The Sun.
London, England, 1862-07-16 00:00:00

deficiency of receipts and excess of expenditure—
nothing calling for help from England, nor even
for help in India—nothing whatever affecting re -
salts—the whole is a question of the mode of stating
accounts. Even had Mr. LAING been wrong, it
would have been no " blunder "—it would have
been a simple difference of opinion as to how the
same items should be arranged. It is not denied
that Mr. LAING'S "estimates of revenue are mode-
rate," but,
" The Secretary of State," Mr. LAING remarks, " says
that I have a deficit, not because I am short of cash and ask
for assistance, but because he argues that certain items of
account ought to be entered differently. When it comes
to remittances he does not ask me to remit money which
he does not want ; all question of the railway exchange
disappears, and the fact remains that after paying all
charges upon me in India for two successive years, and
remitting all that the Secretary of State asks for to meet
charges in England (irrespective of railway construction,
which is charged to capital account), I should find myself
with a large increase of cash balances if I did not volun-
tarily part with a portion of it, by remitting taxes andipro-
moting public works and education."
It seems that this ungentlemanly, rude blunder.•
ing on the part of Sir CHARLES WOOD is not new.
Last year be said there were mistakes which would
result in a deficiency of a million sterling. Here
is Mr. LAING'S reply
My answer is, that after paying for opium advances
£714,000 more than either I or the Secretary of State anti-
cipated at the time,we have been able to expend upwards of
£'oo,ooo more than was intended in pushing railway
feeders and roads in cotton districts ; and yet we close the
year with £17,783,978 in the Treasuries, which, after pro-
viding for all known claims in India or England, contain
fully £700,000 more than at the beginning of the year.
"This is a fact not an argument, for the money is there
in actual rupees, and I defy any one to say how it got there,
except from a bona fide excess of receipts over payments.
If this be a deficit of £595,515, as the Secretary of State
argues, I can only say that ten years of such deficit, in-
stead of loans, would give a nation an accumulation of mil-
lions of treasure ; and that any mode of making entries
or stating accounts which show such a state of things to be
a deficit, is, on the face of it, contrary to the Secretary of
State's own canon, of showing the income and expenditure
of the country as nearly as possible as they really are."
We know that readers generally are not fond
of too many figures ; we spare them, therefore,
too many at once ; but we can assure them that
the minute is so full of such racy and ccmplete
exposure of official Whig Duncedom—the reader
must excuse such language, for we can find none
fitter—that we may very probably return to it
soon again. We can, however, conceive of nothing
more disgraceful to Sir CHARLES WOOD than
that he should venture to parade his own conceits
in account-keeping before the public as the blun-
ders of a gentleman so much the more the right
man in the right place, as Mr. S. LAING.

A terrible onslaught upon the Commissioners for
the great International Exhibition of 1862 adorns
the current number of the Quarterly. Adorns it
we say advisedly. For the article here referred to
is trailed over, and festooned. and garlanded with
a prodigal abundance of the flowers of invective.
And no wonder. Now that we are in mid July, at
the height of the summer solstice, we may say it.
For the results from first to last have surely proved
by this time to have been consistently throughout
the very perfection of mismanagement.
The Exhibition of eleven years ago, the initial
Exhibition in that exquisite Crystal Palace which
glorified 1851, from May to September, might
alone, one would have imagined, have guarded us
from the risk of anything like all this portentous
blundering. Nay, if the bright Example, held np
to the Commissioners of all future Exhibitions by
that first exposition of the arts and indus-
try of all nations, had not been sufficient
as an incentive to those intrusted with the
conduct of the arrangements of its present gigantic
successor down at South Kensington--there were
Warnings enough in all conscience scattered through
the intervening years between our First Exhibition
and our Second Exhibition. There was that
Beware ! audibly sounded to us, from the other side
of St. George's Channel, by the more than question-
able close of the Dublin display—an enterprise
that Mr. DARGAN'S splendid munificence alone
saved from the disgrace of bankruptcy. There was
that other Beware ! still more audibly resounded to
us, from the opposite shores of the broad Atlantic,
by the total and absolute failure of that most melan-
choly New York Demonstration. But no—all the
plainest experience won eleven years ago from our
own signal successes, successes which were after-
wards in some measure enhanced to our more perfect ,
appreciation by their partial renewal in 1857 down
at Manchester—all the solemn and emphatic warn-
ings coming to us, between while, from more places
even than merely Ireland and the North American
continent—everything in the way of encourage-
ment, everything in the way of warning, went for
just absolutely nothing. Blundering was to be
from beginning to end the system to be acted upon,
consciously or unconsciously it matters little, by
the Commissioners for 1862. The Second Great
International Exhibition was to surpass all others
—and it has entirely done so. It is not only bigger,
it is not only more comprehensive—it is beyond
them all, even the moat notorious of them all, in
those peculiarities of bad taste, of false economy,
and of confused and confusing modification upon
modification, which have already won for it its now
admitted pre-eminence as—we repeat it—a stupen-
dous exemplar of the very perfection of mismanage-
ment. There is the building itself. An absolute
monstrosity of its kind, even in some respects when
viewed simply as an engineering exploit, or still more
flagrantly when looked at as one of Mr. DICKENS'S
whimsical characters expresses it " architectoora-
loorally !" There is that grand sweep down the
nave contrasting even now so lamentably with the
picturesque and superb perspective of the nave,
sparkling a whole decade since under its glittering
arch of glass in the midst of the Hyde-park green-
sward ! that amazing nave still littered deplorably
down at South Kensington with sundry fantastic
structures miscalled Trophies—but preposterously
blocked up originally with the most ludicrous
jumble of absurdities. There and then during the
earlier days of May, says our justly indignant and
derisive
Blarney Were
with the con
houses,
porcelain,
critic in the Quarterly, " The Groves of
fountains,
entoaridneer and good taste in comparison
stearine, and Lad
the conglomeration of telescopes, organs, light-
navdeesertiopt;t:n
of
Roca
sotbreikliisnks, pickles,. furs, stuffs,
rocking-horses, alabasters,
Lady Godiva, which reduced
g similitude of a tra-
veller's Ile, Canton." Again,
there were the very ceremonies of
exquisitely ingenious he Inauguration
—by the
awkward
mismanagement of
signorDtVEßNDEcwTaswgaraatuunitnoieicselysaititirsiteicil:iffDedr.,
swThEiRchs:DALE ..-, EN
andan d
invidious
i COSTA
pre thrust
dic a into
ro olt . an
Then, extremely
too,there
Were
the Catalogues—catalogues even now but partially
published. One of those actually issued, moreover
—though given to the public in a complete form--
having, in another sense, With a literal significance
in the word, been even then "partially" published!
Published and written so partially, indeed, that, after
arousing a storm of indignation against it
as a piece
of gratuitous impertinence, it had to be withdrawn
—as an official blunder no longer in any way to be
tolerated. aincing at the contents of the Exhi-
bition Palace—shah,' We it P—and then turn- ,
ing for a moment to their
copOderation in

one only particular—it was recognised at the first
glance, it is appreciable still more now that ample
time has been allowed us in which to recognise the
fact in its full and deplorable integrity, the space
set apart for our Imperial Allies across the Chan-
nel, just by way of example, is miserably insuffi-
cient. Yet, when it is remembered how the whole
scheme was set about originally, it is scarcely mat-
ter for surprise that it has led to all this blundering
by retail and by wholesale, in minutia and as a
whole. Recollect how things have stood there all
along in regard to the accumulation of the funds
required for the carrying out of the enterprise.
" There were," quoth the sardonic critic in the
Quarterly, " the Bank that advanced, the sub-
scribers who guaranteed, the New Commission that
managed, the Society of Arts that advised and that
waited for its windfall, and the Old Commission
that sat in its counting-house counting of its
money !'" We believe the true reading is "counting-
out its money," hut that, to be sure, is neither here
'nor there. The sketch, as jotted down by the
facetious reviewer, is true to the life otherwise.
And assuredly, remembering how certainly between
two stools one comes to the ground—between half-
a-dozen the downfall is pretty sure to be speedy,
inevitably, and reiterated. Casting a retrospective
glance at the history of Exhibition Number Two,
so far as that history has yet advanced, it is quite
impossible not to recognise in the lamented Death
of his Royal Highness the late PRINCE CONSORT
at',once a Reason and a Consolation. A Reason forall
these blunders on the part of the Commissioners. A
Consolation in the thought that even supposing these
to have been unavoidable under his wise and judi-
cious direction, his Royal Highness has at least been
spared the recognition of such flagrant and syste-
matic mismanagement. Had he himself been spared,
however, it is inconceivable that things could so
have been mismanaged. His refined taste, his pru-
dential forethought, his ample share of that gift of
common sense which is so seldom vouchsafed to any
one in such affluent abundance could not, we insist,
have rendered this multiplication of blunders upon
blunders down at South Kensington in any way
possible. The reflection is but another reminder of
the magnitude of that loss which is, indeed, irrepa-
rable both to the country and to the SOVEREIGN.

The Police are still at it, we observe, down at the
International Exhibition. They are there still at it
—obdurately and obtusely. Following persons of
the utmost respectability—watching them into a
crowd of ladies fashionably attired in crinoline—
and seizing them there abruptly on a charge of
picking pockets. Any one is liable to this kind of
treatment. The reader of these words might himself
just as reasonably, on his next visit to that scene
of suspicion to the Mind Detective, be summarily
nipped by the arm by Policeman X 99 or Police-
man A 1, and walked off as a supposed member of
the Swell Mob, first to the police station, and after-
wards to the magistrate's office. Yesterday we
recounted in these columns the treatment endured
in this way but very recently by a man of un-
doubted probity, a friend of the member for Roch-
dale, and himself a member of the Society of
Friends into the bargain, who was twice hauled
before Mr. DAYMAN, the second time on remand
under sureties, as a reputed thief. To-day, we
have to comment upon a charge in every particular
quite as unfounded. The charge in this instance
was preferred literally by that egregious wiseacre
immortalised through Mr. THACKERAY'S amusing
Ballads: anent the same—Policeman X. In this
instance even, be it said—by Policeman XX. The
numerals appertaining to those two constables of
the X division were, it should be eapeeially borne
in mind, 121 and 117. These wiseacres yesterdays
it appears, in pursuance of the favourite practice
now in vogue among the policemen engaged at the
International Exhibition, brought two perfectly
honest and respectable visitors before the magis-
trate at the Westminster Police-court, upon a
charge of having attempted to pick pockets, like
that unfortunate gentleman, the Quaker of Mac-
clesfield. One of the prisoners turned out to be
the servant of a barrister, residing at Hatcham—
his employer giving him, quite as frankly, the
highest character for honesty and integrity, as he
had given him the day before permission to go to
the Exhibition. This " young man from the
country," poor, honest fellow, little ima-
gining when he went there that he not
only went to see sights but to run the risk (mite
innocently of having his character frightfully
jeopardised ! Not only was this accused spoken
of, in the police-court yesterday, by his employer, as
a thoroughly honest person who was incapable of
the act with which he was charged ; bat that same
employer spoke also, while still upon his oath in the
witness-box, positively and distinctly as to the
known respectability of the other prisoner, his ser-
vant's companion. At the clove of the proceedings
yesterday in the Westminster Police-court, we are
glad to observe that the magistrate—prior to dis-
charging the two worthy men who had been thus un-
justly accused—reprobrated in the strongest terms,
but quite deservedly, the disgraceful conduct of
certain members of the police force in preferring,
upon the lightest suspicion, these disgraceful
charges against wholly innocent persons, who
turn out, one after another, upon inquiry to be men
of undoubted respectability.

MEXICO is not the most attractive subject to
Englishmen, and we cannot be surprised that Lord
R. MONTAGUE should commence his observations
last night with the announcement that the House
was to be counted out, or to find that at eight
o'clock his prediction was fulfilled. It was, indeed,
very obliging of the House to hear three or four
speeches out on the subject—by that time it had,
doubtless, heard all that could interest even the
thirty-three who then had to leave, through the
apathy of their brother legislators. His Lordship,
indeed, said that the two oppositions were agreed
to give him the cold shoulder, and to avoid a vote
on his motion that the Government should give
better and fuller instructions to its Mexican repre-
sentative, Sir CHAS. WYKE.
We cannot see that our Government is much to
blame. When we come to hear all, what seems
most objectionable of all, and has now proved to be
the cause of the chief perplexities—the joint expe-
dition—does not appear easy to have been evaded.
After the robbing of our Consul by the Mexican
President of the day—literally taking the money
from under our official seal; and again, the plun-
dering of our money when under escort by an officer
of the Government, it became impossible for us not
to demand redress. When, at the same time, the
Spanish and French Governments, aware of
what we were doing, told us that they had
similar claims to prefer, and meant to
enforce them, it was difficult without show-
ing undue suspicion and discourtesy, to tell
them
We that we could not act amicably together.
must, therefore, throw the entire blame on the
French Government. The three Powers had defi-
nitively agreed not to interfere in the political
affairs of the country. England was from the first
faithful to the engagement, Spain was at last,
France never vas. Spain hoped by stealing a
march on the allies, and
landing first at the port
of Vera Cruz, to see the enmity .
y rise 14 her favour.
miappointed in this, she sided .
Nvltb. the Englieh •
A I