The Express.
London, England, 1858-09-02 00:00:00

SPORTING INTELLIGENCE..

A SPECIAL EDITION ef the "EXPRESS,"
seutaialag the results et the day's Reese, is pub-
lished every evening daring the Sporting Simon, et
to o'clock.

THE Government of the East India Company has
ripened into history. The affairs of ear great
Anglo-Indian Empire are now administered in the
name of the Crown. The Company has no territories,
has no subjects, has no servants. It exists only for
the management of stock and the payment of divi-
dends. In place of a great fact we haves great expe-
riment. GOD grant that it may be a suoceedul one.
Believing that the great change which is now at
maturity on this 2nd day of September, 1858,
would be beneficial neither to India nor to
England, we vigorously resisted it from the
first. We did not contend that the ma-
chinery of Indian Government was not suscep-
tible of some improvement. The progress of Time
and Circumstance, which had already rendered that
Government, like all other Governments in free
countries, a Government of change, must necessarily
in their further development have suggested some
further changes. A little more consolidation and
simplification may have been demanded ; but the
incumbrances and excrescences which complicated
and delayed the despatch of business, might bare
been removed without cutting into the very heart
of the system. Instead of improving the exist-
ing Government of India, Parliament really
determined, without consideration and without in-
qairy, to destroy it ; and having once committed
itself to this resolution, it floundered on until the
work was done. No measure of equal magnitude
has ever, we will venture to say, been hurried
through the two Houses of Parliament with so
little thought and so little knowledge of the subject.
To those who watched, with intelligent interest, the
progress of legislation during the latter part of the
Session, it was astounding to observe how frequently
grave questions were misunderstood, important
points mimed, and vital principles altogether ob-
scured. But in spite of Ministerial and Parliamentary
ignorance, an Act for the future Government of India
this day becomes the law of the land, with fewer
inherent defects in it than we ever dared to expect.
It is probable that we owe the moat beneficial parts
of the Act to the very haste and the very indifference
which, in the abstract, are to be so much deplored
and condemned. A jaded Parliament, a burning
summer, and a poisonous river, saw accidents in them-
selves not very favourable to wise legislation; but,
somehow or other, we feel that they have done more
for us than anything to which reason and experi-
ence would have induced us to look for favourable
results. lime pressed, the Thames threatened,
members were alarmed. The work was to be done;
the Bill was to be passed. It was necessary in this
strait to seek the assistance of some me knowing
something about the m►tter. In a happy hour the
East India Company itself went to the rescue—and
truthful history will record that the Bill, which was
finally passed at the end of the session, was not Lord
PALMERSTON'S Bill—nor Lord ELLENBOROOGII'S
Bill—nor Lord STANLEY'S Bill ; bet the Bill oldie
East India Company.
It has been loudly and rancorously objected to
the system under which the affairs of our Anglo-
Indian Empire are now for the first time
administered, that it is too much like the
old " double government " of the Court of
Directors and the Board of Control. It is said, with
different expressions of contumely, that we have sot
only the same system, bat nearly the same um to
carry it into operation. So much the better. Eleven
members of the old Court of Directors have been
elected or nominated to the new Council of India.
They are experienced men; they ars independent
men ; we have every reason to believe that they are
honest men. If to some eonsiderable portion of
them the old traditions of the East India Com-
pany still cling, so much, we repent, the better;
for foremost among those traditions ever was
that which declared that the Court of Directors
was " not a political body." The adjective has
many meanings : but here it was understood to mean
that the Court of Directors had never been subject
to Parliamentary or party influence,. The is a tra-
dition worthy of eternal preservation by the Coun-
cil. It is the richest legacy which the defooct
Government of the East India Company has flans-
milled to the infant Council. If in that Council
there had been a majority of new men,
would that tradition be perpetuated ? Weald
other traditions, a respect for which enabled the
Company so long to exercise dominion in India, be
perpetuated under a new system worked out by
new men If there had been a clean sweep of
Leadenhall-street, what would have become of our
Indian Empire ?

It is because there is so much of the old system, and
no many of the old men,in the new Crown Government
of India, that we arc not without hope of its anomie.
As it is, there must nec,ssarily be a transition-period,

lIIIMEm.