The Express.
London, England, 1857-08-24 00:00:00

THE EXPIINA

narrow elide of his tastily and Weds, may Is.
bear his commandire company in death. The gess
don of our troops in the revolted dlstriets ream-
Mee slarsaingly that of the Spartans at Thee-
mopyhe ; they look like men doomed to die, in order
to giro their country time to assemble her forces
and put forth all her might.
We dwell upon this awful reflection—we meek to
realise to the imaginations of our readers—not for
the purpose of exciting unavailing regrets or idle
indignation. It is not enough to say that those
men will be avenged—they must, if possible, be
saved. Too much time has already been wasted.
If we may believe the Pays, Ministers have nego-
tiated succetsfully with the Yachts of EGYPT for the
transit of troops woes the Ltlunus of Suet. That
ought to have been done the moment the news of
the mutiny arrived. The first detachment of troops
of all arms ought already to have crossed the Isth-
mus, whereas it is doubtful whether those who are
to be sent out will even yet find means of conveyance
ready for them at Suez. Again, in reply to those
who urge the employment of gunboats and steamers
on the Indian rivers,Lord PALMERSTON, with chime-
teristic levity, asserted, that though the Ganges and
Indus make a great show on a map, they are not
very available for water carriage. Of course they
are not unless suitable vessels are employed. The
gunboats despatched to China, whose great draught
of water would have rendered them as unavailing in
the Canton river as the gunboats sent to the Baltic
were among the reefs of Finland, would be useless
on the Indus or Ganges. But if orders had been
I sent in proper time to Bombay and Moulmein, a fleet
of gunboats calculated to navigate both rivers might
by this time have been ready for inc. Had efforts been
made at first to collect a fleet of steamers of light
draught in India, the Indus and Ganges, with their
affluents, might have been our great highways for the
conveyance of men and military stores during the
whole of the rainy lesson. How do matters actually I
stand? Allahabad is accessible to the steamers
which ply on the Ganges at all seasons; yet the
latest accounts speak of soldiers forwarded bens
&flares to Allahabad by bullock trains. Demo.
dation of the apathy and inertness of ore.
would, however, now be mere waste of time. The
mistakes of the past are the necessary consequence of
extraordinary duty devolving on very common-

place men. They could not raise themselves to the
exigencies of the occasion ; they could not devise
unprecedented means of meeting an unprece-
dented danger. But now the necessity must
be obvious even to them, and the people
must bring into play the pressure from without to
compel them to meet it. The bin of blood-guilti-
ness will rest or. the bead of every man who is
slack in this great work. The greater part of our
surviving countrymen iu the insurgent districts may
yet be saved if proper exertion is made. The
slaughtered women and babes can only be avenged
—but those who survive may be rescued. But in
order to achieve this great object every power that
art and science have placed at the national disposal
most be put forth, and that without a moment's de-
lay. Our cause is aholy one. We fight not merely
to retrieve the honour of England—though that,
too, is something—we fight to save the millions of
India from the domination of es ruthless and anar-
chical a soldiery es we saved them from when we
put down the Mahrattas and the l'indarees.

The fleet &Won of the Parliament of 1857 has
reached its close. Unusual!). brief as its deliberative
term has been, the sense of wearies.' and exhaustion
has long since marked its proceedings in a way
neither to be controlled nor concealed. Conceived in
anger and brought into existence amid shouts of pas-
donate exultation, the still youthful House of Com-
mons betrays already too many symptoms of being
prematurely old. We do not advert to its
garrulity, for that is the characteristic of both
stages of childishness, and may be said to be
the privileged sin of all periods of a Parlia-
ment's life; nor yet to the ease with which,
amid the presages of storm and earthquake
in our most important dependency, the fops and
jainhnts of the Lower House have sauntered out of
tows, because the atmosphere is " really unbeatable"
sad the first days of partridge shooting are at hand.
These are not novel affectations, and the consti-
tuencies that in March last chose coxcombs and
"fools of quality" for representatives have certainly
no right to complain. What seems to us more par.
ticolarly deserving of attention is the evidence of
_ .

nervelessness and dimness of vision which the few
acts worth mentioning as the result of much talking
and voting painfully betray. Nobody expected that
the new House of Commons would go off at score in
the popular key. It had been summoned to deter-
mine no question of popular right; on the con-
trary, every attempt that was made before and
after the dissolution to extort from the Minister a
programme of future policy, was resolutely rejected
by him ; and though in various important instances
the people did for themselves what no leads: of
eminence undertook to do for them, and made wise
and honourable stipulations with their members
before they elected them, it cannot be denied that to
a great extent the bootless and absurd test of Bow-
ringism or anti-Bowringism was the only one put
forward, and that scores of incompetent, idle, and
ignorant men were returned at the hustings upon
that already almost forgotten cry. Nobody could under
such circumstances anticipate the exhibition of any

effective zeal for improvement in our domestic polity, or
any effervescent sympathy in favour of foreign free-
dom. But, considering the vaunted security of the
PALMERSTON Cabinet in the newly-elected house of
Commons, and the absence of party cohesion or unity
in the Opposition, even in the House of Lords, it was
not unreasonable to expect that the unchecked and
unimpeded power thus placed in the hands of
Ministers, of carrying useful measures, would hare
been turned to more account, and that the array of
legislative cyphers marshalled behind them, avowedly
for no other purpose than to give them preponderant
weight, would at least have been made good use of
therefor.

But whoever may hare been credulous enough
to entertain such hopes, they have been
doomed to disappointment. The ArronsEv-
GENERAL is entitled to the praise of having
kept awake during the four months' Session, and of
having consequently something like "work done" to

show as the result of his diligence. How much
more complete the fruit of his patch of the legislative
field might have been, had he had the luck to hare
had lees indolent and indifferent fellow-labourers, we

leave those who have caught matches of the honour-
able and learned gentleman's solilo-groans to deter-
mine. lie has indeed succeeded in dragging through
the stagnant and weedy waste of talk, the mutilated
remains of his Divorce Dill and the ler* injured and
consequently more valuable measure introduced at an
earlier period of the Somion for the regulation of
pecuniary hosts. But if the humble Alderman in the
play in forced to Naha' mournfully, that amid all hie
nmaielpal grandeur and power, something within
tells him that after all he is bat a man "—so the
modesty of Sir Itteman Brrnet.o. however hie
enemies may disparage his claims to the possession,
met oftentimes of late have prompted the wish that

b• was nekleft to put*, who'. 14111101" colek
=
end that the insidePaseagers could be
Map eat end walk up a pima el a hill.
Ihr the ink the Session at 1867 (he the sitting
berate NEM palimony mat kr neught) may be
said to kw pagmed wake lett a volume of
Mend Pmllllllslake emeeiset the Circumlocution-
oft% w le le Ina precedents of every
endsliralimmkr ffeelentway " sot to do it." Three
year* mks* elaborate, will therein be found
of the Merest ways in which a Parliament not re-
presenting the people, will pretend to desire to
emancipate the Jews, and at the tame time will
take out not to do so. Therein will be found
how an assembly affecting to speak the most earnest
wishes of the nation regarding the re-constitution
of its army on a jester and more efficient system,
can contrive to sit and snore out the in-
terval between the termination of one war and
commencement of another, without taking one hour's
waking thought about the national defames in
case of need, or the redemption of the long overdue
promise given in days of peril and disaster, of
"justice to the army." Therein, too, posterity will
read how a freshly elected body of representatives
succeeded in stifling every preliminary inquiry into
the notorious faults and deficiencies in the electoral
system by which they had somehow been brought
together, on the transparent pretext that it was not
their duty to tell the Minister what the nation
wanted, but to learn its wishes at some future day
from him--as though a majority of the House of
Commons tacitly desired to endorse the ill-omened
phrase that "representative institutions were upon
their trial," and being in the craven and cowed
condition of culprits at the bar of courtly justice,
had resolved to take advantage of the culprit's
privilege to say nothing lest they should commit
themselves. In the journals of 1837 will like-
wise be found traces of infinitely diver-
sified fiddle-!!addle concerning matters of prac-
tical moment—Church-rates, Harbours of Refuge,

Abolition of Puffing Tolls on Shipping, Equalisa-
don of Poor Relief Assessment, &c.—about each and
all of which no sign of business-like earnestness was
manifested, and regarding which, therefore, nothing
whatever was done. All these questions were notes
riously ripe for legislation, yet no legislation took
place, or was even seriously attempted. AU are
left to stand over for a more convenient season—•a
season which, u far u the overbalance of parties is
concerned, it is clear is never likely to come.
The truth is that to the over-weighting of the
balance in favour of the Government of the day, the
power of usefulness has for the time been sacrificed.
The pendulum of opinion no longer moves, and the
whole mechanism of legislation is virtually stopped.
Parliamentary Government without a strong and
vigorous Opposition of some sort, is a sham, a thing
that cannot last, an illusion that nobody can desire
to see prolonged. The convulsive vehemence of
narrow-minded sections, whether belonging to one
extreme of opinion or to the other, is no compensa-
tion for the want of a powerful and constant check
upon the conduct of Administration—let us rather
say, for the want of a permanent end well-regulated
pressure upon the opting. of executive rule. Without
such prostate its springs, however intrinsically
• sound, lose their practical power, and become as
1 valveless as though they had never been, when duly
bound sod est, capable of safely bearing the burthen
of a world-wide empire.

It is eonfldently asserted, in certain quarters
which profess to be well informed, that Lord It.
Ortavenor, Lord Harry Vitae and Mr. Compton
Cavendish are to be immediately niece' to the
peerage ; and that the writs for Middlesex, South
Durham, and Buda will be boned before the pro-
rogation.