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

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TRE FINANCES OF INDIA. ki
• The radical rottenness of the "system" which s
has been pursued in India appears from this,—Mr.
Laing has been able to strike off at one blew three
millions and a quarter from the military expendi-
ture, one-third of a million from the marine, and
half a million from the civil expenditure. What
must have been the system which allowed insol-
vency to creep up, and even bankruptcy to threaten,
while this unnecessary and wasteful expenditure
remained unchecked ? Here is an absolute excision
of £4,100,000 from the public expenditure of India,
and yet we are assured by all the heads of the
different departments that the service is more
healthy and more effective than ever. Could not
Colonel Balfour, and Mr. Hollingberry, and Capt.
Rennie, to whom Mr. Laing attributes all this re-
duction, be induced to try their hands upon some
ever-increasing columns of figures nearer home, and
see whether the principle of increased efficiency and
decreased cost could not be introduced into our
public service ?
Well, India has been taught by a European
financier to cut down her expenses and increase her
income. To the surprise of every one, and to the
surprise of no one more than the orthodox official
;ngbuatsushrpelcuasnrenvoewnue.
pay Ihteirs
Nnvoatyylealv7i
people out there, India stands in the position of
sinhluyc,h;pietni(sl
having
money in railways, and still have a little change in.
her pocket. India, however, is a very spongy soil,
and the quantity of golden rain which would be suffi-
cient to produce all the fruits and flowers of good
government in Ceylon or any other Crown colony
is absorbed without acknowledgment by that thirsty
land. Four millions of savings do not count for four
millions of surplus; but let us be thankful and re-
joice that there is actually the sum of £239,896 on
the right side of the annual account.' If this can be
effected now, it is very clear that it could have been
effected long before. Nothing has been done by Mr.
Wilson or Mr. Laing which the old-fashioned offi-
cials who nursed up the Sepoy Mutiny might not
have done long ago. This change from insolvency
to affluence has been simply brought about by the
application of modern science and untrammelled
common sense to circumstances which had been
produced by evil traditions and ignorance of modern
lights. Put a stupid man or an unskilful man in the
richest mine the world can show, and bid him work
it ; he will probably send you up the waste instead
of the ore, and perhaps end by bringing down all
the galleries and ruining the whole affair. But the
mine is not destroyed for ever, the metal is still
there. Send skilful men who have learnt the trade
where it may best be learnt, and the rubbish will be
dug out, the water will be drawn off, and the mine
will be made to pay again. It seems to have so
happened in this case. There is quite as much
skill in properly taxing a nation as there is in pro-
perly pumping a mine. There are natural laws
regulating each operation which must be known.
The old-fashioned Indian statesman—very esti-
mable men—did not know these laws, and in the
honesty of ignorance flogged the country into in-
solvency. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Laing, who did
know these laws, have just succeeded in getting it
out of the quagmire, and setting it upon a hard
level road again. ow it will run for the future
must depend upon who are intrusted with the
reins.

And now India, being set free from overweight,
is expected to do great things. We ask her at
once for twenty millions' worth of cotton, to be
delivered at her earliest possible convenience, and
to be paid for at a price proportioned to the chances
of an effective blockade being established upon the
Southern shores of North America. We ask her
also for fifty million pounds of tea, if she can pro-
duce it cheaper and better than her neighbours on
the other side of the Central Mountains. We shall
be glad to have also any quantity of silk which can
be produced upon the same terms ; and jute, and
indigo, and rice, and wool will be welcome. In.
fact, India is supposed to b© getting out of her un-
informed and listless state, and is expected to go to
work seriously, and produce all that the refined and.
fastidious civilisation of the West requires. There
is no doubt she can do it. She has climate, soil, and
labour for anything. She could keep a hundred.
Lancashires going; and she could clothe ten mil-
lions of London ladies from the products of a hun-
dred millions of mulberry trees; she could make
happy as many working women with powerful tea
and rich sugarcane—what is there which a popula-
tion of 150,000,000, with a country in which the
amount of the earth's produce may be increased in-
definitely by human toil, could not do ? But if you
want India to do this you must teach her.
That Hindoo, happy in his dreams of bang and
paradise, will wake up and work if you make
it worth his while ; but you must go to him
and wake him up, and you must pay him before-
hand, for distant delights have small temptation to
his simple mind ; and you must also tell him what
you want and how he is to do it. Moreover, after
you have paid him, and after he has spent the
money, and after you have got all your fine new
machines ready for cleaning the cotton or getting.
the silk, or drying the tea, you must hare some sys
tem of law which will bind him to perform, his con
tre.ct. You must do all this, or you will get no cot.
ton worth having. Lord Ellenborough may tell
you that the old native cotton is the best, but Glas-
gow knows better. Glasgow has spun some of her
finest work out of Indian cotton ; but it was growu
from Georgian seed by an English planter. The
productions whiclvEurope requires of India are of
a nature which can only be understood by Euro-
peans, and are only to be produced under European.
supervision.
It is well, therefore, to ask, when we thus call
upon India to step in and extinguish slavery by
mere force of competition, whether we are to allow
Englishmen to settle in India. Eighty years ago
the East India Company were very decided in say-
ing "No." The Calcutta Secretariat of the present
day is of the same opinion. So is the Council of
India. So is Lord Ellenborough, as appeared from
his speech in the House of Lords some evenings ago.
So is Sir Charles Wood, who has just sent out
to Lord Canning to disallow Lord Canning's own
bill for giving a remedy upon small contracts in
the rural districts. In unbroken succession from
the earliest days, the mere local Indian officials,
and the Englishmen who, unlike Canning and Ben-
tinck and such like men, were content to follow-
others rather than to conscientiously study the sub-
ject, always objected to unofficial Englishmen in
India; "they band together," said one of the de-
spatches, " and insist upon what they call constitu-
tional rights." Mr. Laing is, of course, of a diffe-
rent opinion from these depositories of bad tradi-
tions, both in India and at home. In his Budget
speech he says that, " To press on the construction
of roads and communications, to pass just laws for
the enforcement of contracts, to provide ready tri-
bunals for dispensing justice, to impress on all son-
n ected with them the importance of encouraging
independent English enterprise by every means
consistent with justice and with the equal rights
of our native subjects—these are within the legiti-
mate functions of Government." This is sound
statesmanship and sound sense ; but it is also a
rather clear admission that we have not done any of
these things hitherto. We are, indeed, doing the
very opposite of them just now. While the Bri-
tish public is addressed chiefly by Old Indians
crammed with the old nabob traditions of the ser-
vice, and while Indian affairs are directed by people
who have no opinion of their own
.on such matters,
and have no right to have an opinion, all thatn
undone
What thinks must be done. will renlainninugd
said"
What Mr. Laing is now saying M. r-k
and Macaulay said long ago ; butthe grasshoppers
long ago, and Lord George Bentinc
attention more
that chirp all around us ourattract
that low in the
certainly than the noblest cattle saidan long ago,