain amount of salary, whether they belong to the
regular police, or are the village watch, only protect rapine
and disorder. To such at least point their own unaided
instincts ; but European superintendence, though power.
less hitherto to convert the Indian police into► an effective
body, has done something to control its excesses. There
is still much more to be done. It is the weakest 'mint of
our Indian administration.

And the following passage bears pleasing
testimony to the acuteness of the native mind
—to the ingenuity of that people which we re-
gard, not indeed as too corrupt, but as too ig-
norant and barbarous, to be entrusted with a
share in domestic administration :

It is a distinguishing feature of the practice of these
professional depredators that they adapt their ways, with
wonderful precision, to the legal machinery which is
brought to hear upon them—that they even turn the very
engine which is designed for their destruction into au in•
strument of defence. They adapt their organisation to
our own, and the more intricate it is the greater are their
rheum's of evasion and escape. " The English," writes an
officer of great intelligence and experience in the intriea•
cies of these crimimilleagnes, "having divided the country
into districts and dmes, the robbers have made it a
fundamental maxim and Ain, voi aim to attach themselves
by divis* to thannas, iu order to bribe every man of
real and iwtual influence over the villagers to enter into a
league with their paymasters—their principle being to sae
entice di in order to retain a little in certainty and
safety. Now, the two classes which have supreme actual
influence among the village population are the thannailms
(with their myrmidons) and the revenue•farmels (with
theirs). These then are the persons held in the pay of
the Daknits. To ensure regularity in this necessary par-
ticular, a robber•division is attached to a thanna, nod a
subdivision to a particular form. This robberslivision is

under a sirdar chief) of rubbers; and it is among the
first of his duties to pay monthly, with his own hiuid, the
shares respecti►ely of the thannadar and the revenue•
farmer."

Nor does the corruption, as 1 have already intimated,
stop here. " The sirdars," says another writer, an intern-
gait and zeaknia niagiatratk," are men who travel in their

231

Palki4 (14bulletins), and arrange all these little stairs first
with the !oval polive, next with the magistrate's andab,
and eventually with the M 16240116 andah and the law otheer."
" In short,- to use the comprehensive words of another civil
°nicer, the highest authority on such a subject in Bengal,
"the whole plan has been got up to meet our rules of mi•
deuce, awl it is carried on with the help of our ministerial
and police amlah." Whatever se have 1611 P, indeed, the
Bakoita have turned our doings to their own uses—our re-
venue system, our ivolice system, our judicial system hays
all been impressed into their serviee. Whatever may have
been our aihninistrative organisation, they have adapted to
it, with consummate skill, the erganisation of their crimi-
nal leagues, and out-miuneuvred us at all prints.
" Set a thief to tidal a thief" is an old saw.
We etlllllot entell our own thieves, that is clear
enough. Will Indians do worse than we have
done ? Probably not. lint how, then, shall
the relations and friends of directors be pro-
vided for? Mr. Alacaulay was right—lndia•
house polities do overshadow Indian polities,
even in Asia itself.

Mr. Koye dilates with something approach--
lug to enthusiasm on the "vigorous" measures
adopted to break up these plundering gangs.
As in the ease of Thuggee, extraordinary
powers were given—able Mill selected for the
special duty—money wAs not spared—the re
sources of despotism were called into play.
Not, however, with any real result. Dakoitee
still abounds in Bengal ; and, if it does not
prevail to an equal extent either in the Punjab
or throughout -Upper India generally, that is
chiefly owing to the more warlike character of
the people, who turn out in their own defence,
while the timid Bengalee sits still and sees
his house plundered, if he does not, under
fear of torture, with his own hands point out
the spot where his little hoards are deposited.
In the Lower Provinces, comparing the lost
live years with an equal period innnediately
preceding, the crime has rather increased than
diminished. It is said by Mr. Kayo that some
sa•mptoms of recent improvement have been
shown ; but his own words still bear witness
against him :—" Dakoitee has not been sup-
pressed : we found it in India, and if we were
to quit. the country to-morrow we should leave
it there."
We cannot follow Mr. Kaye into his graphic
portraiture of the "non-regulation provinces;"
i.e., in which the regular written law of the
Company is not held binding on the adminis-
trators, but these are left to the exercise of
their unfettered discretion, and invested with
a simply despotic authority. It is almost a
satire on the boasted " regulations " to say,
what, nevertheless, is not only true but. noto-
rious, that where they are not in force govern-
ment is cheaper, better, and more popular;
this Mr. Kaye himself admits, and justly
instances the Punjab as an example. That
country has been divided into districts, each
of which is placed under the control of a com-
missioner with deputies, who unite in them-
selves civil, military, and judicial power. Only
in cases of life and death must they appeal to
the Central Board at Lahore. In other respects,
their rule exactly fulfils the Duke of Welling
ton's definition of martial law—" government
by the will of the governor." No native Asiatic
despotism is so organised, so uncontrolled, or
so certain of obedience. Yet under this Go-
vernment, presided over by the most active
and able of all living Indian officers—Sir
Ilemy Lawrence—the people of the Pugjab
have, since '49, evinced no inclination to dis-
turbance or even to discontent. Some proof
of the influence of individual character, and
some proof also of the Oriental preference for
government by men rather than government
by codes. But what becomes of the " regula-
tions" us models of legislative wisdom, if it
be proved that newly-conquered provinces do
better without than with them ?

We I►ass over, though reluctantly, our au•
thor's sketch of the civilising labours of
Outrun, Ovans, Dixon, and Cleveland among
the wild predatory tribes of the hills. These
men worked well, and their labours were re-
warded by success ; nor is there any brighter
page in the annals of the Company than that
which tells of the reclaiming of the Bheels and
the civilisation of Mailw•arla. But what they
did was done mainly by individual agency,
Government only looking on. Still the per
formances of the servant bring credit to the
n►aster, and thus fur Mr. Kayo's eulogy is jus-
tified.

232

The education question alone remains ; and
here neither our author nor any one else can
succeed in making out a case for the Com-
pany. The statistics of this subject are few
end simple. Up to 1823 nothing was done by
Government—very little by private agency.
In 1928 the Hindu College was established
and endowed, Oriental study alone being pur-
sued there. In 1935, after much controversy,
the Oriental teaching was overthrown by Lord
William l3entinek, and English science and
literature substituted, Macaulay being among
the strenuous supporters of the change. A
wise regulation was at the same time framed
by which the stipends formerly allowed to
students during the time of their tuition were
discontinued. Lord Hardinge, in the famous
minute of 1844, announced that a preference
should be given in conferring official appoint-
ments to natives who had passed examina-
tion at the college, or at other similar institu-
tions—a benevolent rule, but scarcely a wise
one, since its effect has been to make every
young student believe that he had a right, not
as matter of favour, but of justice, to be main-
tained in official employ at the expense of his
countrymen. Something, but not much, has
been done for vernacular education. The
total expenditure •of the Company on this
score is about 80,0001. yearly—a sum which
Dr. Marshmau himself declares to be shame-
Ailly inadequate. The quality of the teaching
given at the various colleges is good, but the
precocious youth seldom ripens into an able,
active, working man :

I do sot believe that them are Wit a down boys at Eton
or aterrew who weld *Ruin is obscure passage in Milton
or nealmileare. ci griever a aeries of historical questions,
extruding frets the days of Alexander to the days of
Nevritit as much critical acuteness and accuracy
of ansidoe as the white-mmilined students who, with
se much ewe, master the difficult examination-papers
whisk it hes taxed all the learning and all the ingenuity of
hallitrogessisil itielleit gentlemen of ripe experience to
=would in any such triad of skill put our young
to confabion.

AU this is past dispute—the proficiency is admitted.
But there has seldom been much more than tho pro-
ficiency of the clever boy. A very few exceptional cases,
bet sullicient to prove the rule on the other aide, might
addlined to chow that European education has struck
heap root in the native mind; but. the good seed commonly
fell by the wayside, and the birds of the air devoured it.
All the enervating and enfeebling envimnments of Indian
life, at the critical period of adolescence, closed around
the native youth, to stupefy and to deaden both the intel-
lectual faculties and the moral sense. The hookah and
'the amens did their sure work. And in a year or two
'there was little left of the bright-faced, quick-witted boy
who could put the Penmen's° into good English prose, tell
you who were Pepin and Charles Martel, and explain the
character of the " self-denying ordinance" as accurately as
Hallam or Macaulay.

Much is professedly done by missionaries ;
but though they spend Igo,oool. yearly, and
educate 120,000 children, the effects of their
labour are inadequate to its amount. The
fanatical zeal and want of intellectual disci-
pline common among this class have gone far
to lessen the prestige of European wisdom
among a people remarkably subtle and scepti-
cal, though Dr. Duff and some others deserve
mention as honourable exceptions. Govern-
ment wisely stands neutral, refusing to take
any part in proselytising enterprises, whereby
it has drawn upon itself the same kind of
honourable odium which Lord Derby incurred
as founder of the Irish national schools. But
thin negative merit is all to which the Com-
pany can lay claim. Next to public works,
there is no department of Indian administra-
tion so neglected as the educational. Better
things may be hoped for the future, especially
if Sir C. Wood's bill does not pass.

We have done with Mr. Kaye, and, though
we differ from much of what he has written,
and cannot but regard him as in some sort a
partisan, we admire his talent, applaud his
general fairness, and part from him in kind-
new Of all books written to supply the mo-
mentary demand for Indian information, he
has written the best. His style is clear, and
not without point, though we occasionally
meet with a passage which strikes unplea-
santly upon our car as an echo of Macaulay.
Ilia statistics, whenever we have been able to
verify them, we have found accurate ; and this
is a rarer merit than many people would
readily believe.

THE PRESS.

Cranford. By the Author of " Mary Barton,"
" Ruth," &c. London : Chapman and Hall.
A PEACEFUL country place—just large enough
to be dignified with the title of town—secluded •
in position, primitive iu manners, quaint as to
its architecture, patriarchal in all its social
habitudes, " old fashioned " in short, in every
point of view and every sense of the word,—
such is the " Cranford " which gives a name
to Mrs. Gaskell's new romance and a local
habitation to her characters. These latter are
in their turn fit denizens and natural products
of the selected locality. Simple-minded
virgins who derive their code of etiquette
and date their day of beauty and flirtation
from the model era of George the Third's
Queen Charlotte ; dowagers who have re-
tired to distant Crin&rd upon the experiences
of high life and of busy cities which they have
gathered in some provincial capital ; home-
spun spinsters who hold high social rank
because their ancestor was rector, or a distant
connection the baronet of provincial grandeur,
—these, with a fair sprinkling of aspiring
parvenus who struggle into the society of
Cranford " exclusives," despite the suspicion
of trade or the reality of a plebeian name, arc
the homely personages with whom the
authoress wishes, and compels, her readers to
feel an interest. With such scenery and
actors the drama is naturally a quiet one.
There is no stirring incident and no hero
throughout the volume. Cranford, as we are
told at the outset, hardly possessed a =Well -
line inhabitant, at all events of any worth
knowing or mentioning. Two or three he-
chameters appear upon the scene ; but they
are mere aecessanes necessary to the develop-
ment of the story, and act but the part of
walking gentlemen in the feminine tragi-
comedy playing out around them. Judging
from the role assigned to them in her book, we
should be almost inclined to believe that the
authoress, like her own excellent Miss
enkyns, " despised the modern idea of
women being equal to men. Equal indeed !
she knew they were superior."

Upon the stage thus kept clear for the
gentler sex a drama of deep though subdued
interest is represented. We have met with few
pictures of English life in the country at once
so pleasing and so true as those delineated by
Mrs. (iaskell. How ditferent from the spasmo-
dic existence and slightly-veiled depravity
describedhy the French historian of the vie pro-
vinciale g How different also from the servants-
hall vulgarisms and cockney raralities which we
find in the sketches of Trollope and Howitt ?
The authoress of " Ruth " and " Cranworth "
gives us something purer than the first, and
something truer than the last. We are allowed
to smile without bitterness at intrigues which
involve nothing but priority in some fashion
ten years post-dated from the Belk A ssemblie,and
laugh without contempt at the troubles arising
out of the awkwarduesses of a rustic servant
girl, evidently a descendant from one of the
ploughboy flunkies in Goldsmith's comedy :

1 undertook the management of the coffee, and told her
I would instruct Martha in the art of waiting, in which it
must he owned she was terribly deficient ; and that 1 had
310 doubt Mitior and Mrs. Jenkyns would understand the
quiet mode in which a lady lived by herself in a country
town. But she was sadly fluttered. I made her empty
her decanters and bring np two fresh bottles of wine.
wished I could have prevented her from being present at
my instructions to Martha ; for she frequently out. in with
some fresh direction, muddling the poor girl's mind, as
she stood open-mouthed, listening to us both.

" Hand the vegetables round," said I (foolishly, I see
now—for it was aiming at more than we could accomplish
with quietness and simplicity) : and then, seeing her look
bewildered, I added, " Take the vegetables round to people,
and let them help themselves."

" And mind you go first to the ladies," put in Miss
Matilda. " Always go to the ladies before gentlemen,
when you are waiting."
" do it as you tell me, ma'am," said Martha ; " but I
like lads best."

We felt very uncomfortable and shocked at this speech
of klartlues : vet I don't think she meant any harm; and,
on the whole, she attended very well to our directions, ex•
cept that she " nudged " the major, when he did not help
himself as soon as she expected to the potatoes, while she
was handing them round.

Even in the following pleasant quiz upon
female inconsequence, though there may be a
trifle of exaggeration, there is not an iota of
ill nature. Information is sought respecting a
certain Peter who disappeared years ago,

SATURDAY,

and is suspected to be somewhere in the
East:—

I remember asking Miss Pole (and I thought the flues-
don was very opportune, for I put it when 1 met her at a
call at Mrs. korrester's, and Loth the ladies had known
Peter, and I imagined that they might refresh each other's
memories) ; I asked Miss Pule what was the very last
thing they had ever heard about him ; and then she named
the absurd report to which I have alluded, about his
having been elected great Lama of Thibet ; and this was
a signal for each lady to go off on her separate idea. Mrs.
Forrester's start was made on the Veiled Prophet in "Lana
Rookh"----whether 1 thought he was meant for the. Great
Lama, though► Peter was not so ugly, indeed rather hand-
some if he had not been freckled. I was thankful to
see her double upon Peter; but, in a moment, the delu-
sive lady was off upon Rowland's kalydor, and the merits
of cosmetics and hair oils in general, and holding forth so
fluently that 1 turned to listen to Miss; Pole, who (through
the Haltom, the beasts of burden) had got to Peruvian
bonds, and the Share Market, and her poor °pluton of
joint-stock banks in general, and of that one in particular
in which Miss Mattes money was invested. In vain I put
in, " When was it—m what year was it, that you heard
that Mr. Peter was the Great Lama? " They only joined
issue to dispute whether llama were carnivorous animate
or not; in which dispute they were not quite un• fair
grounds, as Mrs. Forrester (after they hail grown warm
and cool again 1 acknowledged that she always confused
carnivorous and graminivorous together, just as she did
horizontal and perpendicular; but then she apologised for
it very prettily, by saying that in her day the only use
people made of four-syllabled words was to teach how they
should be spelt.
The only fact I gained from this conversation was that
certainly Peter had been last heard of in India, "or that
neighbourhood ;" and that this scanty intelligence of his
whereabouts had reached Cranford in the year when Miss
Pule had bought her India muslin gown, long since wont
out (we washed it and mended it, and traced its decline
and fall into a window-blind, before we could go on) ; and
in a year when Wombwell came to Cranford, because Miss
Matty had wanted to see an elephant in order that she
might the better imagine Peter ruling on one ; and had
11 seen a boa-constrictor too, which was more than she wished
. .

to imagine in her fancy pictures of Peter's locality;—and
in a year when Miss Jenkyns had learnt some piece of
poetry off by heart, and used to say, at all the Cranford
parties, how Peter was " surveying mankind from China to
Peru," which everybody had thought very grand, anti
rather appropriate, because India was between China and
Peru, if you took care to turn the globe to the left instead
of the right.

We have left untouched the story of this
hook, with which a large circle of readers are
already acquainted, from its appearance in
Household Words ; but, believing that England
has many nooks like Cranford, we acknow
ledge the talent of the artist who has depicted
them with so many touches of quiet and
feminine pathos.

The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South
Africa. By Francis Oalton, Esq. London :
Murray.

Tars is a real book of travels after the old
models, and Mr. Galton is a real traveller—
not one of the pretentious class of tourists
who rush into print on the strength of a few
nights' bivouac in the desert, a lion-hunt. and,
perhaps, a skirmish with Indians or banditti.
Since the premature death of Ruxton, the
most indefatigable of explorers and the most
fascinating of storytellers, we have seen no-
thing better of its kind than this little volume.
In some respects, indeed, Mr. Galton has the
best of the parallel ; for Ruxton, with all his
energy, never achieved anything in the way of
discovery. His African attempt was a failure;
whereas our author, starting from nearly the
same point, actually penetrated three hundred
miles into an unexplored tract, visited a tribe
which no European knew except by report,
and reached a higher parallel of latitude than
any traveller on the south-western coast of
Africa had yet attained. He tells his story,
too, in a plain, off hand way which marks him
as the very opposite of a bookmaker ; neither
swaggering about his perils nor affecting to
despise them, but taking them as matters of
course, necessary to be undergone in such a
journey, and forming part. of its inevitable
accompaniments. Why he went, or with what
object, except to gratify a love of wandering,
we are not told, nor do we greatly care to
know. A man well-to-do in the world is not
called to account by his neighbours for
leading a life of respectable inactivity; and,
while one costly expedition is sent out after
another in search of the North Vele or the
North-west Passage, a private individual de
serves no censure because. unpaid and unem-
ployed, he chooses to risk his life in promoting
geographical science.

JULY 9, 1853.

Mr. Balton sailed for the Cape in 1850, in-
tending to make Algoa Bay his point of depar-
ture, and thence to strike northward for Lake
'Ngami through the Boer country. The dis-
turbed state of the colony induced him to
alter his plans, and, after some months of un-
certainty, he selected Witlfisch Bay, on the
Atlantic coast (hit. •:3 deg.. long. 14 (leg. 30
sees.), as affording the must convenient access
to the interior. Nothing, according to our
author, can be more desolate than the whole
line of seaboard between the Orange River and
the Portuguese territory to the north. Desti-
tute of vegetation, of water, and almost of
inhabitants, it interposes an insuperable bar-
rier to commerce with the interior. But the
natives inland have no reason to complain ;
for this desert., which the missionary has pene-
trated, repels the slave-trader. Wallis& Bay
has been reached overland from Cape Town,
but. it is a journey of fora• months, and
dangerous. The missionaries receive supplies
and letters by a vessel chartered for the pur-
pose, which touches once in two years. No
other ships call there. Fresh water can only
be had at a single spot near the coast, and that
more often brackish than sweet. The mis-
sionary station of Scheppinattsdorf, one day's
journey distant, is not much better off. 'I he
coast is peopled by a scattered Hottentot
tribe, over wheat missionaries exercise some
influence, and who live in perpetual feud with
the negro Damaras of the interior.
From this pleasant locality Mr. Galton pro-
ceeded to Otjimbingue and Barmen. distant
some two hundred miles from the sea, the
latter of which posts became the centre or
pivot of his more distant expeditions. lie
made his way (February to June, 1851) to it
spot called by him Ondonga, beyond the I sth
parallel of latitude, anti five hundred miles
from Barmen by the track which he followed ;
was there brought to a standstill, partly by
the refusal of the waiver( to let him pass.
partly by the exhausted state of his cattle ;
returned unwillingly to the southward : again
set. off in a due-easterly direction across the
plains, and reached the Hottentot station of
Tounobis, ,'►t► miles south-west of the 'Ngami
Lake ; once more retraced his steps to the
coast. and re-embarked, in January, 1552, from
Waltisch Bay. after fourteen months of wan-
dering in the least-known tracts of the globe.
His apologies for penetrating no blether,
though quite superfluous, are worth the eon
sideration of stay-at-home critics :

A question is commonly put to explorers, " Why could
you not go further when you had already succeeded in
going so far ?" and the answer to tins is, that several in-
dependent circumstances concur us ntopping a man after
he has been travelling for a certain time and distance. lie
,anal refit, tier his cattle become worn out ; his articles of
ewhange, which are his money, expended ; and, indeed,
the medium of currency among the people he at last
nitrites being unknown to him has of course been unpro-
vided for. His clothes, necessaries, tummies, all beconw
exleinsted, and the capital out of which he has to support
himself fast disappears. On the other hand, infinite diffi-
culty is timid in acquiring the confidence of a strange
nation ; a new language has to be learnt ; native servants
refuse, and are unfitted, to accompany their master in
emmtries strange and probably hostile to them, and whom
months of joint labours had educated into a kind of sym-
pathy with his cause ; and so, when an explorer intends to
cross the frontier of a neighbouring tribe, be finds that all
his old travelling arrangements are more or less broken up,
and that the further progress (tithe expedition will require
nearly as many preparations and as much delay as if it
were then about quitting the burdens of rivilisation. hut
his energies are reduced, and his means lweinne blade-
iinate to the task, mid therefore no ahrmative is left him
but to return while it is still possible for him to do so.

The days are gone by when single adven-
turers, by land or sea, could hope to discover
terra incognita, or lay open the interior of a
continent. The outlines of the world's map
are complete, and nothing is left except to fill
them in. Only three fields of discovery on a
large scale remain—Central Africa, Central
Australia, and the Steppes of Tartary. Of all
these our knowledge is imperfect ; but, com-
pared with what it was 24 years ago, the pro-
gress made seems more than satisfactory ; and
it appears likely that by the commencement
Of the twentieth century the explorer's occupa-
tion will be ;one.

The practical results of Mr. Galton's wan-
derings are twofold. He has ascertained the
existence of a practicable communication from
Lake 'Ngami to the Atlantic ; and his journey
among the Ovainpos proves that the barren-