The Express.
London, England, 1858-07-16 00:00:00

THE EXPRESS, FRIDAY EVENING, JULY 16, UK

We do not know whether the mamas has been the
work of the inhabitants of Jeddah or of a crowd col-
lected from other parts. We do not know whether it
has been the result of some local quarrel or Wens
dentanding, or provoked by /mimetic!' from various
more remote enemies. The stories about the Hadra-
aunt) merchants, and the Sheikh who had wit-
nessed the massacre at Delhi, are not to be received
as exact and literal truths ; but it is possible that
they may indicate the real source of the outrage.
It is stated that the English Consulate was first at-
tacked ; this seems to imply that the English were
the more immediate objects of hostility. Jeddah—is
the port of Mecca, and u such likely to be thronged
by pilgrims from various parts; it is therefore pos-
sible that the massacre may have been mainly
the work of non-residents. The inhabitants of
Hadrantaut, from their proximity to Aden,
are very likely to be animated by the jea-
lousy and animosity which the occupation of
that Peninsula by the English has inspired, and
which the more recent occupation of Perim can
scarcely have allayed. And though the Sheikh
who witnessed the massacre of Delhi may possibly
prove a myth, it is well known that the chief priest
of the Moplabs—the fanatical Mahometans who
have given us so much trouble on the Malabar
coast—has been many years resident at Mecca, and
has been incessantly intriguing against us. There
are, therefore, good grounds for surmising that the
Jeddah massacre has been a blow more especially
struck at England, and in that case our whole posi-
tion as rulers in Hindostan, and our whole foreign
relations as regards Mahometan States, may take a
colouring from it. The affair is one which, on the
part of England, calla for action at onos prompt sad
wary.

There remains to be considered the conduct of the
Turkish authorities in the Hedjas. As far as has
yet transpired there appears to be little reason to
complain of them. There has been, it may be, hesi-
tation, irresolution, wavering on the part of the
Governor ; but when the conduct of our Vtallos
Slants at home, and of some high in office at Cal-
cutta, is recalled to mind, it will be obvious that
Englishmen have little right to throw the first
stone on that score. Of complicity with the rioters
on the part of the Turkish authorities there is no
trace ; and there is no reason to expect any.
The Turks are in that region a email mino-
rity ; they are an alien and dominant race, and as
such scarcely less hated than the Christians. Mecca,
Jeddah, and the surrounding country are the region
which has been most scrupulously preserved from
European contact. There all the old Moslem in-
veteracy against Christiana prevails in almost
Its pristine intensity. The Government is weak;
and every concession it makes to Christians in the
north increases the discontent and insubordination
of the untamed and bigotted tribes of the Hedjaz.
For this very unsatisfactory state of affairs we are
mainly indebted to Lord PALMERSTON. So long as
the Pacha at Cairo administered the Herbs:, his
police was as effective there as in Egypt. Lord
Patstrarros succeeded--at the imminent risk of
involving this country in a war with France—in
wresting Arabia from NIEIILMET ALI, and placing
it once more in nominal subordination to the Porte.
He struck down a real and efficient Government In
the Hedjas, and substituted a mere shadowy
authority. That there is not the same safety
fora: Christians at Jeddah,' and throughout
the Hedjaz, as at Suez, Cairo, and Alex-
andria, is the fault of Lord PALMERSTON.
Again, the fanaticism of the Arabians, the increas-
ing jealousy entertained by their local traders of
foreign merchants, and the unsocial habits of the
whole population as regards aliens, are in great part
I the consequence of their isolation from European
contact. This isolation it has been the unvarying
aim of Lard PALMERSTON'S policy to perpetuate.
His blind and bigoted opposition to the Suez Canal,
and to almost every other project for facilitating the
acmes of European commerce to the Red Sea, has its
origin in a superannuated dream of keeping the Red
Sea an English lake, and excluding from it a large
proportion even of English traffio—all those heavy
goods which are still sent round by the Cape.
But for Lord PALMERSTON the Red Sea would
long Cr, this have been one thronged mart of
' European commerce—the great highway of the
traffic between the West and the East—and the
prejudice of the inhabitants of its coasts against
Europeans would have been rapidly disappearing.
And Lord PALMERSTON is at least an accomplice in
that imbecile and procrastinating policy which, by
shrinking from the immediate despatch of reinforce-
ments to India on the first receipt of the news of the
Mutiny, allowed an opportunity to be lost of im-
pressing all the East with a profound sense of our
power as a nation.

Ma. Dtea,►att'e Bill for the purification of the
Thames is by no means either a complicated or a
very complete piece of legislation. It does not sus-
tain the promise of its title. It is a measure, not for
cleansing the river, bat for raising the wind—a plan
for furnishing funds by which Mr. THWAITES and his
colleagues may be enabled to accomplish what every-
body wants done, end nobody knows how to do. The
whole enterprise is thrown on the Metropolitan Board
of Works. They alone are to decide on plans, they
alone are to be responsible for their execution.
Being thus subjected to responsibility they are also
to be entrusted with power. For forty years they
are to enjoy a delegated right of levying a rate of
3d. in the pound over the whole of the metropolitan
districts. They are farther empowered to raise money
to the extent of 3,000,0001. en a government gua-
rantee at 4 per cent.
Bach is the outline of the Government scheme.
To a certain extent, undoubtedly, it meets one
of the difficulties of this confessedly difficult
ease. It diminishes, if it does not remove, the
financial difficulty. It is also a step in advance, in
as far as it substitutes the undivided responsibility
of a single Board for the practical irresponsibility of
two co-ordinate and consequently conflicting Boards.
Bat it does not, indeed it could not well, go beyond
this. The engineering difficulty remains precisely what
it was. No definite scheme has been propounded
whisk approves itself as pre-eminently worthy of
adoption. No single man of first-rate engineering
genius has come forward with a plan which alike
satiate the requirements of science and the j udgmen t
of practical good sense. There may be amongst us such
a man, but if so, he has not come out. At present there
is a perfect chaos of schemes and counterachemes,
bewildering alike to the scientific and to the non-
scientific mind. Combustion of gases; deodorisation
of sewage; an iron cloaca in the mid-channel of
the Thames ; a couple of vast open canals of pollu-
tion carried down to Woolwich, to Erith,
to Bea-Reach ; embankment of the Thames
the carrying away of the timid matter in
barges or collecting it in tanks—every conceivable
variety, in short, of suggestion hes day after day
been submitted to a puzzled public and an equally
puzzled Legislature—till the task of selection and
decision appears to hays become one of mere hope-
Wanes.. Will the Metropolitan Parliament be,
indeed, able to extricate us from this bewiklerment ?
It is difficult to feel very confident that they will.
Boards, like individuals, are necessarily the victims

d the scientific wen the', employ in the conduct of
schemes liko these ; and the scientific men they eta.
ploy are thsenselves not absolutely proof agaiast the
prompting, et professional ambition. The desire to
carry out a great engineering work is a temptation
almost irresistible to an eminent engineer. How
can it be expected that the professional mind which
has once conceived ► gigantic scheme of intercepting
drainage will be content with the humbler utility of
mere works of deodorisation ? This, then, is the rock
a-head. If you invest the Metropolitan Board with
money and power, you virtually place us at the
mercy of any eminent engineer who may have inte-
rest or ingenuity enough to produce the most plausi-
ble scheme. As to responsibility, we have not much
faith in it. The responsibility of an individual
may be a reality, that of a board is a farce. If our
Metropolitan Board had been furnished with funds,
and clothed with responsible powers from the first,
we should by this time have had BIZALGETTE at
work, with his high level and low level sewers at the
North and the South. Is it comfortable to think of
this? Meanwhile the work must be done somehow,
and it certainly has a better chance of getting done
by being entrusted to one body, than by being
' '

to and fro between two bodies.

There is one obvious consideration which meets
us at every turn in this discussion. Why
is the Metropolitan Board of Works—the collective
Prefecture, as it nominally is, of this vast metro-
polis—eo powerless and so poor that it should require
this Government aid ? The answer is plain: Because
it is not really what it professes to be, and what it
ought to be. The real wealth and the real power
are with the Corporation of the City, nor can Lon-
don ever be placed on a footing of equality,
in respect of local management —we do
not say with Paris, but even with our own
great provincial towns—until that much needed Re-
form has been carried out, which, by abolishing the
Corporation monopoly, shall really vest in one
Metropolitan Council the entire management and
the vast resources of the whole metropolitan dis-
trict. The manner in which successive Govern-
ments have been allowed to palter and procrasti-
nate with this great question of Corporation Reform
is one of the most discreditable features of our
present Parliamentary system ; one of the strongest
proofs of the lassitude that has overtaken the Liberal
Party

LAniST -INTELLIGIINCE,

THE MASSACRE AT JEDDAH.

AND 11M68 TILZOILATI.)
_ PARIS, FRIDAY MONNINO.

The Merit/yr says that the atrocious act at Jeddah
exceeds in barbarity anything is the worst days
of Muesulman fanaticism, and demands prompt
and signal satisfaction. The two governments are
taking measures in concert for securing such made-
faction as the honour of their flags and the enormity
of the outrage require.

CONSTANTINOPLE, IvLy 14.

A general officer of the Ottoman army has been
ordered to proceed immediately to Jeddah, as an
imperial commissioner, to bring to trial and punish-
ment, by martial law, the guilty parties concerned
in the late horrible massacre.