The Press.
London, England, 1854-11-11 00:00:00

LORD ABERDEEN'S WAR.

AN attempt is made in a Ministerial journal
this week to absolve Lord ABERDEEN from the

responsibility of having brought about the war,
with all its deplorable consequences. But the
public knows well not only to whom it is
indebted for the war, but to whom it is in-
debted for such part of the conduct of the
war as will, ere long, demand investigation too
grave to be lightly indicated. The Russian
war is Lord ABERDEEN'S just as the Sydenham
Palace is PAXTON'S, as the Parliament Houses
are BARRY'S, and as St. Paul's is WREN'S ; and
it would be about as easy to associate the
ideas of ABERDEEN and War in the mind of
the country, as to sever the other memorials
we have mentioned from the names of their
respective founders. By what course of de-
ception, timidity, and blunder, the miserable
negotiations " drifted" on to the unhappy result
which is placing the hottoeholds of England
in mourning, it is surely needless to say.
That map has been traced too distinctly to be
effaced, and it hangs side by side, to most
eyes, with the map of the seat of war.
Let us rather ask what advantage the
Premier and his friends purpose to them-
selves by their incessant iteration of a political
untruth. Is it—we almost feel inclined to
apologise to men of the world for asking them
the question—but is such iteration made
with the faintest hope that the untruth will
obtain acceptance and credit anywhere ? No ;
we feel that to make the demand amounts to
such a disparagement of their individual in-
tellects as, even with a recollection of their
mishaps of last session, no assailant of their
united policy has a right to offer. We are
well aware that it is not with any such ridi-
culous hope or expectation.
That the Earl of ABERDEEN should feel most
keenly and deeply the responsibility which lie
has brought upon himself by his greed for '
an office for which he was notoriously un•
qualified, is far more improbable. Few men
are more dangerous to a State than small
men with large ambition. The Coalition holds
several of such men, but the most mischievous
is its head. He has plunged the nation into
a war, unwillingly, as we firmly believe, but
because, ungifted with the fine intellect and
lofty heart necessary to our counsels at such
a crisis, he nevertheless persisted, with cha-
racteristic pertinacity, in trying to " manage"
a situation he had firot produced and subse-
quently complicated. He cannot still be un
convinced of this, if indeed he ever really
believed himself capable of dealing with a na-
tion's destinies. The fires and thunders of
the Alma and of Sebastopol must have cured
any blindness and deafness on his part.
" Antiquated imbecility," to quote his col-
league's words, would have office, and a flame
is raging which no statesmanship can now
• extinguish or limit. To suppose that the Earl

SATURDAY,

of ABERDEEN does not feel all this now, were
to accuse him of a dulness and a heartlessness
which political antagonism has no right to
charge against him. But hutv can his perpetual
peace-cry console him ? To dwell upon the
war is to yomember its origin—himself.
Time is a certain subtleness of a ludicrous
character which i 9 often found in combination
with shallowness, and even with simplicity.
We do find a ptizzliug and irritating under-
ourrent cunning in man whose intellect and
practical knowledge are of the least elevated
description. They frequently have recourse
to the most tortuous and under-handed courses
for effecting objects which could be far better
attained by straightforward frankness and
manliness. Can this fact in natural history
throw any light upon the conduct of the
Premier and his party ? Do they imagine
that they see, at some almost incalculable dis-
tance that lends greater enchantment to the
view, a prospect of the ultimate triumph of
those " Russian counsels" which they have
striven so long, so lamentably, and so fruit-
lessly to acclimatise here ? And are all these
wretched protests that the Aberdeen party had
always been for peace, that they undertook the
war reluctantly, and would terminate it joy-
fully, intended for capital in that great day of
rejoicing when our friend of forty years shall
revisit Windsor? Because, if the reiteration
of political untruths—which the speakers are
at any rate too clever to imagine that anybody
in England will believe—has not some such
object, in the name of all that is common
sense, if not common honesty-, what is it for?
Is the Premier gifted with his national
second sight, and, having "turned his coat"
(according to the Highland formula), has he
peeped through the blanket of the dark, and
beheld NICHOLAS with the Mild Eyes taking an
early morning walk on the slopes ?
If this be too far-fetched a supposition, we
have but one more to offer. The iteration
regarding a " peace policy " is not intended to
deceive England, or to please Russia ; and
yet so ridiculous a picture is flung, so lately as
Thursday night, into the faces of Englishmen
fresh from perusal of painful news from the
scat of the Aberdeen war—flung at a period
when every instinct of good taste and good
feeling would have dictated the avoidance of a
protest which could not. but be received with
" cheers," of whose derision, or even bitterer
meaning, reporters could not be expected to
speak, but which were very well understood at
the Guildhall. There is only one way of ac-
counting for Lord ABERDEEN'S course, and this
would place him in an entirely new light, and
as nobody's enemy but his own. Is it possi-
ble that Lord ABERDEEN, having duly gauged
his intellect by a calm consideration of the
frightful position into which, with the best
intentions, he has brought us, has come to the
conclusion that he can, by perseverance, de-
ceive—himself The exhaustion process brin4s
us to the conviction that this is the solution
of the Aberdeen mystification.

THE CARNATIC STIPENDIARIES.
" THE Carnatic Stipendiaries " is the designs•
tion by which are known the junior branches
of the family of the Nuwabs of Arcot. It is
exactly eighty-three years ago—that is, within
the existence, if not within the memory, of
some persons still living—that the then
Sovereign of England, CrEoanE 111., wrote to
the then Nuwab of ARCOT as follows :
We received from the hands of the East India Company
in July last your letter, accompanied with your different
presents. We shall look upon the picture of yourself and
your children with pleasure, as it will put us constantly in
mind of that affection which you have always shown
towards us, and which, we have no doubt, will be here-
ditary in prow offspring, as we are satisfied that our friend-
ship and ction to you and your posterity will descend
through our successors from generation to generation.
At that time the Nuwab of ARCOT was a
powerful Sovereign, and England was en-
gaged in a struggle that many of her most
eminent statesmen thought would be fatal to
her existence. Since then the tables have
turned. The Nuwab of the Arcot has sunk
into a mere stipendiary of the East India
Company, while England has long since tar
more than recovered the prestige which in her

NOVEMBER 11, 1854.

struggle with her American colonies she lost—
the picture which GEORGE 111. alluded to has
been consigned to Hampton Court, a palace
whichthe Sovereign never visits, and therefore
is never reminded that the descendants of the

Nuwab then written to are now pleading before
the Company that they may not be deprived

of bread.

- .
It is difficult to contemplate such a case
without strong feelings of compassion for the
state to which fortune has reduced the de-

scendants of a powerful monarch. And wo are

very sure that if our gracious Sovereign were
only aware of the facts she would interpose
to prevent the ruin that is threatened to them.
She would view the promise made personally
by her royal grandfather as a pledge too sacred
to be allowed to be contemptuously violated,
and she would permit no pretended motives
of policy to interfere with the fulfilment of
the plighted word of the most honest and
conscientious of our kings.
In truth, however, there is no considerable
question of policy involved in the matter.
The only question is, whether the Carnatic
stipendiaries shall still continue to receive
annually the sum that in lieu of their patri-
mony was by treaty assigned them; or whe-
ther, having fixed ourselves too firmly in the
territories which they resigned to us, to be
driven from them by force, we shall now be at
liberty to repudiate the stipulations on which
we originally acquired those territories. The
principle at issue may be shortly stated.
At the time when the Nuwab of ARCOT ceded
by treaty his territories on certain terms to
the Company there were a number of rela-
tions and officers of the Sovereign who held
estates under grants made by the Nuwab and
his predecessors of a very similar nature to
those by which the nobility and gentry of Eng-
land now hold their estates. It was thought
desirable by the Company to obtain posses-
sion of these estates at the time when they
acquired the sovereignty of the territories in
which they lay, and they agreed to pay to the
holders and their families in successive gene-
rations a sum annually, as compensation, which
was deemed ,equivalent to the rents of the
lands thus sought to be obtained. On this
agreement the holders at once gave up posses-
sion, and the Company stepped peaceably into
the proprietorship of the estates. For many
years the equivalent was paid fairly and with-
out question, and descending to children,
where there were any ; and, if not, reverting to
the heirs general of the original stipendiaries,
precisely as in the case of income arising out
of any other kind of personal estate. Latterly,
however, the system has been entirely altered.
The Company have claimed the right on the
death of each individual holder to pay his
heir whatever amount they think proper. And
what with diminished payments to lineal heirs,
and the refusing payment altogether in cases
where the heir is not a male child inheriting
by direct descent from the last incumbent, a
large portion of the payment originally stipu-
lated has been withheld. Thus the Company,
while they retain possession of the land, and
the rents arising from it, are repudiating a
large portion of the annual payments, in con-
sideration of which the land was assigned to
them. In fact, they have arbitrarily changed
an estate properly descendible to heirs general
of the first granters into an estate descendible
only in tail male, renewing the settlement in
each generation so as to cut off all those who
even under this limitation would be heirs to
the original grantee, and confining the succes-
sion to the eldest male child of the man last
in possession, or, on failure of such child, the
portion is resumed, and the heirs general are
left to starve.
The plan has been artfully devised with a
view of gradually absorbing the cost of the
lughires, the rents of which we continue to
pocket ; hut it is not only an unworthy one,
but contrary to treaty, and a direct violation,
therefore, of the faith that we have pledged.
If proof be wanting of this, it may be found
in the fact that no such plan of reducing the
payment ever occurred to the minds of those
who formed the treaty, or to the successive
governors who ruled India for very many
years afterwards. In fact, the whole plan
owes its origin to that alieni appetens tut pro-
futus system alleged by CICERO against

V;.....