Northern Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1857-07-27 00:00:00

THE CRISIS OF INDIA.

It is very necessary that a sufficient number of
European troops should be thrown in to keep the
native mercenaries in order. The distribution
should be such as to prevent any alien rebels from
consolidating their strength. But India is not to
be preserved to us by a dead weight of military
power. Such a vast population must always to a
certain extent be governed through itself, partly by
keeping it in check, partly by studying its feelings
and the exercise of those influences which can
guide without irritating. The skilful driver knows
how to make his horses feel that there is a tight
hand upon the reins if they are impatient, while
" their heads are given to them" so long as they go
at the properpace. So it is with adult children like
the semi-barbarian Hindoo. Whatever differences
may exist among Anglo-Indians, there is a common
agreement in the fact that the. Hindoo has been
treated too much like tha European. On grounds
of common humanity, he might be persuaded to
part with some of his usages—with his festival
of Juggernaut or his suttee. The proposal to
re-marry widows trenched upon his ideas of positive
morality. But when he sees a law passed that
threatens his social position, his very property is at
stake. A law was passed that the convert to Chris-
tianity, notwithstanding the consequent loss of
caste, should retain his land— a law " striking at
the very foundations of property,". as our land-
owners would say. It injured individual in-
terests, for those friends and relations who would
have succeeded to the forfeited • property saw their
reversionary rights destroyed. Again, in the dis-
tribution of greased cartridges he sees a stratagem
to deprive him of caste, and so to loosen his tenure
upon his land. No pouring in of cornmon.soldiers,
with the beet officers, could hold 150,000,000 men
in check, if we irritate and alarm them while re-
moving them from the actual control of firm and
skilful administrators. Quite as much as soldiers,
are wanted men, or 'a man, Who' knows the
native character—who has the experience and
the heart to govern the barbarism, the energy and
firmness to carry out his own counsels. Have we
such men, either in London or in India? We
cannot answer the question in the affirmative. We
have Mr. Vernon Smith at the Board of Control;
of whom it has lately been said in parliament that .
every Anglo-Indian mistrusts him. But perhaps

he is not the real governor. Is it Lord Palmerston ?
If he is, does he understand ludian affairs? Is
the Governor General, promoted from the Post-
office to sit at the head of the gigantic correspond-
ence ~of India during the time of apparent
tranquility, the man who would be exactly selected
for the present juncture ? On this important
point we are absolutely destitute of information.
But one thing the facts tell us—that the men
appointed in India, or retained there, ought to be
men suited to the present eircumstances.—Spectator.

A CREW FOR THE FLYING DUTCHMAN.
Garratt, the great gold-robber, was for some
years the leader of the convict ton in Bermuda 4
His associates regarded him with admiration ; he
was the master-spirit of their yellow-coated con-
federacy. Ultimately, Mr. Kirwan, condemned
(justly or not) for the murder of his wife in Ireland's
Eye, arrived in the colony. Garratt at once re-
signed the lead, and said, courteusly, he could not
think of refusing precedence to Mr. Kirwan.
Upon the same principle, the banks of the. Swan,
in Western Australia, may be expected to become
the scene of a social flutter; for an aristocracy is
to be planted in. the soil. On the 25th of
August a good ship will sail from England,
bearing to The Swan Sir John Dean Paul,
Mr. Strahan, Mr. Bates, Mr. Leopold Redpath, Mr.
Robson, Mr. Saward, Mr. Agar—three celebrated
embezzlers, three celebrated forgers, and the
inimitable, vengeful Agar. With the exception of
Agar and Seward, between whom an antipathy may
naturally be supposed to rankle, many mutual
feelings will harmonise this aristocracy of detested
crime. Common reminiscences and a common fate
unite them. What strange contrasts in their lives
Paul looking back through the gratings of Milibank
to that happier time when he sat with Baron
Alderson on the bench of justice ; Strahan to his
" elegantly planted park and residence in perfect
taste ;" Bates to the hour of gratified ambition, in
which he became the partner in a firm with a
baronet at his head. Through Redpath's dreams
may flit the auction at which ho bid successfully
against the French Emperor for a wondrous work
in buhl ; through Robson's the triumph of his
dramatic productions—
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and tie dream ?
Neither Agar nor Saward can have sympathies
with men or with regrets like these. The latter
was for twenty years a miserable Jonathan Wild,
a master forger, a burglars' agent, whose nightmare
was Newgate; to the former penal . discipline has
been the routine of years; he knows what it is to
labour in the hulks he must have calculated, half
a life ago, upon no euthanasia better than a
ticket-of-leave. But, in some respects, Red-
path and Robson stand upon a level with him ; they
garbled every day, and hazarded liberty for luxury ;
they could scarcely have looked for perpetual
winnings. Depend upon it, many a time and oft
did a prophetic shadow of penitentiaries and the
Australian settlements obscure the glitter of
Chester-terrace, and the gaiety of Kilburn Priory.
We do not believe that the three bankers ever
imagined such a possibility; breaking the old
bank in the Strand, and losing their com-
mercial reputation—that was, no doubt, the climax
of fear in the minds of Paul, Strahan, and Bates.
With four hundred inferior criminals they go—these
social bankrupts—to Western Australia. Well,
there is something upon which to congratulate
even this criminal crew. It is a change—from
the monotony of that hideous desert of brick
and whitewash at Millbank, from the wards of
Newgate, from the motionless hulk in the. Thames.
They cross the ocean; they have a new life before
them ; there will be freshness i❑ the sight of the
Australian shores ; there is the prospect of tickets-
of-leave. But how the population will crowd to
gape at the convict baronet, and revive the story of
Redpath's " glory"—upon which ballad-singers
have so unctuously expatiated ! How will the old
"leading men" of the Swan River Settlement
resign their precedence in favour of five gentlemen
so accomplished, and, up to a certain point, so
flattered by society ? Agar and "Saward will not
be similarly respected ; they have only their dis-
torted talents to recommend them : they have
never been gentlemen, or sat. on the bench, or
inherited estates, or outbid Louis Napoleon,
or achieved a dramatic success. But let
the captain of the vessel " chartered at
Lloyd's look well to his navigation: There
is a story that the Flying Dutchman has for ages
been wandering in search of a crew. And would
not the seven great convicts prefer the perfidious
barque, built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses
dark, to the grey soup, canary-coloured •jackets,
and dull severity of a penal colony ? Never, per-
haps, was a more remarkable band of criminals
embarked together, or one in which mutual recog-
nitions were more likely to take place. The five
" respectable" individuals moved pretty much in
the same " sphere,'' except that their sympathies
were different. Robson, although a poet, had not
the delicate tastes of Redpath, and as for Sir
John Dean Paul, his " seriousness" kept him apart
from turfment and philosophical virtuosi.—Leader.