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

NOTICE.

All remittances are, henceforth, to be made to
Mr. JOHN CHAPLIN, at The Sun office, 112,
Strand, who has been appointed, by the Lord
Chancellor, Receiver and Manager of The Sun
newspaper, and the outstanding debts due in
respect thereof.

if C4t)j/ f'.•'%'"
a , .
-:,...-
I''' ''.• -1, . , --:''''.-----1-.---T--;'• ':-.710 ',,,,-- _ ,eoe-ec''7.i.
4, -f.,, • . ~:--/'•i-----.3-•'"-'i------41,i q
V.
4,-- , „:,. , ~,,,,...t2.):74(1-0 , .4. 7"Pn'io-1:;1 - P '2"----
---:._,_:___,, -:,_ ...,:-----'- 4,-, '

THE SUN.
LONDON, WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 1862.

WE felt little doubt that when a man like Sir
CHAS. WOOD accused such a man as Mr. LAING of
blundering in his accounts, the accusation could
stand only so long as it should remain unanswered.
We have had too many proofs that Sir CHARLES is
a person who owes his position solely to his connec-
tions, and who, as Cardinal WOLSEY told his re-
proacher, had he been born a butcher, would
have remained a butcher, to doubt that Mr. LAING,
who owes his position to his ability, would in a
short time expose the splenetic charges of his in-
competent official superior. This Mr. LAING, worn
down as he is with his Indian labours, has done at
once, in the " Minute'' before us. It is one every
way worthy of a man who is, not only nobly con-
scious of integrity and industry in a most responsi-
ble post, but worthy of one who must feel that he
is dealing with obstinacy and stupidity such as
nothing but Whig connections could have placed
at the head of the Indian Government. Our
readers lately saw how Sir C. WOOD has been doing
his best to th wart the policy of Lord STAN-
LEY in encouraging one of the most vain-
-able companies ever formed for the investment
a English capital in India—his conduct in that
.ease really amounted to bad faith as well as stu-
pidity. Now, we have our Indian Secretary per-
-Tersely insisting on a mode df stating accounts
which his superior in knowledge and intelligence
rejects, and then because be did so turning round
and lecturing the official inferior, but intellectual
superior, as if Mr. LAING were a " blunderer" and
the
'mute
Sir CHARLES WOOD—how appropriate
the
name—had found him out.
Perhaps our readers who do not care about
figures will
read with molt interest the manly
closing Paragraphs of Mr. LAING'S minute :
" I now conclude the last lines which I shall write in the
capacity of the Financial Member of the Council of the
Governor-General in
India. whether my health would
have perm fitted of my return is doubtful, but of course this
despatch decides the question. After
of
the concluding
in what I
believe to be the signal success
concluding act of
ni
Lord Canning Indian administration,
of that
serve
under a minister who views a material
so differently, as to think that it cane for
public censure
and disavowal.
"It is now just 18 months since I first landed in India,from
and during this period I have been absent six months
severe illness.

" I found India with a deficiency estimated by the Go-
vernment at £6,000,000; I leave it with a surplus.
" I found it with an annual expenditure, open to revision,
of £29,365,066 ; I leave it with one of £23,454,087
661 found it with a cash balance below £12,000,000; I
leave it with one of £17,783,978.

"I found it with gloom and despondency prevailing/
great animosity of races and parties, and wide-spread dis-
affection and discontent ; I leave it with one universal
feeling of hopefulness and satisfaction, and amidst general
expressions of loyalty aild attachment from the natives of
India to the British rule.

" I have no wish to cla.'m more than my fair share of
credit as a member of Lord Canning's Government for
these results, but if they have failed to secure me against
the repeated expression of disapproval and disavowal on
the part of the Secretary of State, I am recompensed by the
consciousness that I have had no inconsiderable part in
bringing them about, =der the guidance and with the con-
stint confidence and apr royal of that illusteous statesman
who o has been taken from, us, and in cordial co-operation
with o
colleagues such as Sir Bartle Frere and Mr. Beadon,
havew been selected as the fittest men lor the highest
posts in India.

If I required any further .consolation I should find it in
the belief that there is not
in
1:I.: a who does not recognise that
,single intelligent man of any
glass, race, or religion
as a minister of India, under most
; fearlessly arduous circumstances,
1 have endeavoured to do in
y ccut
and faithfully,
and that my labours have teen :attended
. win the whole with
more success than any one in i'adia
'a Ventured to an-

ticipate."
LAnd what now is the gist of the case--no
actual

deficiency of receipts and excess of expenditure—
nothing calling for help from England, nor even
for help in India—nothing whatever affecting re-
sults—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 and:pro-
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 he 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
£:00,000 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 complete
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 acrount•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 up
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 scatteredthrongh
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 most 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
derisive critic .of
Blarney Nye,
with the
.May, says our justly indignant and
dolls
critic in the Quarterly, " The Groves of
fousttoarneer and good taste in comparison
stearine, and Lady Q
porcelain,
the nave to a strikin •
conglomeration of telescopes, organs, light-
houses,, obelisks, pickles, furs, stuffs,
roeking.horses, alabasters,
°diva, which reduced
R similitude of a tra-
veller's description of Rog-lane, Canton." Again,
there were the very ceremonies of the Inanauration
—by the e q
x uisitely ingenious 6
mismanagement of
Sig nor VERDI was gratuitously i
which, Snsulted, Dr.
STERNDALE BENNETT was unnecessarily huffed,
and M. COSTA tt.rust into an extremely awkward
and invidious predicament • Then, too, there were
the Catalogues—catalogues even now but partially \
Published. One of those actually it,sued, moreover
'
—though given to the public in a complete form—..
having, in another sense, with a literal significance
'
in the word, been even then " part:ajj y" published !
Published and written so partially, indeed, that, after
arousing a storm of indi
gnatiJn 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. Glancing at the contents of the Exhi-
bition Palace—shall we it ?—and then turn-
ing for a moment to their consideration in '