The Sun.
London, England, 1857-09-12 00:00:00

THE SUN, LO DONS SATTTR,DAY EVENING.

- - -
was established, but to secure a revision of t'
.ieir
mounts by an independent authority, invested with
sufficient powers of investigation to detect any . misap-
plication of the votes, or any deviation fr' am the
appropriation sanctioned by Parliament. TWA check
noW applies to the naval and military expendite re, and is
regulated by the provisions of an act (9 and 10 Vict.,
c. 92) passed in 1846 ; also to the expendit are of the
offices of Woods and Forests, and Public Works ; and
the Commissioners of Audit transmit annually to the
Treasury, for presentation to the House of Commons,
accounts of naval and military expenditure, compared
with the grants, accompanied by reports, in which they
direct attention to every departure from the provisions
of the Appropriation Act. Your committee recommend
that this important check upon the application of the
income
and money be extended to the accounts of the
and expenditure kept at the Treasury, to the accounts of
the revenue departments, and to the various accounts
comprising the expenditure of the votes for civil services,
including civil contingencies. For the latter service two
accounts should be presented ; one showing the final
payments charged against the vote for civil contingencies,
and the other showing a balanced account of the trans-
actions of the year, including the outstanding advances
at the close of theyear, and the balance unissued brought
down to the following year. These accounts were pre-
sented for the past year along with the estimate for civil
contingencies for the current year. Your committee are
also of opinion that the whole of these accounts, finally
audited, shoull be presented to Parliament before the
close of the year succeeding that to which they relate.
In order to strengthen the check upon the Government
in regard to issues of money, for any service whatever in
excess of the sum voted by Parliament, your committee
recommend that all payments of the Paymaster-General
shall be checked from day to day, in the departments in
which they are authorised or made, by an officer to be ap-
pointed by the Commissioners of Audit ; it will be the
duty of this officer to follow from day to day the appro-
priation of every payment to its proper account, and to
report immediately to the commissioners any excess of
the vote sanctioned by Parliament, or other irregularity.
And your committee further recommend that these
audited accounts be annually submitted to the revision
of a committee of the House of Commons, to be nomi-
nated by the Speaker. It is desirable that an annual
account of all guaranteed loans, including the payments
made, and the arrears, if any, due to the Consolidated
Fund, shall be presented to this committee, and that
they do report thereon specially to the house.
Your committee suggest that the Audit Board should
no longer transmit through the Treasury those accounts
which they are bound to lay before Parliament, but
should communicate them direct, and that the appro-
priation and inspection of army and navy accounts, the
selection of officers for the respective duties, their re-
moval or dismissal, should rest entirely with the Audit
Board.

Your committee has recommended a large extension
of the duties and powers of the Board of Audit. If
these suggestions be adopted, it will be necessary that
the composition and zelative position of this board, as a
great department of the State, should be reconsidered
by the Executive Government. The Board of Audit is
responsible to Parliament alone, and the station and
emoluments of the personist the head of it should be equal
to the importance of the duties to be performed, and not
second in rank to any of the permanent officers presiding
over other principal departments.
7.—PRINCIPLE UPON WHICH THE VOTES FOE CIVIL

FREEDOM OS THE PRESS IN INDIA.

(From the Times.)
As it was never imagined that India was to be
governed precisely as we govern ourselves, so it wls
never supposed that the Press stood on the same
ground there as at home. The liberty of the Press
has in this country been exalted to the rank of a
sacred principle, the Palladium of the Constitution,
an inherited right, the safeguard of personal freedom,
and the only check upon political tyranny and offi-
oial abuse. These are indefinite and absolute expres-
sions, but they who employ them have an honest
and wholesome conviction that a free Press is
necessary to a free State, and that there is some-
thing intrinsically honourable and beneficial in a
state of society in which everybody may publish,
within reasonable limits, his belief and his ODilli.ol3S.
The freedom of the Press is, however, a practical
question. We maintain it on such practical and
assignable grounds as that it throws continual
light on the administration of public affairs, ou
the proceedings of official personages, and the
working of the whole system ; that it gives a vont
to feelings which might otherwise smoulder in a
more malignant form ; that, on the other hand, it
provides a check for its own excesses in the constant
opportunity of reply and contradiction, and the
disgust which calumny and falsehood will always
excite in the mind of a free and generous people.
Such a defence is true as far as it applies to such a
State and such a people. We believe that, iu
mat er of fact it is impossible for the Press of this
country to do any amount of mischief at all to be
compared with the evils certain to ensue on a
withdrawal of this check. The Press cannot
damage a good measure ; it cannot overthrow a
good Government ; it cannot destroy a well-
grounded reputation. The least symptom of a
malicious design to attain these ends is certain to
recoil on the authors. These things it cannot do,
though they are quite within the ordinary scope
of public men, and aro the frequent, aims of
parties and politicians. The public at large are far
more ready to accept the rhetorical exaggerations
of some enthusiast or partisan on a platform, of
some adventurer or rival in the Senate, than of the
nameless writer who sits down to a dispassionate
discussion of persons and things. The " we" to
which some alarmists have attached so tremendous
an influence, and which it has been proposed to rob
of its dark terrors and clothe with some vulgar im-
personation, is, perhaps, the most cautious and
scrupulous writer of the day. In the absence of a
great name the pen is found to appeal to facts and
considerations within everybody's knowledge and
reach, and to go no further than the public is pre-
pared to go with it. Once it transgresses, once it
aims to be an independent authority and an organ
of mischief, it finds everybody'shand turned against
it, and it has to defend its ground against a thou-
sand writers and talkers only too glad to find a
common butt for their invective.

For the truth of these remarks on the real impo-
tence of a free Press in a free country for any evil
purpose we need only refer to the fact that none
use it so freely as they who in moments of petu-
lance have thought fit to denounce it. It is a
matter of frequent occurrence for men who but the
other day were abusing the newspapers, and putting
anonymous writing ou a par with assassination, to
make the freest use of these or other columns, and,
as often as not, find by their own experience that
it is no easy matter so to write as to incur neither
contradiction nor rebuke.

These are practical considerations, and they apply
to England, but not to India. Though our govern-
ment of that country is infinitely more conducive
to happiness, freedom, and elevation than any
government that its former rulers or the people
themselves over devised, yet it cannot be called
self-government or constitutional in the same sense
as ours. In fact, India cannot govern itself ;
it never did ; and the first step in the attempt
would be a war of extermination between Ma-
homedan and Hindoo, then betweon the dif-
ferent sects of the former creed. So we govern
India, and impartial authorities have said there is
no country in the world so well governed as India,
and that England herself cannot exhibit such proofs
of government at home as can be' shown iu her
great dependency. We are the lords of India, and
bold the balance of power between innumerable
races, religions, dynasties, laws, and pretensions of
all sorts. In doing this we have to appeal to the
gratitude, the fear,- and respect of two hundred
millions of peopld. who are, perhaps, the simplest
and most credulous on the earth. It is the very
soil of delusion. The religion of the vast majority
is not merely an ancient mythology, believed be-
cause it is there, but a living source of the most
preposterous inventions. Indeed, there is hardly
anything that the Hindoos may not be made to
believe. They will accept with equal facility, on
any or no authority, and without the least investi-
gation, a tale of private scandal, a libel upon a Go-
vernment, an astounding miracle, a now revelation,
the deification of a plant, a stream, or a stone, a
prophecy, the decline of a dynasty or the decay of
a godhead, a curse, a code of morality, or anything
whatever, so long as the appeal is made directly to
the faith, and ieascn be carefully put out of the
question. All that is spontaneous in the social sys
tem of the Hindoos is of the most imaginative and
irrational character. From the highest Rajah to
the lowest mendicant they yield their faith, their
conscience, their purse, and their lives to the leader
who makes the most extravagant demands upon
them. Accordingly for themselves, and among
themselves, they altogether eschew freedom of
discussion. As for the Mahomedans, they know
no such thing as liberty, and can have as little
to do with a free Press as with a House of
Commons. In such a population, then, there are
wanting those checks which we have admitted
to be necessary, and which we have asserted in
our own instance. Our direct hold upon India
is our military system, and the chief material of
that system is a native soldiery. As it is the most
powerful part of the people, so it is the most in-
formed, the most gregarious, the least occupied, and
the most liable to have a stock of grievances against
us. If it is assured by designing persons in a tone
of authority that we are planning to destroy caste
by the secret use of forbidden materials ; that we
are preparing to take the Sepoy to the ends of the
earth ; or that this is the prophetic period of our
expulsion, it will most probably believe what it is
told. It may never see the contradiction or may
not credit it. At all events, it is not competent
to detect the imposture, and consequently has not
the requisite safeguard against the abuses of a free
Press.

Such are the considerations that have determined.
—indeed, we may say compelled, the Indian Go-
vernment to restrict for the present the liberty of
the Press. It does not by any means give up the
principle, and it expressly reserves the grounds
upon which a free Press was given to India, now
twenty-two years ago. That Act was avowedly an
experiment, or temporary concession, made with
the full consciousness that it might be abused,
and that circumstances might arise to compel
its suspension. The present Act of Council, there-
fore, is, happily, not retrogressive, and merely
implies that an occasion has come such as was
eontemelated. by the authors of the Act of 1833.
When it is found that the native journals pub-
lished in Hindostanee and Persian contain, besides
the incendiary proclamation known to our readers,
the most lavish abuse of the Government and its
agents, promises of immediate emancipation, and
directions to the native army how to further that
object, it becomes a matter of oommon sense and
obvious necessity to prevent the Press from being
the organ of rebellion. That is all that is intended.-
The only difficulty of the question is its bearing on
the Anglo-Indian press. To the home imagina-
tion there is a certain necessary convex on betwei n
the English language and liberty of speech. But
everywhere and every native regiment there are
Sepoys who read English, schools where English is
taught, and native officials quite ready and compe-
tent to translate sedition into any Indian language
that may answer the purpe as. In fee', there are
two journals at Calcutta, published and edited by
natives in the English language, and these journals
have contributed their share to the insurrection.
Practically it matters little, or nothing, whether
dangerous arguments, treasonable counsels, and
useful information are given in English or in any
native tongue, or whether the publishers be Dig-
lish tat Indian. In the present critical sAuat.oe of
the Indian Government it must take a plain, not to
say a military view of the question, and silence not
only the mutineer in arms, but the writer who
blows the blast of war. The Indian Government
have carried out the- present measure with great
moderation. It would be mere pedantry, then, to
ascribe to it a settled design on the press, or on
those principles of liberty which we all cherish at
home. What course it may have to take for the
future is a matter for further consideration.

A respeotable-loOking man went, a few days ago)
through the different villages in the neighbourhood of
Chateau-Thierry (Aisne), with a large register under his
arm, for the purpose, he said, of engaging workmen fur
a railway which was to be commenced immediately from
the above town to Soissons. A number of countrymen
anxious to obtain employment during the winter months,
when the operations in the fields are almost at a stand-
still, eagerly came forward and had their names set down.
On leaving the cottage of oz,e of his dupes, the recruiter
took from his pocket-book a bank-cote for 500 f., and
asked whether he could have cash for it. On being told
ikat they had not so much money in the house, he ap-
peared annoyed, saying that he had 801. to pay, and he
had only 39f., which he drew out of his pocket. He then
asked whether he could have the loan of 41f. until the
next day, to make up the sum. This was acceded to, un-
fortunately, as he never returned, and has not since
been heard of,

LAW INTELLIGENCE—Sept. 11.

COURT OF BANKRUPTCY.
(Before Mr. Commissioner Fane.)

INRE --..-....-........,

This was a trader debtor summons. The case
involved an important point in respect to practice
and costs. The debtor was served with a writ for
441. on the 28th August. No further proceedings
could be taken under that writ before the 24th of
October. To meat this the debtor was also served
with a trader debtor summons. Payment of the
debt and costs wera tendered, minus the cost of the
trader debtor summons. it was urged that the
debt being under 501. no adjudication of bank-
ruptcy could be made, and that the Court could not
allow the costs consequent on this summons.

His Honour held that the debtor must pay the
costs under both the forms of proceeding, and that
although the amount of the debt was under 501. an
at of bankruptcy would be committed if the claim
were not forthwith settled.

It follows that the law vacation allows no protec-
tion or respite to debtors where creditors take pro-
ceedings in this court by summons.

IN RE TYLER.

The bmalctupt W 3 s formerly lessee of the Royal
Surrey Gardens. This was a meeting for the
choice of a trade assignee. Mr. Southby, pyro-
technist, was appointed.