The Express.
London, England, 1853-06-07 00:00:00

apart. And it is not owing to the settlement
among them of colonising English. It is not a
case of the melting away of an inferior race
in the light of a superior. We do not colonise that
vast dependency of ours, rich as it is in all reitural
wealth and full of advantages for the production of
all that can be made. Perhaps the nearest approach
to eloquence in the whole speech was the sentence
which described the relation of the English to India
—" We go, we govern, and we return." In fact,
only 337 British have settled on the land in all that
enormous territory ; and the number of British in
the whole country unconnected with the Government
scarcely exceeds 100,000. While their own upper
classes are thus melting away and none come to
supply their places--while the expenditure for wars
is to that for the arts of peace as forty-two to one--
while they are segregated in villages where they suffer
under an alternaticin of want and glut which yields
no remainder—while the want of capital dooms them

to a condition ever sinking—while English capital
finds its way to all the hands in the world but
theirs, Sir C. Woon gives out in Parliament
that he must say that he sees " no evidence that the
condition of the people of India is not as good as that
of the peasantry in most parts oven of the civilised
world." We have been accustomed to think the evi-
dence of Indian famines tolerably strong : and a de-
clining salt tax would be commonly supposed to
come under the head of evidence, when it is the only
article of consumption that is taxed. That the
population purchase only Is. Id. worth per head of
our oommodities in the year, while the half-slava
population of South America purchase to the
amount of Bs. Bd. per head, is what we should
call evidence that the condition of the peasantry,
is inferior to that of other countries. Sir CHARLES
Woon deprecates all comparison of India to
England, and he observes his own rule in regard to
blessings; but when we come to curses, he violates it
directly. We are not to comp= e his happy pea-
santry with our own : but, in regard to some
acknowledged vices and miseries of our Indian
management, he picks out our worst vices and mise-
ries at home to compare them with. He matches
saisexiss as a tailor matches cloths. He exhibits the per-
, Juries of natives, but fails to admit that we have not
tried to educate them to something better. He says
much about the judges, and the paucity of appals
from their decisions ; but there was not a word
, about the dread in which our courts are held by the
people, and of the sufferings they will endure rather
than undergo our justice. He related an anecdote of
the jealousy of the natives when one of their race
was put into office; and he seemed entirely insen-
sible to the cutting censure of such an illustration of
our relation to the people. He spoke of our was
as an affiiction—in the same tone in whisk
he would have spoken of a hurricane or the cholera
and audaciously held up to admiration the mite we!
had spent in pacific objects, as if we had not emptied
out a full treasury for purposes of aggression and do_
minion. He spoke of our double government of India
as if a genuine administration of Indian affairs were
really the result, and as if he did not know that it
takes three years to get a letter answered by Govern-
ment, while there have been three Presidents of the
Board of Control in one February.
This will not do. If the Hindoos can bear it, the
English cannot. Oar anxiety, our shame, our lose.
our peril about Indian affairs, must not be mocked
by special pleadings and general boastings like them.
II We will have Haileybury and Addiscombe thrown
open—of course. That is the smallest thing we in-
tend to have. If anybody likes the amusement of
chopping and changing about the Directors, let this
play at that game, on the understanding that IS la
not to stand in the way of real business. We taut
go to business, and that immediately—to get wall-
compacted responsible government organised for
India, and laws that can work, and courts that can
be confided in, and a power of control over war-
makers, and a power of stimulating the arts of
peace. While Ministers are extolling their bits of
road, and their dribble of irrigation, we must press
on to stretch a highway for our commerce across the
whole expanse of our dependency, and bees Amalie
for British capital through its entire =taut, that
from the commercial seed moral harvests war
spring, where now all is as barren—as official speedos
on difficult subjects.