The Press.
London, England, 1857-09-05 00:00:00

t'el HOW TO MAKE THINGS PLEASANT.
TO THE EDITOR OF 66 THE PRESS."
Sir,—Long an admiring reader of THE Pam, I
have always regretted the deficiency of its editor in
one most important qualification. He cannot make
things look pleasant, but with a stolidity which is
painful declines to gloss over facts or to conceal the
real state of affairs. In no instance has this defici-
ency been more conspicuous than with respect to the
Indian mutinies.
Your contemporaries the Times and the Globe
will have opened your eyes to your deficiencies, and
the disgust they express at your plain speaking must
be pretty general all over the country. Nor need
you wonder at this, for you must admit that the
mode of treatment of the Indian crisis adopted by
the Ministerial papers and by her Majesty's Minis-
ters is much more pleasant than that which you so
pertinaciously adhere to. It is refreshing to turn
from the sickening horrors of the Indian massacres
to the placid assurances that at the worst it is only
a mil;tary revolt, in which the natives in no degree
sympathise ; that the English are gathering in over-
whelming numbers round Delhi, while the muti-
neers inside are hastening the period of their retri-
bution by internal divisions, and that, defeated by
our troops on all occasions, destitute of percussion-
caps, and dying like rotten sheep of cholera, they
cannot long postpone the period when, by their
wholesale destruction, we shall avenge the wrongs
they have committed on our countrymen, raze Delhi
to the ground, relieve Agra and Lucknow, and by
the next mail learn the suppression of the revolt.
Then, again, contrast the tone of your paper and
of the Ministerial prints on another branch of the
same subject. You are always commenting on the
remissness of Ministers and the pococurante view
taken by them of the most tragic and heartrending
episode in English history. You even doubt the
tremendous energy of Lord Canning, and cavil
against the wisdom of Vernon Smith ; nor does the
commanding presence of Macallum More induce you
to be satisfied with his assurance that all has been
done which the emergency requires. Perhaps your
wicked perversity will even carry you so far as to
denounce Lord Palmerston for adjourning Parlia-
ment without making any provision for borrowing
those large sums of money which will be required
to put down the mutiny; and you will argue, in
ignorant defiance of the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
that it is unreasonable to expect that the Indian
Government, which for years back has had an annual
deficit, will this year, with its expenses quadrupled
and without one-third of its income, be able of itself
to raise the necessary supplies. Nay, further, I can
suppose you ill-advised enough to affirm that Lord
Palmerston should have made provision for a large
army of reserve ; and you will quote history to prove
that the effective force of the thirty thousand men
whom Government have sent out to conquer a
country the size of Russia, with a population of a
hundred millions, will be frightfully reduced even by
the march over the thousand miles they have to
make to reach Delhi.
Such fear will for some time be the burden of
your leaders ; but I submit for your consideration
that, seeing the only merit of such a style of writing
consists in its truth, and its only advantage in the
importance of rightly appreciating the danger of our
position, whether it is prudent to sacrifice your popu-
larity, and to be called by the Ministerial papers and
their credulous supporters, who like to take things
quietly, "anti-national," "Russian," and amen
damnis And I put it to you commercially whether
it would not be wiser to praise Lords Palmerston
and Canning, to prophesy the easy extinction of the
rebellion, the perfect adequacy of the "tremendous
force" sent out, and to answer emphatically for our
perfect safety at home, when, by the vigour of our
Government, England has been denuded of troops ?
Such a style of writing has only one fault—namely,
falsehood—and there is no denying it has a trifling
tendency to aggravate our dangers by inducing us
to relax in our efforts ; but then it has the para-
mount advantage of being popular and of being
greedily believed by all those who wish it to be true.
I think I have put the case to you plainly
enough, and hope that, after perusing this letter,
you will see the propriety of following the lead of the
Ministerial papers, to the great glory of Lord Pal-
merston, and the exceeding comfort of tho old women
of England.—l am, sir, your obedient servant,
J. A. G.

For several hours on Thursday night and yester-
day morning (Friday) a fire of considerable magni-
tude raged in Gee-street, Brick lane, St. Luke's.
The scene of this misfortune was the extensive
premises of Mr. J. Strickland, picture-frame menu-
facturer, No. 25, Gee-street, whose premises were
nearly 104) feet long by 50 feet wide. The entire
premises were destroyed and tea adjoining houses
most severely injured.