The Sun.
London, England, 1860-05-08 00:00:00

THE WEATHER.-SUN OFFICE, MAY 8, 1860.

THERMOMETER, TN THE SHADE.
59--highest since noon yesterday.
38—Lowest this morning and during the night.
62—this day at noon.

BA.RO3[ETEIL-29.63.
WIND, South-Westerly ; light, with eloudy weather
Rain in the night.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
Tllie DAy.—Morning, 3h. 36m.—Afternoon, 3h. :57m.
To-monnow.-Morning, 4h. 17m.—Afternoon, 4h. 39m.

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THE SUN,
LONDON, TUESDAY, MAY 8, 1860.

In the case of HoRsmAN versus "THE TIMES,"
heard last night before the House of Commons, we
are constrained to concur in the judgment of the
House, as delivered by its two leaders—which
judgment, we understand, to be for the defendant.
In the words charged as libellous to the House,
through one of its members, we really can see
nothing which the House, when most conscious of
its dignity, or the hon, member himself as a public
man, has the slightest occasion to resent. If we
remember rightly, we smiled when we read the
happily illustrated idea of members all desiring
what they would not like to ask openly, and of
their being influenced by the motives com-
mon to all men—and, as things stand, members may
reasonably dislike frequent elections. Were our
elections even annual it would be far less tax upon
the purse and time of candidates. More would be
returned without costly opposition, because the prize
of a year's membership would be comparatively
small ; but when membership may last seven years,
and elections are repeated frequently, they require
all the cost of the greater prize to secure the lesser
We all know, too well, that the last election
was not inexpensively fought. We must agree,
therefore, with our contemporary, that without
thinking at all worse of representatives than he
thinks of himself, not merely ninety-nine, but one
hundred Englishmen out of a hundred would think
that perhaps every member of the House, so
far as he is personally concerned, would have
thought none the worse of the house, or of Mr.
I-IOE.smAN, merely because recent public events at
Stroud had made his name a suitable one with
which to point the closing senten:e of the paragraph.
If, indeed, the limes were guilty of insulting the
house, we also must humbly beg its pardon for in-
nocently doing the same thing. We had before we
saw Mr. WALTER'S speech in the Times article
surmised that it could not be veiy agreeable to
members to hazard, so soon in some cases, the loss
of their seats, and, in all others, to incur so
soon again the cost and trouble of another
election. It is not much of a libel to suppose,
even members of the House of Commons would
prefer that this Parliament should'sit another year,
and do not doubt that an understanding to that
effect would have a mollifying influence on the re-
p ignance of too many to the bill.
We must remind Mr. IlonsmaN too, and he
kro ,vs that ive have been ready enough to do him
justice en other questions, that his else looks alto-
gether like one of constructive libel. The allusion
to his name was founded on public and notorious
occurrences—those who, as we did, might censure
the electors of Stroud, might get with equal pro-
priety advert to the presumed unwillingness of
their represensemtative to become a candidate there
before next session. Surely there would be in
this no reason t® put the least favourable construc-
tion on the allusion, and to wrest from it the infe-
rence that he vms " personally brought in for no
other purpose but; as illustrative of the general mean-

one.

ness of the House of Commons." No, Mr. HORS-
MAN, we must think, and we imagine all your
fellow-members will think, that you " do protest
too much."

With regard to the relations of the Press and the
House of Commons, we do not notice any real dif-
ference of opinion. All concur in demanding for
us entire independence. No one would venture to
suggest that the Press should be responsible to any
judgment but that of the country and its own
sense of honour. Mr. HORSMAN very clearly,
we admit, contrasted the responsibility of Mr.
BRIGHT for what he uttered publicly on the
platform, and the responsibility of the anonymous
individual who penned the article. Now we must
think that a newspaper editor both enjoys the secrecy
which tends so greatly to independence in writing,
and yet is subjected to the responsibility which
prevents the abuse of that independence. He fears
not to speak out where ho ought to do so, because
his statements bring no personally unpleasant con-
sequences, Yet he would fear to indulge private
piques in public affairs, because some of his many
contemporaries would be sure to expose his unfair-
ness, and because he must either publish ex-
postulatory letters sealing his own condemna-
-1 tion, or submit to see them appear in
other journals with the intimation that he had
not the English fairness to give them insertion.
Nor is it true, if Mr. HORSMAN needs to be told
this, that the manager of any respectable paper
dictates the articles which appear in it. He, and
his editors are, generally and naturally, persons, on
most points, of the same views, and Mr. HORSMAN
would find, if admitted to the " back parlour," that
any respectable newspaper proprietor has not the
slightest wish to influence his editors. He knows
that they feel their responsibility for exercising a
sound and creditable judgment for themselves, as
much as he could for them. The idern de repnblica
sentzre is the intellectual link between them, The
charge, therefore, was substantially unjust of Mr.
WALTER, himself being responsible for doing by
another, what Mr. BRIGHT did for himself. We
certainly believe, and are sure the country may be-
lieve Mr. WALTER'S disclaimor of privity to the
article in question.

At the same time we have always felt that the de-
fence of our contemporary goes a long way in
favour of our view of anonymous voting, to which
the Times is so strongly opposed. We feel the great
advantage of not being individually recognised as
the authors of many remarks which we yet think it
desirable to make. We hope, in many important
matters, that principle would induce us to write all
we thought, whoever might be offended. Yet if we
look back we must doubt whether we should in
numerous cases have written as explicitly as we have
done, if indeed we had written at all. No one
knows what is suppressed, and we might often
have declined to say what would have brought
on us unpleasant social censequences. Surely the
poor, or in any way dependent voter, is very
much in the same position. He needs the
independence of an anonymous vote, as much as we
do of en anonymous pen. The voter, also, by ballot
has Ms responsibility. Not, indeed, to those who
have no right to command his vote, but, like the
anonymous editor, to the judgment of society and
to his own convictions. It is a mistake to think
that any man even likes, though others know it
not, to adopt the course which turns out to be erro-
neous, or to vote for the man who shows afterwards
his unfitness. Conscience and consequences are
adequate checks on anonymous voting.

It could hardly have been deemed extraordinary
by CHARLES LAMB had he— while travelling
nowadays in a railway carriage instead of a quarter
of a century back in a mailcoach—been accosted at
last by his taciturn fellow-passenger with an unex-
pected inquiry as to the position of the market in
regard to Indigo. It is one of the most vitally
important considerations at this moment, because
it is one intimately affecting the relative position
of British authority and Asiatic obedience. Unless
some wholly nnlooked for incident should arise to
dissipate our anxieties instantaneously, we have a
tolerably distinct prospect before us of being able to
test in some measure the loyalty of a considerable
portion of the Indian population by means of the
fluctuations of the indigo market. For hard upon
the heels of the Sepoy mutiny has come, oddly
enough, a riot among the ryots of Bengal. The
former calamitous rising in arms against our
authority in Hindostan has scarcely been sup-
pressed when another rebellious movement sud-
denly becomes apparent in nearly the same
quarter of the great Asiatic Peninsula.
Only, rnirabile dicta, the outbreak here
has been caused, not by a wanton out-
rage upon a fanatical prejudice—no excuse
has been afforded to the ryots, who are the rioters,
by constraining them them to oontaminate their
lips with the pig's grease saturating the bitten
cartridge. They have been actually— it is not
exaggeration to say it—goaded into insurgents by
the insensate insults directed against them by a
bungling official of the Government. A circular
recently issued by the Hon. Mr. EDEN has abso-
lutely induced the agricultural population of Lower
Bengal to believe that the administrative authority
at Calcutta disapproves of the further cultivation of
indigo as burdensome or unremunerative ! The (,ffi-
cial representatives of the Government scattered
through the provinces having derided them
as poltroons, for inasmuch as they have never given
any token whatever of vigorous resistance. The
agricultural population have in consequence of this
risen—as a matter of course they have risen and
are rising. The disastrous movement threatens to
spread—the ryots recognising in those reiterated
taunts, coupled with this most rash circular of Mr.
EDEN, a positive signal to them to declare openly
against their employers, the indigo planters !
It has seemingly been forgotton at this juncture
by the authorities what is precisely the character
of the population with which they have to deal in
these and other delicate administrative proceedings.
The Correspondent of our chief morning contem-
porary has significantly declared but very recently
of this identical class of the population now hurried
and goaded into rebellion against their English em-
ployers the indigo planters : " A Bungalee ryot is
the most trying of human beings :" adding, "He
is always doing small swindles, and he regards
the kottree, or factory, as an entiety it is his moral
duty to cheat." But what in point of fact is the
character given long since of this very population
by a masterhand when that masterhand was writ-
ing his admitted masterpiece ? The late Lord
MACAULAY in his essay on Warren Hustings has
thus spoken of the Bengalee—" The physical
organisation of the Bengalee is fLeble even to effe-
minacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His
pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his move-
ment's languid. During many ages- he has been
trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy
breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qua-
lities to which his constitution and his situation
are equally unfavourable. His mind bears a sin-
gular analogy to his body. It is weak even to help-
lessness for purposes of manly resistance; but its
suppleness and its tact move the children of sterner
climates to admiration not unmingled with co► -
tempt. All those arts which are the natural de-

fence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle
race than to the lonian of the time of JUVENAL,
or to the Jew of the dark ages. What the horns
are to the buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger,
what the sting is to the bee, what beauty, ac-
cording to the old Greek song, is to woman,
deceit is to the Bengalee. Large promises, smooth
excuses, elaborate tissues of circumstantial false-
hood, chicanery, perjury, forgery, are the
weapons, offensive and defensive of the people of
the Lower Ganges." And yet it is this treacher-
ous and deceitful race—it is about the
lowest and the most degraded and the most ignorant
class of this treacherous and deceitful population
that the Indian Government has been carefully
driving into rebellion against their absurd and in
every way (from their comparative insignificance in
point of numbers, and from their peculiar isolation
in their wide Zemindarships) defenceless employers,
the English indigo planters. Besides which, it has
been sagaciously and accurately observed that the
Bengal farmer has hitherto all along regarded the
necessity of cultivating the indigo-patch somewhat
as our sturdy English yeoman looks askance upon
that "reserve" in the lease setting apart the little bit
of land for buckwheat. Yet these are the men now
tempted to set at defiance the rights and the
authority of those widely scattered indigo planters,
each of whose households settled here and there,
far and wide over Lower Bengal, is, so to speak, a
veritable English Family ROBINSON. The folly,
the crass and insensate folly, of any such proceed-
ings absolutely beggars description. More espe-
cially when it is remembered that the wanton
sneers indulged in by the Government officials when
taunting the ryots with cowardice, and the wholly
uncalled for circular of Mr. EDEN, capping the climax
of irritation to the Hindoo farmer thus antagonis-
tically placed in regard to the English indigo plan-
ter—have followed hard upon the heels, as we have
said, of the bloody Sepoy Rebellion, An end to
this folly there must be, or the sceptre of VICTORIA
will be liable periodically, if not continuously, to
be employed but as the handle for a death-dealing
scourge, to be wielded in terror over the Hindoos,
but more peculiarly over the Bengalese, to bring
them back for a while by the mere brute influence
of terror, to a purely fugitive state of subordina-
tion.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has no alterna-
tive. He must sell his cheapened wines—to sell
them he must have abundance of places where per-
sons can get them easily—therefore, he must make
it the interest of ten times more persons than can
do it under the present licensing system, to tempt
the public to buy them. No demonstration in
EUCLID can be more complete. Opposition is
useless. Revenue must be had, and another
penny in the pound to the income-tax would be the
alternative of rejecting the bill which was read a
second time last night. We advise all parties,
therefore, teetotallers and publicans, brewers and
magistrates, to acquiesce with a good grace, for it
not they will have to do it with a bad one.
But, as in many similar cases, we cannot think
that any legitimate trade will suffer. The classes
which use the present houses of refreshment of all
kinds will continue to do so still. In a few cases
the licensed houses may have made a hardly fair
profit at the expense of some eating-house which
was not allowed to sell intoxicating liquors ; but,
generally speaking, we believe the result will
be the creation of a new trade rather than
a subtraction from the old. Then, again,
we are Free-traders all of us now, and how can we
reconcile with this, entrusting to magistrates the
power to decide how many refreshment houses of
any kind a neighbourhood needs. Surely in this,
as in other matters, demand and supply is the good
old rule. There can be no propriety in limit-
ing magisterially the number of publicans,
any more than that of grocers, butchers, or
or bakers. Of course, no one objects to a super-
vision of houses where intoxicating drinks are con-
sumed on the premises. That, however, is a part
of the bill, and will be impartial in its bearing on
all. It cannot be denied, we think, that the class
of refreshment-houses contemplated by the bill are
likely to arise, because they are wanted ; and, if
wanted, free trade principles demand that they
should be allowed. We believe, therefore, that in a
short time all parties will approve the proposed
plan and none be sufferers.

COUR CIRCULAR. `-)

Her Majesty the Queen and his Royal Highness the
Prince Consort, accompanied by the Princess Alice, rode
on horseback yesterday afternoon, attended by the Hon.
Emily Cathcart, Lord Charles Fitzroy, Major General Sir
H. Bentinck, and Lieut.-Col. Ponsonby.

Her Majesty's dinner party in the evening included their
Royal Highnesses the Princess Alice and the Duke of
Cambridge, his Highness the Maharajah Dhuleep Singh,
the Earl and Countess of Westmoreland, the Earl and
Countess Fitzwilliam, Lord and Lady Wodehouse, Mr. T.
Baring, M.P., Col. Francis Seymour, C. 8., the Equerry in
Waiting to the Dake of Cambridge, and Major Elphin-
stone, R.E.
The band of the Scots Fusileer Guards was in attendance
and played during dinner.
A deputation had an interview with Viscount Palmer-
ston yesterday on behalf of the Deans and Residencies of
the Queen's Colleges, Ireland. The deputation consisted
of Lord Dunkellin, M.P., Lord Fermoy, M.P., the Bishop
of Tuam, the Bishop of Down, the Bishop of Derry, Sir
Edward Grogan, M.P., Sir H. M'Calmont Cairns, M.P.,
Colonel Forde, m.r., Mr. Bearnish, M.P., Mr. Dawson,
Crl. Vandeleur, M.P., Mr. Lefroy, M.P., Captain
Stacpoole, and Mr. Bond, M.P.
The Rev. Henry Murphy, A.M., Episcopal Dean of the
Queen's College, Belfast, represented the Deans of the
Queen's Colleges, Ireland.

Senor Don Carlos Calvo, Charge d,Affaires du Paraguay,
transacted business at the Foreign-office on Saturday.

The Marquis and Marchioness of Breadalbane
are expected at their mansion in Park-lane in a few days,
from Scotland, for the season.

The Marquis and Marchioness Townshend
arrived at their residence in Stratford-place a few days
since from Raynham Hall, Norfolk, for the season.

The Earl of Dartmouth comes to town to-day
from Patshull Hall, near Wolverhampton.

The Earl of Dundonald has recently undergone
an operation for the stone, which has been successful; but
his lordship is now suffering from an attack of gout, which
causes great prostration.
The Earl and Countess of Hardwicke entertained
at dinner, last evening, at their residence in Portman-
square, the Marquis and Marchioness of Salisbury, the Earl
and Countess of Airlie, Viscount Barrington, Lord and Lady
Chelmsford and the Hon. Misses Thesiger, Col. the Hon.
W. P. Talbot, Lady Mary Craven, Mr. Joseph Yorke, Mi.
Adeane, &c.

Lady Rolle has arrived at her residence in Upper
Grosvenor-street, for the season.

The Baroness Windsor and the Hon. Misses Clive
come to town to-morrow, from Oakley park, Salop, fer the

season.

The Ladies Charlotte and Dorothy 'Wentworth
Fitz williarn have arrived at Edwards's Hotel for the seasou.

Mr. and Mrs. Crawshay Bailey have arrived at
:heir residence, New-street, Spring-gardens, for the season.

The advices from Adelaide, South Australia, by
the present mail are to March 17. In a circular of Messrs.
P. Levi and Co. it is stated that " the'enormous stocks of
nearly all kinds of goods both here and in Melbourne will
necessarily exercise a most depressing influence on the
markets for some time to come. The yield of wheat is not
much below the average. It is expected that before long
wins will form an important export, as greater care is Ling•
exercised in its manufacture all over the colony." it, ,pect_
in g the mining interest of the colony, the South Australian
_Advertiser of March 17 remarks : —",Fresh mineral disco-
veries are continually being made northward, and public
confidence in the mineral wealth of the colony is stronger
than ever." Burra Burra shares aro quoted at £162 buyers ;
sellers at £l7O. Copper had advanced from £lOO to £lO5
per ton. 'Wool, choice flocks, is 4d to is 5d per lb. Tallow,
565. to 655. per cwt. Hides, salted, 7s. to 12s. Banks sell
at 1 per cent. premium, and buy at 1 per cent, discount,
60 days.