The Sun.
London, England, 1861-06-07 00:00:00

T H E

Mr. I.Evr, undoubtedly the best performer of the day on
the Cornet-a-Piston—Grand Selections (on the most complete
scale) from Dinorah, Martha, Stradella, &e., and other vocal
and instrumental music, by Miss Russell, the Misses Stuart,
and Miss Ernst, Messrs. Claarles Greville, Fornari, Kimber-
ley, Bernard, Beaumont, Bervon, Hnish, Signor Tivoli, and
Mr. Henry Herbert, with full band and powerful and selected
chorus, conducted by Mr. F. Jonghmans.—The following
Comic talent, Messrs. W. Randall, J. Blanchard, W. H. Wie-
land, Hollingsworth, E. Marshall, Harvey, and French, and
the Brothers Conrad in their latest and best entertainment,
every evening. Admission, Hall, sixpence; Balcony and
Stalls, one shilling. Private Boxes, 10s. 6d.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
Ting DAY.—Morning, lh. sm.—Afternoon, lh. 28m
To-moußow.-Morning, lh. 46m.—Afternoon, 2h. bm

THE WEATHER.....-SUN OFFICE, JUNE 7, 1861.
THERMOMETER, IN THE SHADE.

56—highest since noon yesterday.
50—lowest this morning and during the night.
s.s—this day at noon.

Banomwrnit-30.0.
WIND North •Easterly ; fresh, with dull, cold, rainy
weather.

Two o'CLocL.—Weather fine.

•sq—

pl' 'd.
4,20ir

~~- +•K
~~ S

THE SIT N

LONDON, FRIDAY, JUNE 7, 1881:

It is but four or five years ago since a member of
Parliament told the House of Commons that an
intelligent man of business with whom he had
ridden to town in the railway carriage had ex-
pressed his opinion, that the best thing for England
in regard to India was, to " cut the connection,"
and that the speaker was himself pretty much
inclined to the same opinion, had he not thought
that we should injure our position among nations
if we allowed ourselves to' be driven out ; while we
owed it—morally—to India to surrender her neither
to anarchy, nor to conquest by other nations who
would not fail to step into our place. Perhaps
till this year, and not completely till the Budget
Speech of Mr. LAING, which we publish at full
length to-day, arrived, has the opinion of the
Railway Traveller not been more or less a part of
the judgment of most of us in looking on India.
Like his companion, the member, we saw indeed,
that the " connection could not be cut,"—political
reasons forbade ; but who of us was prepared to
say that time would not prove, and possibly to this
generation, that, commercially speaking, to have
lost India in the mutiny would have been a
gain. Another mutiny, however, in America, the
prospects of cotton, and this last Indian Budget,
now assure -as that India may be worth more to us
than any other colony.
We now regard India as the not improbable
saviour of our vast cotton manufacture, the feeder
of four millions of our population, the emancipator
of American slaves, and all without hazard to the
English Exchequer. May all these possibilities
prove realities ! Right thankful should we be to
pass through one year of a little cotton difficulty,
if it eventually ruined the accursed cotton culti-
vation of the Confederate States, and transferred
it to the free labour of our own subjects on the
plains of India. Right thankful if our Indian
ryots pocketed the millions of money which now
go to maintain the reign of the slave driver, and to
make profitable the sale and purchase of human
flesh and blood.

Mr. LAING, himself, thorough man of business as
he is, and intent upon arithmetic throughout his
long speech, could not help warming up into a
kind of British eloquence when ho touched on
cotton, India, America, and slavery. Having to
advert to public works, to roads in particular, as
the most advantageous way of spending money in
India, and to their purpose to construct good roads
into the cotton districts, so as to be prepared
to " bring the resources of India into play, to
supply the threatened deficiency of cotton in
America," he added, " Immense interests are
at stake on this question, not only material
—for who can measure the extension of commerce,
and the mutual benefit to England and to India
which Ronal result from a transfer of the chief
supply of col ton ziqm America to the East ?—but
moral, also, for the issue for which WILBERFORCE
contended, and for which Engia,l has sacrified her
West India colonies, and poured forth
like water—the issue of slavery or freedom is staffta
mainly on the question, whether America's danger
is to be _England's opportunity. If cotton produced
by free labour can undersell cotton the produce of
slavery, then, and not till then, the cause of free-
dom will be filially gained."

Mr. LAING intimates that the Government is
thoroughly awake to this vital question, that it will
not perform its duties negligently, that it
will do
everything to encourage independent European
enterprise which justice to the natives permits—,

roads and communications, just laws for the en-
forcement of contracts, ready tribunals for the dis-

penning of justice—we wish he had added, facilities
for disposing of the land in fee simple—are all to be

objects ofimmediate attention ; and, he emphatically
remarked, "it shall not be said of us that slavery

triumphed and India missed its opportunity be-

cause its Government was too blind to discover, or
too weak to carry out the policy which, at a great
crisis, Providence had pointed out to us." The
several Presidencies are also taking up their share
of the work in earnest. Very able men have been
selected by Bengal, Bombay, and the North-west
to attend immediately to the subject of communi-

cation with the cotton districts of these great divi.
aims ; and we may even hope that this very year
much will be done to improve them, and every year
much more, till the roads, canals, and railways
shall make conveyance to the coast safe and easy.
The carrying out of the grand economical reform
of reduction of the army in India will much facili-
tate, we should think, the grand desideratum of
road making. One hundred thousand men are this
year disbanded, in addition to more than as many
previously. Having been disciplined to re-
gular habits, and to obedience to European orders,
and wages being so much better, we may reason-
ably expect that they will be a valuable addition to
the numbers of Indian navvies, and will not only
lighten the charge on the Exchequer by earning
their own support, but soon prove most effective
contributors to its resources by the trade which
they will create in more ways than one.
Too much praise, indeed, cannot be given to those
who have this year effected so large a reduction
on former reductions of our vast native Indian
army. Mr. LAING awards special praise to the
three members of the Military Finance Commission
for what has been achieved in this respect. Its
results are a reduction this year of the military
expenditure by £3,600,000. The men have been
reduced from 353,783 armed natives to about
140,000 since 1859, and this has not been done in
the aristocratic way always practised in this coun-
try, when army reductions were made, of retaining
skeleton regiments and pay for officers, but whole
regiments have been disbanded ; 248 regiments of
native infantry are now cut down to 145-103 regi-
ments having been disbanded ; 33 cavalry regiments
have been disbanded, leaving 45 ; native artillery
regiments exist no longer. The lesson we received
at Delhi will never be forgotten. But the limit of
reduction has not yet been reached, nor that of the
saving, since the disbandment involves of course
gratuities satisfactory to the soldiers disbanded.
Yet all this has been done without the least sacri-
fice of efficiency. Indeed, we believe that, in the
military point of view, India is safer than ever.
Mr. LAING'S surplus cannot be charged with
being an imaginary one. He has calculated it on
the market price of opium ; had he taken the actual
price it would have added about a million and a
half to the quarter of a million he has actually
reserved. Indeed, throughout his calculations he
has carefully kept cn the safe side. For the first
time, therefore, we see an Indian Budget with a
surplus on fairly estimated expenditure, as real as
any surplus calculated by our most cautious Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer. Even the famine has
not, as was feared, turned the scale on the wrong
side. Unless wholly unlooked for contingencies
therefore occur, India seems fairly to have obtained
that fundamental condition of easy and prosperous
Government a national balance-sheet with a
sufficient surplus.

The three Bills introduced last night by Sir
CHAS. WOOD are all in the right direction. We
shall have, of course, ample time to consider their
provisions, but as to their general scope there can
be no doubt. 'One liberalises the Legislative
Council by including in it a considerable number
of persons whose qualification is to be that they
are not Government officials. Natives of high posi-
tion •will be eligible, and independent Europeans.
It is intended, in good faith, to secure the advice
in legislation of all classes whom the laws will
most affect. Representation in India is at pre-
sent an impossibility ; the natives do not under-
stand or appreciate it ; and it would be dangerous
to have a representation of Europeans only. Sir C.
WOOD and Lord CANNING seem honestly bent
on ensuring such discussion and examination of
all measures as shall give some certainty that they
have not been passed in ignorance. The extension
of the powers of the Provincial Legislatures on the
same principle is also very wise. Each of them
will have charge of the local business of a respecta-
ble kingdom, and can manage it far better than it
can be done from Calcutta.

The Union of the two Superior Courts—of the one
which consists of able English lawyers, and that
in which there may be native judges also—must
be right. The amalgamation will bring toge-
ther three classes of judges—those who have
had high legal training ; civil servants
well acquainted with native usages, but who have
not necessarily had legal training, and native
judges. Such a composition seems to be every
way desirable for a court of final appeal in such
a country. The opening of the civil service will
also give satisfaction. Occasion is taken of the
necessity of legalising appointments which have
been already made to high offices from those
who do not belong to the covenanted service, to
settle rules for the permanent power of making
such appointments. Of course, there is the danger
of jobbing and nepotism; but it became impossible
to maintain any longer the wholesale job of the old
costly covenanted service. We hope the limitations
on the power of appointment will not be dictated
by " Old Indians."

Since THELLUsSON'S Will Case was at length
brough tto cue
oaconclusion, there has remained "on
hand" no
more urgently requiring settlement
in its turn than that in which the son and heir of
the late Baron DE BODE is the claimant of compen-
sation from the British Government. Among the
majority of the English public the unanimous feel-
ing has long been, without doubt, of a kind so abso-
lutely identical, in the Baron's instance, with the
sanction of uttermost exhaustion and weariness,
that
we might perhaps express the general senti-
ment that with the bulk of the people
of this by observingiscountry
, the Baron's name would be more
accurately spelt with an
R itnhelireeufroafina oDf.oneFoorf tihne-
disputably, in the words of 0
very wretchedest of those melanccheomlyiedsitotniz,—desig-
nated, of course, in mere irony,
" The greatest Bore of all the Bores I know,"
is—not a doubt of it—to the vast multitude—the
Baron DE BODE. Still, however unwelcome the
subject may be, undoubtedly is, in itself, justice at
the same time Is Justice : and it yet remains with
the Imperial Legislature to decide definitively, for
once (more) and for all, whether the unfortunate
Baron a.- 71„m—that is DE BODE has yet had it.
Until that final c.—:,;nn has been arrived at—
the Baron will be perpetually "bock agen"
like the inexorable Scotchman. He will
petually revisiting the glimpses of the Moon, down
at Westminster, like the incorrible Monsieur TON-
SON, whose memory is preserved to us (a fly in am-
ber) embalmed in "inextinguishable laughter."
The ghost of this poor dead and gone Baron DEO
BODE will—untii it shall have been somehow effee,