The Sun.
London, England, 1864-06-27 00:00:00

INDIAN BRANCH.

The half-yearly meeting of this railway company was
held on Friday at the London Tavern, the Marquis of
Tweeddale in the chair.
The report was taken as read.
The CHAIRMAN, in moving the adoption of the report,
said the undertaking was for the purpose of establishing a
permanent light system of railways in India. Their com-
pany was the first that had undertaken to make rail•
ways without a guaranteed rate of interest. All
the railways that had been guaranteed ware subjected
to Government c )ntrol, delay, interruption, and increased
expense. The terms upon which they carried on their ope •
rations did not allow of interference with their works, or
limit their dividend to 5 per cent. Their engineer, Mr
Wilson, had returned to England for the benefit of his
health, and he was glad to see him in tho room, (Hear.)
He thought the Government were right in waiting for the
working of the Nulhattee line before conceding to the com-
pany the whole of the lines in Oude and Rohilcund, The
Government had undertaken to supply the land, the road,
and bridges, with the exception of the bridge to Moorsha-
bad. The late Governor. General, Lord Elgin, had visited
the line when in course of construction, and had expressed
his approval of the plan and works. The Deputy-Governor
of Bombay had also inspected it, and, finding everything
complete, agreed that it should be opened in January last for
traffic, The receipts to March 31 amounted to £1,650, and
the expenses to £6BO, leaving £970, which was equivalent
to 5 per cent. on their outlay of £2,300 per mile, which was
the cost to them when the line was completed in all re-
spects. The company were to have 796 miles conceded to
them in the rich, productive, and populous district of Oude
and Rohilcund. They were of easy construction, and the
climate was well suited to the cultivation of most valuable
produce for home consumption. The best districts bad been
selected by the Government for those cheap lines, which
would not only greatly develop° the resources of those
districts, but prove important feeders to the main line of
the East Indian Railway between Benares and Delhi.
Mr WILSON, the engineer in chief, gave an account of
the company's proceedings in India. The receipts on the
Nulhattee line for the three months it was open gave a net
return of 51 per cent on the capital, hut this was no criterion
of what it would be when it was in operation a longer time,
It was difficult to divert the traffic from the old route, but
since they had established through booking between Cal.
cutta and Moorshabad, and vice versa, the traffic had
greatly increased. He had received a letter, dated the 16th
of last month, from which it appeared that the goods traffic
alone for seven days on the Nulhattee line amounted to £122,
and he had no doubt that the goods traffic on the Indian
lines would equal the passenger traffic. The principle upon
which their system rested was economy, lightness, stiffness,
in obtaining the same strength with half the weight of
material judiciously put together. The carriages for con-
veying 200 persons weighed about 7i tons, but on the ordi-
nary construction the dead weight of the carriages would be
four times as much, or 30 tons. The same result was ob-
tained in conveying goods ; therefore a heavy engine was
not required, and a light one was adopted. The Govern-
ment subsidy of £lOO per mile per annum for 20 years was
equivalent to £1,350 per mile, which, added to £20300 for
the Nulhattee line, or to £2,650 for the Oude and Rohilcund
lines, gave the total cost of them per mile. On the Nul-
hattee line the subsidy was equivalent to 2i per cent. per
annum for 20 years, and the net traffic for the short time it
had been opened 3.16 per cent., even without a junction
with Moorshabad, as the people had to cross the river to
and from the railway. But in the Oude and Rohilcund dis-
tricts the traffic would be far greater than on the Nulhattee
line. There were 23 coach companies on the road between
Cawnpore and Lucknow, from which they could form some
idea of what the traffic would be on their line, which
would run all the way by the side of the road. In Lucknow
there were 350,000 inhabitants, and in Fyzabad beyond it
there were 250,000 inhabitants. The whole district was
more densely populated than any part of Europe, and there
was ample traffic to pay them a very large dividend. There
could be no doubt that railways economically constructed
in India would pay handsomely.
Mr DENT, in seconding the motion for the adoption of the
report, explained that the Government gave the company
the land for the railway, and a subsidy of £lOO a mile per
aniawn for 20 years, which was equal to £1,300 in cash.
This was given in 4eu of making the roads for the branch
railway company, and that was abort the average cost to
the Government of making the ordinary roads. This was
done in cases where the Government had no road to give the
company. The concession for the lines in Oude and Rol:4:
cund was agreed to be given them by the late lamented
Governor-Cleneral of India, Lord Elgin. They had no
doubt that final teruss would be come to, and that the sub-
sidy for those lines would be granted, The concession Was
for 99 years.

After some observations by Mr Sheward, Mr Powell, and
Mr Turnbull, as to the favourable prospects of the under.
taking, resolutions were passed adopting the report; autho-
rizing the (Undue to borrow £lOO,OOO at 5 pot' cent on

THE "SPECTATOR" ON THE COMING WAR.—
The Conference which ought never to have met has
risen, and the possibilities of peace are slipping
away by hours. One more formal meeting takes
place to-day, and then the plenipotentiaries sum-
moned to register and legalize an act of armed
spoliation disperse to countries more deeply em-
bittered than they were before the assemblage,
.Throughout the negotiations every country en-
gaged has maintained the attitude which it had
assumed in war; Prussia, insolent, unreasoning,
and aggressive; Austria courteous in seeming, but
following steadily Herr von Rismark's lead ; Den-
mark complaining, and moderate up to a point, but
pressed beyond that, hard as iron, or as the op-
pressed are apt to be; Russia unintelligible; France
watchful; and England, conciliatory to the verge,
or over the verge, of national humiliation. After
surrendering the treaty of 1852, which England her-
self prepared, after giving up Holstein and selling
Lauenburg, after offering one large slice of the
country whose integrity he was bound to defend,
after compelling his unhappy ally to abandon the
boundary of a thousand years, and suggesting that
she might live without a defensible frontier, Earl
Russell made his final effort in favour of peace and
accepted a crowning humiliation. He abandoned
his own ultimatum, the line of the Schlei, and by
agreeing to an award of any boundary between the
Dannewerke and Apenradei agreed to place purely
Danish population under the rule of their foes.
Even that shameful concession was rejected, eagerly
by Prussia, reluctantly by Austria, despairingly by
Denmark, and then at last the uselessness of the
Conference became clear even to the diplomatic
mind, and it remained only to decide whether Ger-
many should carry out the design which she has
pursued all along, and Denmark ceases to exist, or
England should declare that concession being ex-
hausted,she was prepared to defend the right of small
nations to exist by arms. Then at last the thesis
maintained from the first by Earl Grey alone among
politicians, and the Spectator alone among journals,
was felt to be true. Had England from the first
preferred her honour and her policy to her comfort
and the surplus, had she counselled the formal re-
nunciation of Holstein, and sent 20,000 men to the
Dannewerke, the war would never have broken out,
and with Holstein assigned to Germany and
Lauenburg to Prussia, the Danes might have
remained the guaranteed and independent masters
of all that is truly theirs, the Peninsula north of
the river which before Latin ceased to be a col-
loquial tongue was described as the Scandinavian
frontier,

THE EXAMINER ON THE BALLOT.—Lord Pal-
merton is mistaken in supposing that Mr. F. Ber-
keley regards the right of voting as a personal
right which may be exercised for the private benefit
of the individual. The suffrage should neither be
turned to private gain nor to private detriment,
and it is to guard against the latter wrong that the
protection of the Ballot is demanded. And it is
a notorious fact that for want of protection great
numbers of the class of ten-pound householders
in trade take care to disqualify themselves, and
avoid the register as they would avoid the loss
of custom and the displeasure of all persons who
have the power of injuring them. Lord Palmer-
ston's objections to the ballot would be all sound
if independence were the common condition of
the people of this country, if men always chose
their parties from conviction, and in conformity
with them went boldly to the hustings and deli.
vered honest votes. But every one knows that
such is not the case, and that where bribery
and intimidation prevail there is a corre-
sponding false show of opinion to save the
shame of the corrupted or the bullied. The
voter against his will is made a hypocrite,
and wears with the badge of party in whose see.
vice he is pressed a pretence of the opinions belong-
ing to it. He cannot for very shame avow Radical
principles, and go and vote for an ultra-Tory can-
didate. He delivers a false suffrage in conformity
with lying professions. Lord Palmerston ignores
all this, and holds—
In this country, I maintain that a man is proud of his
party. He may be thought right or wrong by his neigh-
bours, but I do not believe that, when he has been enlisted
under the banner of one candidate or the other, he is not
proud of the side he has taken. So far from wishing to
conceal his vote, or sneaking with it to the ballot-box,
he tells all his friends what he is going to do, and is
rather anxious than otherwise that the whole community
should know it.
This is true, no doubt, of the independent man,
who has his opinions, and acts in conformity with
them, fearless of any one's displeasure; but how
many are so happily circumstanced ? and it is for
those who are not, and who have to consider the
consequences of the resentment of landlords,
patrons, and customers, that protection is asked.
The State has no right to rcquire a man to risk
ruin in the discharge of a public duty. Lord
Palmerston holds that the franchise is a trust, for
the due performance of which there must be re-
sponsibility to the unenfranchised, and with it pub-
licity. Whether the franchise is a privilege or a trust
is not worth dispute, but whatever may be its nature
there is no responsibility to the unenfranchised, and
if there were, it would be an irresistible argument
for universal suffrage. For nothing can be clearer
than this, that if the unenfranchised are competent
to judge of the way in which the electoral duty is
performed, and, indeed, to exercise a control over it,
they must a fortiori be qualified to discharge it
themselves. To deny them tho franchise as unfit,
and to hold the classes fit to be trusted with it re-
sponsible to their judgment as to the exercise, is a
gross and glaring inconsistency. The argument
that publicity is essential to a trust is plausible, but
not always sound. And in the dependent elector's
case publicity is fatal to the honest discharge of the
duty. It has always struck us that an anecdote
told by Froissart is highly illustrative of the fallacy
in question. A poor woman complained to Bsjazet
that one of his grooms had stolen her milk. Ba-
jazet called for the! man, who protested his inno-
cence of the charge. "We will soon discover the
truth of this matter," said Bajazet ; " cut open the
man's stomach, and let us see what there is in it."
This was pushing light rather further than justice,
for the man was killed in the process of inquiry,
whether innocent or guilty. And in like manner
the electoral body is cut open to see how things go
on in it.

rHE " SATURDAYREVIEW" ON SMITH O'BRIEN.
The ex-rebel and patriot who has just terminated
a remarkably useless life in harmless obscurity was
not devoid of qualities which have always been
recognised as mitigating the censure due to legal
and even moral criminality, and which partially
redeemed from contempt a career presenting an
unusually broad mark to ridicule. Though tech-
nically a felon and traitor, and really a mischievous
and conceited monomaniac, the late Mr. Smith
O'Brien never utterly forfeited the esteem of his
contemporaries ; and though one of the weakest
and silliest of men that ever claimed to act a part
in history, he was at no time altogether despicable.
In fact, paradoxical as it may seem, it would not
be difficult, without the slightest deviation from
literal accuracy, to construct a very toler-
able panegyric on the character of a man
whose life from first to last was an absurd
and dismal mistake, whose mediocre abili-
ties would never have excited notice, but
for the stupendous vanity which accompanied them,
and whose solitary service to his country was that
he exhibited treason and insurrection in a ludicrous
point of view. He was unquestionably sincere, dis-
interested, and, according to his very feeble lights,
patriotic. He had the feelings and principles, as
well as the education, of a gentleman, and was
wholly incapable of a mean or sordid act. As an
agitator, he devoutly believed in the delusions which
he propagated; and as a rebel, he risked his life by
the side of the miserable peasants who formed his
extremely ragged regiment. He never made a trade
of patriotism ; he never sent round his hat ; and
while his most prominent coadjutors found sedition
a good paying business, Smith O'Brien staked and
lost property and position in a cause which he had
persuaded himself to regard as that of his country.
There was always a certain chivalrousness about the
rsee
co r rather
se to (absurdly,
b plunders u rdly,
man. It is recorded of him that, a few days before
the campaign which began and ended at Bailin_
a
Barry, he was all but deposed from the command
bbyy
tahe rebelway7 councilwouldof
u
'tarnish the fair fame
of an ancient family by having
and robbery" to maintain his army that Was to be.
Again, at the most critical moment of the cabbage-
have gone on his knees
garden fray, he is said to
to dissuade hio followers from bn-ni
es are often more
seuarrilltdehses_ap7 et.rrye Bpsh. a I ,8 übcuht
police in their extempo •d f ng party of
dot
c-
and gentlemanlike rebel, and can b© no doubt that
wishedßrien wasaf
far
humaneas
a n
theree
pos-
sible to make his revel Cori with rose water. When
he stood in the dock sa a traitor, he received with
entire composure a sentence which he had every
reason to suppose would be punctually carried into
cehffuenctte;readnd
whiewould, in all probability, 'Ave 'Ol
tha
undeniably Meritdeidg.clitYlt fate whichay ,_ Jae had
ant Med the, no woo— oe confidently
ld !lave tempted p
,to —uircha se,consid byeration anywou
eon.
Cession which he deemed degrading, the
mercy which was extended to him by the
Vr°l7o3l In exile, he honourably distinguished him.