GOVERNMENT OF INDIA BILL —ADJOURNED DEBATE (SECOND NIGHT).

HC Deb 24 June 1853 vol 128 cc734-78

Order read, for resuming adjourned Debate on Amendment proposed to be made to Question [23rd June], "That the Bill be now read a second time:—And which Amendment was to leave out from the word "That" to the end of the Question, in order to add the words "in the opinion of this House, further information is necessary, to enable Parliament to legislate with advantage for the permanent Government of India; and that, at this late period of the Session, it is inexpedient to proceed with a measure which, while it disturbs existing arrangements, cannot be considered as a final settlement," instead thereof.

Question again proposed, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question."

Debate resumed.

MR. HUME

, who rose amid some impatience, and cries for the right hon. Member for Edinburgh, said, it was all very well for those hon. Members who were determined to support the Bill of the Government, to call for their friend; but it did not seem at all fair to take a course so unusual as to call up a Member of that House in opposition to one who had moved the adjournment of the debate on the previous evening, and who, therefore, by their rules of debate, was in possession of the House. He (Mr. Hume) would relieve those Gentlemen who were so impatient by stating that he should not occupy the attention of the House for any great length of time. Having been so long connected with India, and having directed much of his attention to the subject of administering its affairs— as much, perhaps, as any private individual Member in that House—he could not allow the present occasion to pass without offering his opinion upon the question before them. He would submit that it was a mere mockery, and contrary to all the ordinary usage of the House, to proceed with this Bill until they had before them the report of the Committee now investigating the affairs of India upstairs. An hon. Gentleman had just presented a petition referring to one of the most important branches of inquiry determined upon by the Committee, and had asked that it should be referred to that Committee; but he did not believe it would ever come under their consideration. What was the use of presenting petitions when the Government had brought in a Bill without any information—without ascertaining from the parties concerned how far their interests were attended to? It was a perfect mockery. He had entreated the Government not to press a question which required the most grave consideration of that House without full information—and in what state was inquiry before the Committee? They had only got through three or four heads out of eight. A great deal had been said about the interests of the millions intrusted to their government—altogether 150,000,000 of persons—for whom they were about to legislate; and they had had petitions from Madras, from Bengal, and from Bombay, natives and Europeans of all classes, praying for inquiry; and he himself had moved in the Committee that some of the petitioners should be requested to appear themselves, or by their agents, to explain their petitions; but only one Member voted with him, all the other Members voting against him. The consequence was, that not one native petitioner had been examined before the Committee. But how could they say what grievances were real, and what were imaginary, without fair examination? Looking to what had taken place before—to the knowledge every man in India, native and European, had of the matter, he would say that if ever there was anything that would keep up agitation and disquiet among the people of India, it was the hanging of a provisional measure of this kind over their heads, accompanied by the understanding that it was to be altered and amended as time and circumstances might require. He thought that the Bill was most injudiciously introduced in point of time. What he could have wished was, that it should have been deferred until the inquiry was finished. It was therefore his intention to support the noble Lord's Amendment. Every man who looked at the welfare of India, and considered the situation in which that country was placed—a situation altogether anomalous, no other possession of the British Crown being placed in the same—an empire obtained, not by conquest, as most most of our colonies were, but created by the industry, labour, and capital of a commercial country a century ago, and conducted in a manner unequalled by any other of our possessions—would say that those who wished to alter that which was going on so well, ought to prove their case and show why that alteration was required. The Under Secretary to the Board of Control (Mr. Lowe) had attempted to mislead the House last evening, by stating that the Government were now proceeding in a course agreeable to the precedent of 1833, and compared the period of the Session at which the present Bill was introduced with the period of the introduction of the Bill for the renewal of the Charter in that year. The hon. Gentleman, however, forgot to state that the heads of the present Bill were only submitted to the Court of Directors on the 1st of June last; whereas the scheme of the Government in 1833 had been under the consideration of "the Chairs" from October 1830, and the Bill itself was submitted to the Directors in March the following year. The hon. Member would find all the correspondence which took place on this subject in a corner of a shelf in his office. The present Bill had been introduced without any previous consideration, and almost without notice. In fact, the conduct of the Government with respect to the question seemed to partake of insanity. On the 30th of March last "the Chairs," having heard rumours as to the intention of the Government to legislate this Session, wrote to the President of the Board of Control to ask whether Ministers meant to introduce a Bill. On the 9th of April the President of the Board answered their letter, but said nothing about the Bill. It was not until the 1st of June the right hon. Baronet announced the intentions of the Government to the Court of Directors. With those facts before him, he thought he was perfectly warranted in stating that sufficient time had not been given to do justice to the matter under consideration. His own opinion was that one great defect of the existing system was, that none of the natives of India were included in the Legislative Council. Did hon. Gentlemen believe that India was to continue for ever, as now, under the management of a few hundred Europeans, and that, in the administration of its affairs, we were not to take advantage of the existing means of civilisation? The complaint he had to make was, that during the last twenty years the resources of India had been wasted, and wasted in uncalled-for wars, which would never have been carried out if the Court of Directors had had that power and control which the Act of 1833 was intended to leave in their hands. He was surprised to hear the late President of the Board of Control state last night, that neither the Court of Directors nor the President of the Board of Control was responsible for Indian wars. The right hon. Gentleman's language, as accurately reported, was as follows:—"Neither the Board of Control nor the Court of Directors was responsible for wars undertaken in India." Now, he maintained that the Board of Control and Her Majesty's Government were responsible for those wars on which the revenues of India were wasted. The Court of Directors did not know how the Affghan war originated until they were called on to pay the bill. In 1833 the home and foreign debt amounted to 38,000,000l., but through the persevering exertions of the Directors, from year to year, it was reduced in 1839 to 31,000,000l. Then came the Affghan war, and since then their expenditure had always exceeded their receipts. Then came the wars of Scinde and the Punjaub—would the House believe that the enormous sum of 28,700,000l. had been spent in these three wars alone, all of which had happened since the last renewal of the Charter? The following extracts from the evidence of Sir J. Hobhouse showed that the President of the Board of Control could do as he pleased in India, in defiance of the wishes of the Court of Directors:— Do yon correspond with the Governor General of India, and with those other high functionaries the Governors of Madras and Bombay, directly, without the intervention of the chairman or deputy-chairman of the India House?—Of course I do, privately. Have you any official correspondence with them which does not go through the India House? —Certainly; the letters from the Secret Committee are written by myself—they go, indeed, from the India House, but not from the Court of Direc tors. This state of things should be put an end to. He contended that it was more a European than an Indian question; and that these wars were directed by a Secretary of State here in conjunction with the Board of Control. What he wanted was, that they should have a security against the continuance of such proceedings. If there was, as he was anxious there should be, a responsible Minister for India, such a Minister ought to have a Council to con. sult and advise with, and there could be no better council than a Court of Directors, properly constituted. He considered that they ought to make the Court of Directors more efficient; and the way to do that was to prevent any man entering that Court who had any other business to occupy his attention, and to infuse into it a larger proportion of members conversant with the affairs of India. With respect to the question of the double government, he wished to see the administration of India as it now was carried on by the Court of Directors— called by the name of a Council, if they pleased—to see that system continued, improved, and perpetuated. He could not believe that the government would have been carried on, or raised to its present extraordinary position of power and importance, if they had not had that body appointing its own servants, and taking care; of, and controlling, the whole revenue of the country. The present Bill degraded the Directors, for it positively placed them under the clerks whose masters they were. He objected to leaving the power in the President of the Board of Control of doing the evil he had hitherto done, without any check, and without any means of Parliament knowing when important measures were taken by him. At present, according; to the Minister himself, no one could tell where responsibility really rested. One said it was in the Board of Control, another in the Directors, whilst a third said it was in India. Parliament ought to know where lay the responsibility; and for effecting this object he suggested that the Secret Committee should be obliged to keep minutes of their proceedings. As regarded patronage, he would have the House consider whether it was not desirable that half of it should go to the families of the civil and military officers who served in India. The patronage had been given to the Directors with the view of disconnecting it from political influence in this country. Judging of the system by its results, a candid man must admit that the Indian patronage had been judiciously bestowed. In no other country in the world was to be found so admirable a body of civil and military servants. For his part, he entertained great doubts as to whether competition would be attended with the beneficial results anticipated from it. On these several grounds he entreated the House not to be led away by hasty or rash proposals, but to insist that the inquiry now proceeding should be closed before they legislated.

MR. MACAULAY

Sir, I shall vote for the second reading of the Bill; and, even if I had not determined to take that course, I should not vote for the Amendment proposed by the noble Lord. That Amend-ment appears to me to be not much mended by the speech of the hon. Member who has just sat down. He certainly cannot tell us that he has not all the information he can desire, or that he has not sufficiently made up his mind on the subject. He has made up his mind not only that the present Bill is a bad one, but also that it is desirable to adopt—even in its most minute details—a plan of government which he himself recommends. He has sketched out the complete plan of a government, fixing the relations between the Board of Control and the Court of Directors, and disposing of the patronage of India in a manner certainly very different from that proposed by the Bill. After having given this complete sketch of an entirely new plan of a government for India, that the hon. Member should call upon us to pass a Resolution declaring that the information is not at present accessible which alone can enable us to legislate for India, does, I confess, seem to me somewhat paradoxical. Nor can I agree with the noble Lord opposite in condemning the Bill on the ground that it changes the existing system, and yet is not final. The noble Lord has condemned the Bill for being what any Bill proposed for the government of India, either this year or next year, or three years hence, or ten years hence, must necessarily be. Such a Bill ought to make alterations, and yet it ought not to be final. The Bill which we pass—be it what it may—ought to be a large yet cautious step in the path of progress. That which we have a right to ask from the Government is not a Bill which should leave everything that exists unchanged—not a Bill which should make such reforms and no other reforms as may now be necessary—but a Bill that shall introduce improvements, and leave us free agents to effect future improvements. Such a Bill I think is the Bill proposed by the right hon. Baronet the President of the Board of Control. One reason which, perhaps, leads me to look on this Bill more favourably than some Gentlemen for whose ability and intentions I have great respect, may be this—that the parts of the Bill which to them seem the most important, are precisely those which, to me, seem least important. We have heard very much—we have read very much—about the changes which it is proposed to make in the home government. That the home government ought to be constituted with care, that it should be as well constituted as possible, is perfectly true; but I do not conceive that the points in dispute touching the constitution of the home government are by any means the most important points we have to decide. The truth is, that vicinity, as we well know, acts on the mind as it does on the eye. A small object near will hide a large object at a distance. 'India is a great way off, but we all know the India-house; and India-house politics may hide from some, and cause more to see imperfectly, Indian politics. We all know something, more or less, about India-house politics. A man must have led a very secluded life indeed who has not in some way or other come across a canvass for a seat in the Direction. I think that many men who would find it very difficult to state whether the people of the Mysore or of the Nizam's territory are Mahomedans or Hindoos—whether the Guicowar is in the east or the west of India, or to explain the difference between the Ryotwar and Zemindary systems, who, nevertheless, would take exceeding interest in the question who shall be the person next elected to the Board of Directors. If not stockholders ourselves, at all events we may be asked to speak to another gentleman to ask him to speak to a lady to ask her to speak to a proprietor to secure the promise of his vote, if not for this or the next time, at least for the time after. When a Director is elected—he is solicited —indeed he is solicited during his canvass very often—by those who have given him "their vote and interest," for cadetships and writerships. Some of us have been obliged by the "home government"— many of us have been obliged by the "home government," but it is on account of these circumstances that we all know something of that government—we all watch its operation; and therefore it is that the proposed change excites so much discussion and so much warm if not angry feeling. I must say, however, that the controversy carried on really seems to me to be altogether disproportionate to the magninitude of the subject. For what, after all— when we come to examine it—is the vague idea entertained about the home government? Much has been said against a double government; and yet, when we come to examine any plan which may be proposed by any Gentleman, we always find that it always does propose a plan which deserves the name of double government exactly as much as that contained in this Bill. No human being proposes, or would think of proposing, that the Crown should have nothing to do with the government of India. No human being proposes, or would think of proposing, that dominions containing a population more than half as large as that of Europe, and where a greater military force is kept up than in all the rest of the Queen's territories, should be placed under an authority distinct from that which governs the rest of the British empire. Nobody would propose, or think of proposing, this: but, if you have the Indian Government under the control of the Crown, the Minister for India must go out of office with the other Ministers of the Crown— that is to say, he must come in and go out on grounds which have nothing whatever to do with the merits or demerits of his Indian administration. In fact, since the Board of Control was first organised and brought into existence in 1784, I believe no single instance can be found of a President of the Board of Control taking or leaving office on account of any difference of opinion on Indian affairs. Two Ministers for India went out on the question of Catholic emancipation, and another because he would not agree to the BILL of Pains and Penalties against Queen Caroline; the last President but one of the Board of Control went out because his Colleagues were in a minority on the Militia Bill; and the last, because the Cabinet of which he was a Member, was in a minority on their Budget. During the last quarter of a century there have been ten changes in the Board of Control—that is to say, the average time during which the Indian Minister has held office is about two years and a half. Now, whoever considers what the nature of Indian government is, the vast extent of the country, the various subjects calling for attention, and the small amount of attention which those subjects generally receive from English public men, whose peculiar duty it has not been to consider them, will be forced to admit that our Ministers for India must often come in and sometimes go out upon questions which have no reference to the merits of Indian administration whatever. It seems, then, necessarily to follow that you must give to them—to the Indian Ministers—some more permanent body which should advise them, and which should, to a certain degree, act upon them as a check. I have never heard any person deny the necessity of having such a body; but if you are to have such a body—such a council—yon have a double government. It seems to me idle to say it is a double government if the Crown appoints the Minister, and the proprietors elect the Council; but that is not double government if the Crown should appoint both Minister and Council. Surely it is just as much double government as if the Minister holds office by one tenure— the tenure from the Crown—and the Council by another, from the Court of Proprietors. You will have the same inconvenience whether the Council be appointed by the Crown, or by the Court of Proprietors. It is utterly impossible to attach to any Minister a council or body of men whose business it is to look on—to restrain and advise him—it is utterly impossible to give any Minister such a council, without at the same time relieving him to a certain extent of his responsibility. It is impossible you can give him such a council without in some degree causing delay in the transaction of the business of the department. These will he the evils of double government under any system I have ever heard of yet. Look at the effects hitherto produced, and see if they do not prove this statement. It seems to me, however, that under the plan of the Government there will be found rather a better council to assist the Minister than we have had before. I think it a great advantage that it is a smaller council, and that, I think, will, on the whole, cause its proceedings to be marked with more vigour and ability. I accept it as an improvement. But it is not in this particular only that I am desirous this Bill should pass. I do not consider that the matter under our consideration is only to settle the form of government for India. I hear one hon. Gentleman say that the Board of Control really governs India; while another says that that is not so, but that the Board of Directors are the governors of that empire. Now, I conceive it to he very incorrect to say, that either the Board of Control or the Board of Directors really exercises the chief authority in this respect. India is, and must be, governed in India. That is a fundamental law which we did not make, which we cannot alter, and to which we should do our best to conform our legislation. While such an extent of ocean and of continent lies between Calcutta and London, India must be governed there, and not here. Ay, in spite of all the improvements which science has made in the means of locomotion and transit, a despatch from India is not read in London until six weeks after it was sent from Calcutta. Suppose it is answered on the very day on which it is received here, six weeks more must elapse before the answer arrives at Calcutta. But we know quite well that no such despatch is answered on the same day as that of its arrival—very rarely indeed in the same month. The double government, whatever he its merits or dements in other respects, is unquestionably not an expeditious government. When a despatch is received, it must be considered by many persons—many persons must have an opportunity of reading it, and both branches of the governing body at home must have opportunities of offering suggestions as to the answer to be sent out; and when you reflect on all this —when you take into consideration the delay which is the effect of your machinery and the effect of distance—you will see that when a despatch reaches Calcutta, it is a despatch not calculated to meet the state of things existing on its arrival, but such as existed six months before. No empire can be governed by precise instructions shaped to meet a condition of circumstances which existed six months before. All our own experience proves that this is impossible. We all remember when in July a Royal Speech congratulated Parliament on the increasing prosperity of the country; and yet, at Christmas, we were within twenty-four hours of a state of barter. We all, too, recollect when in autumn, all Europe seemed in a state of profound peace; and yet, in the next year, from the Vistula to the Bay of Biscay, there was nothing but war and insurrection. Even in the space of the very last month we have seen this. Suppose the ablest and clearest instructions for a scheme of foreign policy drawn out but six months ago, of what effect would they be at such a juncture as that in which we now find ourselves? It is, therefore, I say, utterly impossible that India can be really governed except in India. The instructions which go out are indeed very rarely precise instructions; they are generally expositions of principles. The business of the Home Government is rather to judge what is past, than to give positive instructions for the future; and even when their directions are most positive, there is almost always a proviso, that, after all, the local authorities must, with a view to the circumstances which exist when the instructions arrive, exercise their own discretion. The whole history of the Indian Government is full of instances to this effect; but, in my own experience, I can illustrate the proposition in the clearest manner, for, certainly, during the time when I was taking part in the government of India, I can venture to say that every day altered the measures that were taken by the Home Government—indeed, every measure of which history will hereafter make mention, was taken without any authority whatever from home. I believe that almost every one of those measures or acts was regarded with disapprobation at home; yet not one of them was rescinded or annulled, but every one of them was suffered to stand, the language of the home authorities generally being such as this:—"You have done wrong, hut what you have done is done." That was most eminently the case with respect to that great reform made in 1835 by Lord W. Bentinck, before his departure from India, on the subject of the education of the Natives in European literature. Such was the case with respect to the abolition of the transit duties. On that occasion a severe reprimand came out with respect to the distinguished functionary who bore the chief part in that transaction. Nevertheless, the transit duties were abolished, and that great boon was secured to the people of India. The same was the case with respect to the Act which established the liberty of unlicensed printing. Then, a most severe reprimand came out from home on account of it, imputing rashness and temerity to the Legislative Council; nevertheless, the home authorities did not command them to undo that Act. It was the same with the Act which established an uniform coinage throughout India. A reprimand came out, but still the Act was not set aside. These instances, all taken from a period of little more than a year—a period certainly of less than a year and a quarter—will convince Gentlemen that the organisation of the Government in India is really much more important to the happiness of the people of that country than the organisation of the Home Government. I am not sure, Sir, with regard to many, and not the least important, of the functions of the Home Government, that I should not be inclined to say, that the most important of all these functions is the choice of the Governor General; but I should be inclined to say that even the character of the Governor General is less important than the general character and spirit of the servants by whom the administration of India is carried on. A test, then, by which I am inclined to judge of the present Bill, is the probable effect it would have on the character and spirit of the civil service in India. Is it likely to raise or is it likely to lower the character of that distinguished body which furnishes India with its judges and collectors?—for, without meaning the slightest disrespect to the Court of Directors, I must say that three or four or six incompetent Directors would cause far less evil to the people of India, than a single incompetent collector in a district where a settlement is to be made between the Government and the villagers. Though many hon. Gentlemen fancy they know what the functions of a collector of revenue are, yet there exists, and I am surprised at it, a strange ignorance as to the power and importance of functionaries of that class in India. Some Gentlemen seem to imagine, putting the Indian collector at the very highest, that he is something like a Commissioner of Taxes or Stamps in this country; while the truth is, that the collector of revenue in many parts of India is the sole consul of a great province, the district assigned to him being about the size of one of the four provinces of Ireland, of Leinster or of Munster, and the population therein probably about 1,000,000 of human beings. In all that district there is not a single village—there is not a single hut—in which the difference between a good and a bad collector may not make the difference between happiness and misery. The difference between a good and bad collector to the people in such a district is infinitely greater than the difference between the very best and the very worst government that we have ever seen or are likely ever to see in England, can be to the people here. I have been assured by those who have had the best opportunities of judging, that you might read the character of the collector in the eyes and in the garb of the population—in the appearance of the fields, and of the houses. Where there was an incapable collector, the peasantry there were brokenhearted. In the first place, the ornaments of the women, in which the peasantry of India lay up their wealth, and which they so greatly prize, are sold—then the pressure overcame their fondness for the village to which they belonged, and emigration by hundreds and thousands took place. The villages became desolate, the jungle encroached on the country before cultivated, and wild beasts made dens where human habitations stood before. But let a good collector replace the bad one, and the whole scene is altered. Cultivation reappears, the jungle recedes, the tigers and beasts of prey are driven back to their former haunts, the houses rise again, and the fugitive population come back to their villages. Such a power as that which collectors in India have over the people in India is not found in any other part of the world possessed by any class of functionaries; and I can conceive that if we made the very best arrangements possible with respect to the home government, we should be rendering far smaller service to those millions for whom we are bound in the first place to take thought, than if we raised the capacity for the civil service. Some Gentlemen for whose ability I have great respect—though upon this subject I cannot agree with them—think the best mode of improving the government of India, is by throwing open the public appointments. Let the Governor General, they say, choose his instruments for the administration. There will be no want of ability, they say, if you only give him the freedom to choose those who serve under him. There is something plausible in the proposition that you should allow him to choose able men wherever he finds them. But my firm opinion is, that the day on which the civil service of India ceases to be a close service, will be the beginning of an age of jobbing—the most monstrous, the most extensive, and the most perilous system of abuse in the distribution of patronage that we have ever witnessed. Every Governor General would, in such case, carry out with him, or would soon be followed by, a crowd of relatives, nephews, first and second cousins, friends, and sons of friends, and political hangers-on; while every steamer arriving from the Red Sea would carry to India some adventurer bearing with him letters from some powerful man in England, all pressing for employment. Upon these persons so recommended the Governor General would have it in his power to distribute residences, seats at the Council Board, seats at the Revenue Board, places of from 4,000l. to 6,000l. a year—upon men without the least acquaintance with the character or habits of the natives, and with only sufficient knowledge of the language to be able to call for another bottle of pale ale, or to desire their attendants to pull the punkah faster. These men would be sent to exercise authority in different districts. One might be sent to a great station at Gwalior; or Khatmandoo, or Mysore, not inferior to Scotland in extent and population, might be made subject to his absolute power. In what way could you put a check on such proceedings? Would you—the House of Commons— control them? Have you been so completely successful in extirpating nepotism and jobbing at your own door, and in ex-eluding all abuses from Whitehall and Somerset House, that you should fancy that you could establish purity in countries the situation of which you do not know, and the names of which you cannot pronounce? This is what you would be called upon to undertake. I believe most firmly that instead of purity resulting from that arrangement to India, India would soon be tainted; and that, before long, when a son or brother of some active Member of this House went out to Calcutta, carrying with him a strong letter of recommendation from the Prime Minister to the Governor General, that letter would be really a bill of exchange drawn on the revenues of India for value received in Parliamentary support in this House. That would be no new traffic, but only an old traffic revived. We are not without a guide and experience on this point. We have only to look back to those lamentable and shameful years which followed the first establishment of our power in Bengal. Then, as may be well known, if you only look to any poet, satirist, or essayist of those times, you may see in what manner the system of appointments operated. Looking over, only yesterday, for another object, a file of newspapers of 1771, I was struck by a paragraph stating that Mr. So-and-So, who went out with the Governor General only three years ago, had just landed with 40,000l. But it was not only so. There were the sort of men who took no office, but simply put the Governor General to a species of ransom; they laid upon him a sort of tax—what the Mahrattas call choret, and the Scotch blackmail—that is, the sum paid to a thief, in consideration that he went away without doing harm. There was a tradition in Calcutta, where the story was very circumstantially told and generally believed, that a man came out with a strong letter of recommendation from one of the Ministers during Lord Clive's second administration. Lord Clive saw that he was not only unfit for, but would positively do harm in, any office, and said in his peculiar way, "Well, chap, how much do you want?" Not being accustomed to be spoken to so plainly, the man replied, that he only hoped for some situation in which his services might be useful. "That is no answer, chap," said Lord Clive, "how much do you want? Will 100,000l. do?" The person replied, that he should be delighted if by laborious service he could obtain that competence. Lord Clive then wrote out an order for the sum at once, and told the applicant to leave India by the ship he came in, and, once in England again, to remain there. I think the story is very probable, and I also think that the people of India ought to be grateful for the course Lord Clive pursued; for though he pillaged the people of Bengal to give this lucky adventurer a large sum, yet the man himself if he had received an appointment, might both have pillaged them and misgoverned them as well. Now, against evils like this there is but one security, and I believe but one, and that is, that the civil service be kept close. The consequence of keeping the service close is, that though the Governor General has a wide choice, he must choose from among a certain set of instruments which he finds prepared to his hand. It is in the highest degree improbable that any one, upon going out as Governor General to India, should find many relatives or friends in the civil service—and it more generally happens that he has not one; and the consequence is, that the most unscrupulous Governor General would dispose of his patronage under the present system more properly than an upright Governor General under a system by which he should be at liberty to appoint any one. Even an unscrupulous Governor General, when he finds he cannot oblige relations and friends, comes to the conclusion that the best thing to do is, to appoint men who would do the most credit to his choice, and make the public service go on most easily and successfully. That excellent and valuable man, Lord William Bentinck, in the month he left India, said, "I have now been here seven years, and during that time I have had to dispose of immense lucrative patronage, and I have never but once in all that time been able to do a single service to a single old English friend." There was the office of a police magistrate vacant at Calcutta, not strictly belonging to the civil service, and Lord William Bentinck gave it to this friend of his who had fallen into distress. That was the single instance where Lord William Bentinck had an opportunity of appointing a friend, and he only did that by going out of the service. It may be asked, What a security is such a system for the proper disposal of the patronage? I say it is infinitely a better security than even the virtues of such a man; for if any man is to be trusted with the uncontrolled disposal of the Indian patronage, Lord William Bentinck certainly was. Then it appears we are agreed that it is of the highest importance that the civil service in India! should be most capable and efficient. We are agreed also, that it must be a close service. In this case, it certainly necessarily follows that we ought to watch with the utmost care over the road to admission to that service—that we ought, if possible, to take such measures that this service may consist entirely of picked men, of superior men, taken from the flower of the youth of India. Now, it is because, in my opinion, this Bill does tend to produce that effect, that I feel earnestly desirous that it should pass, and pass without delay. My right hon. Friend (Sir C. Wood) proposes that all places in the civil service—all admissions to the civil service—shall be distributed among young men by competition in those studies—as I understand the plan—which constitute a liberal British education. That plan was originally suggested by Lord Grenville, in 1813,! in a speech which, though I do not concur in every part of it, I would earnestly re- commend every Gentleman to read, for I believe that since the death of Burke nothing more remarkable has been delivered. Nothing, however, on this point was then! done; and the matter slept till 1833, when my Friend Lord Glenelg, the purest and most disinterested of men, proposed the adoption of a plan not altogether framed according to those views, but still a plan which would have introduced this principle of competition. Upon that plan twenty years ago I remember speaking here. I ought not to say here, for the then House of Commons has been burnt down, and of the audience I then addressed the greater part has passed away. But my opinion on that subject has always been the same. The Bill has passed; but difficulties were either found or made—the fault lies between the Government and this House; the I Company were less to blame, as they had opposed the thing from the beginning. The enactments to which I have referred were repealed, and the patronage ran in its old course. It is now proposed to introduce this principle of competition again, and I do most earnestly entreat this House to give it a fair trial. I was truly glad to hear the noble Lord who proposed the present Amendment express approval of the general principle of that part of the Bill. I was glad, but not surprised at it, for it is what I should expect from a young man of his spirit and ability, and recent experience of academical competition. But I must say I do join with the hon. Member for Kidderminster (Mr. Lowe) in feeling some surprise at the manner in which that part of the plan has been spoken of by a nobleman of great eminence, once President of the Board of Control and Governor General of India, and of very distinguished ability, both as an orator and as a statesman. If I understand the opinions imputed to that noble Lord, be thinks the proficiency of a young man in those pursuits which constitute a liberal education, is not only no indication that he is likely in after life to make a distinguished figure, but that it positively raises a presumption that in after life he will be overpassed by those he overcame in these early contests. I understand that the noble Lord is of opinion that young men gaining distinction in such pursuits, are likely to turn out dullards and utterly unfit for the contests of active life; and I am not sure that the noble Lord did not say that it would be better to make boxing or cricket a test of fitness than a liberal education. I must say it seems to me that there never was a fact better proved by an immense mass of evidence, by an experience almost unvaried, than this—that men who distinguish themselves in their youth above their cotemporaries in academic competition, almost always keep to the end of their lives the start they have gained in the earlier part of their career. This experience is so vast that I should as soon expect to hear any one question it as to hear it denied that arsenic is poison, or that brandy is intoxicating. Take the very simplest test. Take down in any library the Cambridge Calendar. There you have the list of honours for a hundred years. Look at the list of wranglers and of junior optimes, and I will venture to say that for one man who has in after life distinguished himself among the junior optimes, you will find twenty among the wranglers. Take the Oxford Calendar; look at the list of first-class men, and compare them with an equal number of men in the third class, and say in which list you find the majority of men who have distinguished themselves in after life. But is not our history full of instances which prove this fact? Look at the Church, the Parliament, or the Bar. Look to the Parliament from the time when Parliamentary government began in this country—from the days of Montagu and St. John, to those of Canning and Peel. You need not stop there, but come down to the time of Lord Derby and my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Has it not always been the case that the men who were first in the -competition of the schools have been the first in the competition of life? Look also to India. The ablest man who ever governed India was Warren Hastings, and was he not in the first rank at Westminster? The ablest civil servant I ever knew in India was Sir Charles Metcalfe, and was he not a man of the first standing at Eton? The most distinguished member of the aristocracy who ever governed India was Lord Wellesley. What was his Eton reputation? What was his Oxford reputation? But I must mention—I cannot refrain from mentioning—another noble and distinguished Governor General. A few days ago, while the memory of the speech to which I have alluded was still fresh in my mind, I read in the Musœ Cantabrigienses a very eloquent and: classical ode, which the University of Cambridge rewarded with a gold medal. The subject was the departure of the House of Braganza from Portugal for Brazil. The young poet, who was then only seventeen, described in very Horatian language and versification the departure of the fleet, and pictured the great Portuguese navigator, Vasco de Gama, and the great Portuguese poet Camoens hovering over the armament which was to convey the fortunes of the Portuguese monarchy to a new hemisphere; and with pleasure, not altogether unmingled with pain, I read at the bottom of that composition the name of the Hon. Edward Law, of St. John's College. I must say I saw with some considerable pleasure that the name of Lord Ellenbo-rough may be added to the long list of those distinguished men, who, in early youth, have, by eminent academical success, given an augury of the distinguished part which they were afterwards to play in public life; and I could not but feel some concern and some surprise that a nobleman so honourably distinguished in his youth by attention to those studies, should, in his maturer years, have descended to use language respecting them which I think would have better become the lips of Ensign Northerton, or the Captain in Swift's poem, who says— A scholard when first from his college broke loose Can hardly tell how to cry boh! to a goose. Your Noveds and Bluturchs, and Omurs and stuff, By George, they don't signify this pinch of snuff; To give a young gentleman right education, The army's the only good school in the nation. The noble Lord seemed, from his speech, to entertain that opinion. [A laugh.] My schoolmaster called me a dunce and a fool, But at cuffs I was always the cock of the school. But if a recollection of his own early academical triumphs did not restrain the noble Earl from using this language, I should have thought that his filial piety would have had that effect. I should have thought that he would have remembered how eminently splendid was the academical career of that great and strong-minded magistrate, the late Lord Ellenborough; and, as I have mentioned him, I will say that if there be in this world a trying test of the fitness of men for the competition of active life, and of the strength and acuteness of their practical faculties, it is to be found in the contests of the English Bar. Have not the most eminent of our Judges distinguished themselves in their academical career? Look at Lord Mansfield, Lord Eldon, Lord Stowell, Sir Vicary Gibbs, Chief Justice Tindall, Lord Tenterden, and Lord Lynd-hurst. Look round the Common Law or the Equity Bar. The present Lord Chief Baron was senior wrangler; Mr. Baron Alderson was senior wrangler; Mr. Justice Maule was senior wrangler; Mr. Baron Parke was eminently distinguished at the University for his mathematical and classical attainments; Mr. Baron Platt was a wrangler; and Mr. Justice Coleridge was the most eminent man of his time at Oxford. Then take the Equity Bar. The Lord Chancellor was a wrangler; Lord Justice Sir George Turner was high in the list of wranglers; all the three Vice Chancellors were wranglers; Sir Lancelot Shadwell was a wrangler, and a very distinguished scholar; my friend Sir James Parke was a high wrangler, and a distinguished mathematician. Can we suppose that it was by mere accident all these obtained their high positions? Is it possible not to believe that these men maintained through life the start which they gained in youth? And is it an answer to these instances to say that you can point—as it is desirable you should be able to point— to two or three men of great powers who, having neglected the struggle when they were young, stung with remorse and generous shame, have afterwards exerted themselves to retrieve lost time, and have sometimes overtaken and surpassed those who had got far in advance of them? Of course there are such exceptions; most desirable it is that there should be, and that they should be noted, for they seem intended to encourage men who, after having thrown away their youth from levity or love of pleasure, may be inclined to throw their manhood after it in despair; but the general rule is, beyond all doubt, that which I have laid down. It is this—that those men who distinguish themselves most in academical competition when they are young, are the men who, in after life, distinguish themselves most in the competition of the world. Now, if this be so, I cannot conceive that we should be justified in refusing to India the advantage of such a test. I know there are gentlemen who say—for it has been said—"After all, this test extends only to a man's intellectual qualifications, and his character is quite as important as his intellectual qualifications." I most readily admit that his character is as important as his intellectual qualifications; but, unfortunately, you have not quite so certain a test of a man's character as you have of his intellectual qualifications. Surely, if there are two qualifications you want a man to possess, and which it is very important he should possess—and if you have a test by which you can ascertain the presence of the one qualification, but no decisive test by which you can ascertain the presence of the other—your best course is to use the test you have, and to leave as little as you possibly can to chance. This argument would seem unanswerable unless some person should say that the circumstance of a man's superiority in academical competition raise a presumption that he was inferior in practical judgment and manly rectitude. But if that could be shown, then the consequence would go a great deal further than the rejection of my right hon. Friend's proposal. It would go to this, that we must reconsider the whole system of English education, and remove our boys from those places where they are trained to studies which have a deleterious effect upon the character. There is another point on which I am desirous to say a few words. Some very able and judicious men, who are strongly of opinion— as strongly as I am myself—that it is important that there should be high intellectual tests for admission to the Indian service, are yet of opinion that this would be best managed, not by means of competition, but by having examinations of a high standard, and rejecting every candidate who does not come up to that standard. Now, all my experience and observation! lead me to believe that this is a complete mistake. The effect of competition is to keep up the standard. Every man struggles to do his best, and the consequence is, that without any effort on the part of the examiner, under a system of competition the standard keeps itself up. But the moment you say to the examiner, not "Shall A or B go to India?" but "Here is A; is he fit to go to India?" the question becomes altogether a different one. The examiner's compassion, his good nature, his unwillingness to blast the prospects of a young man, lead him to strain a point in order to let the candidate in if he possibly can. That would be the case even if we suppose the dispensers of patronage to be left merely to the operation of their own minds; but you would have them subjected to solicitations of a sort which it would be impossible to resist. I speak of what I know, and of what I have seen. I have known cases where public servants have been under the painful necessity of pronouncing young men, on examination, to be unfit for the public service. What is the consequence? The candidate declares that he will exert himself to the utmost, and that, if he be but tried, no endeavour shall be wanting on his part to discharge his duties satisfactorily. The father comes with tears in his eyes; the mother writes the most pathetic and heartbreaking letters. I have repeatedly seen very firm minds shaken by appeals of that sort. Now, the system of competition allows nothing of the kind— the parent cannot say "the other boy beat my son, but please say my son beat the other boy"—in that way the system of competition necessarily keeps your standard high, while the other system constantly tends to bring it lower and lower. I hope most earnestly it will not be supposed that in anything I have said I intend in the smallest degree to reflect on the present civil service of India. Some of the dearest and most valued friends I have in the world belong to that service, and for the general spirit and character of that service I feel the greatest respect and affection. I think it wonderful that a body of men not picked or chosen, but taken merely at random—appointed because one is the son of a Director, because another is the nephew of a Director, because the father of a third is some person who has been, perhaps, of great service to the President of the Board of Control at a contested election—I think it wonderful that men selected purely and avowedly on grounds of a personal nature, should have conducted themselves as they have done, and have discharged their duties under great temptation, under great difficulties, with so much success. It is, I think, a thing glorious to our country, that 800 men taken in that way—at random, from among the gentlemen of England—should have conducted themselves in general with such distinguished ability and probity. That, however, is no reason for not making the service better, if we can do so; and it is impossible to deny that we have proofs that the service is not entirely free from defects. How, indeed, could it be other- wise? You must necessarily have a certain number of inferior men in a service formed in such a manner—-in a service consisting of 800 men, not selected on the ground of ability. Among any 800 gentlemen whom you might select at random, there would be a certain number of men of very superior powers; the great majority might be not very much above, nor very much below, the average of ability; but there must necessarily be, in every body of 800 men, not selected by some test of ability, a considerable number—say a tenth, or, if you please, a twentieth—who fall decidedly below the average of ability. Now, you can do very well with this in this country. You don't want all the clerks in the War Office, or the Treasury, to be superior men. There is plenty of routine business to be done in those offices which a man of no great ability can transact. The men of small ability do that routine business; the men of great ability rise in position. But the case is different in the Indian service. You have there 800 men charged with the happiness of 120,000,000 of people. There is not a single one of those men upon whose capacity the happiness of a very large number of human beings may not, in any situation, depend. It is utterly impossible that one-tenth part or one-twentieth part of that service can consist of incapable men without causing great suffering to thousands of individuals. And here, I believe, we find the real explanation of that which has appeared to me, from all I have been able to learn, the most defective point of our system in India. I quite agree with the noble Lord who moved the Amendment as to the evils of the judicial system in India. All the evidence leads me to that conclusion; but permit me to say that this is no novelty. Those evils were distinctly predicted before the Bill of 1833 passed. I heard them predicted myself. It was said by a very able man—"Your opening the China trade will, in one sense, inflict great evils upon the people of India, unless you alter the mode in which the patronage is dispensed. While patronage is exercised as it is exercised, there will always be a certain number of incapable men in the service. At present they are sent into the trade; your able men are left for judicial, revenue, and political positions. If you abolish the trade, you will still have the same proportion of incapacity in the service; but there will no longer be commercial affairs to which you can ap- point these men of small ability, and you will send them to the judicial department." The prophecy has been strictly realised, for to the judicial department they have gone. The evidence before us leaves no doubt that, though there are very eminently able and useful men—as able and useful as any which the service comprises —in the judicial department, yet that in general it is to that department that men deficient in ability and energy are sent; and I do not blame the Indian Government for having taken this course; for, shocking as it sounds in the car of an Englishman to say that the collection of taxes is more important than the admistration of justice, yet, practically, I do believe that the happiness of the people of a district in India depends more upon the ability of the revenue collector than even upon the ability of the judge. Now, what is the remedy for this? Not, I think—as some would propose—to strengthen the judicial department at the expense of the revenue department—not, in my opinion, to pour out upon India, as has been suggested, some scores of barristers from the back rows of the Court of Queen's Bench, and to give them office as Indian judges. The true remedy is to raise the general character of the service, and to take such measures that it may be in the highest degree improbable that any men who are really incapable-—any men who are below par— will find their way into that service at all. I believe that the plan proposed by Her Majesty's Government will accomplish this end, and it is on that ground chiefly that I give it my most sincere and cordial support. One word more. It seems to mo that this plan provides the best means that can be imagined for effecting an object upon which much has been said, and which I admit to be desirable—the gradual admission of Natives to a share in the higher offices of the government. Legally, they are now admissible; practically, none have been admitted. I do not blame those who do not admit them, for it is my belief that there is not in India a young Native whom it would be a kindness to the Native population to place, at the present moment, in your civil service. I can conceive nothing more unfortunate for the people of India than that you should put into the civil service a Native, because he is a Native, if he is to be the last man in that service, a man decidedly inferior in attainments to all the other members of that service, and who would be looked down upon by his European colleagues. Above all, I cannot conceive anything more pernicious than the suggestion which has been made, that before you admit any Native to the service at all—before any native has been even an assistant collector or a judge, you should take some Native, and appoint him a member of the Legislative Council. That, of all propositions, would seem to me least likely to promote the real benefit of the people of India. Under the proposed system it would depend on the Natives themselves, and upon them alone, at what time they should enter into the civil service. As soon as any young Native of distinguished parts should, by the cultivation of English literature, have enabled himself to be victorious in competition over European candidates, he would, in the most honourable manner, by conquest, as a matter of right, and not as a mere eleemosynary donation, obtain access to the service. It would then be utterly impossible for his European fellows to look down upon him; he would enter the service in the best and most honourable way; and I believe that in this mode, and in this mode alone, can the object which so many friends of the Native population have in view be attained in a manner at all satisfactory. I differ, I am well aware, as to the effect of the admission of Natives to such situations, from a noble Lord (the Earl of Ellenborough), whom I mentioned a short time ago. That noble Lord is of opinion, not only that we ought to exclude Natives from office, but that even by encouraging them to study the arts and learning of Europe, we are preparing the way for the utter destruction of our power in India. I must leave it to the noble Lord to explain what seems to me a rather singular inconsistency in his opinion. I am at a loss to understand how, while utterly contemning education when it is given to Europeans, he should regard it with dread when it is given to Natives. This training, we are told, when given to a European, makes him a bookworm, a twaddler, a man unfit for the active duties of life; but give the same education to the Hindoo, and it arms him with such an accession of intellectual power, that an established government, with an army of 250,000 men, backed by the whole army and navy of England, are to go down inevitably before its irresistible power. I do not pretend to explain how the knowledge which is power in one race, can be absolutely impotent in another; but I can only say, for myself, with regard to this question, that, in my opinion, we shall not secure or prolong our dominion in India by attempting to exclude the Natives of that country from a share in its government, or by attempting to discourage their study of western arts or learning; and I will only say, further, that, however that may be, I will never consent to keep them ignorant in order to keep them manageable, or to govern them in ignorance in order that we may govern them long.

MR. BLACKETT

said, he did not rise to combat the eloquent speech of the right hon. Gentleman who had just sat down, but to call attention to the extraordinary conduct of the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Control. He was aware that one, who like himself, derived his knowledge of Parliamentary usages from books, was liable to mistake in discussing a point of Parliamentary precedent or law. He ventured, however, to ask whether the right hon. Gentleman had taken a Parliamentary or constitutional course when, in introducing his measure, he quoted the authority of Lord Dalhousie in support of it, and then refused to lay on the table of the House the despatches to which he had referred? The right hon. Gentleman, in reply to the hon. Member for Montrose, said it was not so much a despatch as a private letter. But when in a similar manner, at the period of the Canadian rebellion, Lord Glenelg spoke of a despatch as a private communication, Lord Brougham said, that whether a document began "My Lord," or "My dear Lord," was immaterial; the main fact was whether the matter of the despatch related to the public service. He would also ask the noble Lord the Member for the City of London, whether he recollected the occasion when, in 1808, Mr. Canning fell into the same fault by quoting a despatch from our Minister at Copenhagen which he refused to lay upon the table. On that occasion Mr. Adair, supported by the Whigs of that day, moved a vote of censure upon the right hon. Gentleman; and so sensible were Mr. Canning's Tory colleagues that he had offended against the laws of Parliament, that they only met the vote of censure by moving the previous question. The proceeding of the right hon. President of the Board of Control was not more defensible than that of Mr. Canning; and he wished to see whether the Whig Ministry of 1853 were as zealous guardians of Parliamentary practice as the Whig Opposition of 1808. In addressing himself to the question before the House, he would confine himself solely to the question of a double government in India. He dissented from the opinion of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Edinburgh (Mr. Mac-aulay), when he said that this was a matter of small importance. No doubt, compared with the happiness of the millions of India, it was a matter of comparatively small importance; but still it must be remembered that it was the source and the spring from which all the other parts of the system flowed. On this question of double government he would make a special appeal to those Gentlemen who represented commercial and manufacturing constituencies, and who had distinguished themselves by their endeavours to introduce into public business the principles of economy, simplicity, and despatch. He believed there never was a system that more required the adoption of the principles of Bentham and Adam Smith—the principles of cheap government and cheap law—than the home government of India. He was sorry to find the noble Lord, in his recently published Memoirs of Fox, differing from the principles which that great statesman laid down on the government of India, and stating that the experience of seventy years had blunted Pox's arguments, which could not be logically refuted, and that the principle of despotism in the Indian Government was tempered by the spirit of our representative institutions. On this point he (Mr. Blackett) was directly at issue with the noble Lord, as he believed that the present Government of India possessed the vices of both forms of government, without the virtues of either; that it had all the oppression of despotism, without its impressive and sweeping energy; and all the vacillation and feebleness of representative government, without possessing the spirit of popular control. One main difficulty with which the Government had to struggle was, the irresponsible position in which English officers were placed in India; and for this difficulty there was no remedy except that of concentrating the government at home, and enforcing, with regard to it, the principle of responsibility —bringing public opinion in England to bear upon it with the greatest possible force. This could never be accomplished under a system of double government. Where two men performed the task of one, it was difficult to apportion the proper degree of praise or blame; and this was rendered infinitely more difficult where the real responsibility rested with one, while the great object was to persuade the public that the authority rested with the other. The hon. Baronet the Member for Honiton maintained that the whole work of Indian administration rested with the Court of Directors; but, in opposition to this, he need only quote from the memoirs of the late Mr. Henry St. John Tucker, just published, in which that gentleman lamented over the humiliating position in which the Directors were placed —a humiliation which he himself had deeply felt. He believed the real explanation of this difficulty to be, that, in point of fact, the administration was not a double one; or, rather, the two departments divided two kinds of administration between them. All the show, the levying of war, the raising of taxes, and all such duties, were decided on by the President of the Board of Control; but the public works, education, and all measures for promoting the civilisation of the people of India, which ought to be the work of the Directors, or of both together, were left to slumber under the bureaucracy of Leaden-hall Street. The result was extravagance, negligence, and waste, which it would be impossible to parallel in any other government whatever. There were one or two points in the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Edinburgh which he would notice. The first related to the education of the natives of India. When that right hon. Gentleman went to India, the English mind was divided into two theories—whether the natives should be instructed in Oriental knowledge or in European learning. What was the part taken by the Court of Directors? In 1837 the then Governor General (Lord William Bentinck), instigated mainly by the masterly minute which was drawn up by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Edinburgh on the subject, issued a proclamation that the fund for education should be employed in instructing the natives in European learning. Now, it was true that that change had been carried out in India, and a blessed change it was; but he had good reason for stating that when Lord William Bentinck sent home his despatch, the Court of Directors actually drew up a despatch condemning his Resolution, and ordering him to reverse it; but Sir John Hobhouse altered the despatch into one approving of the change, which the Court of Directors refused to accept, and the consequence of which was that no despatch on the subject had ever been sent out at all, and that great change had to this day received neither the sanction nor the censure of the Home Government. In another observation of the right hon. Gentleman he fully concurred—that India was to be governed only in India; and it was his complaint against the home authorities that on this point they were constantly overstepping their legitimate powers, and abandoning that wise course which had been adopted in regard to our colonies of leaving as much as possible to local legislation. By the 43rd clause of the Charter the right of making laws was vested in the Indian Legislative Council; but in 1845, when a Bill declaring the lex loci of India was prepared by the Legislative Council, and sanctioned by Lord Har-dinge, the Court of Directors sent out a despatch demanding that no such law should be passed till it had been submitted to their decision. For what purpose did he mention these things? In order to test the tendency of the Home Government to outstep their authority. The Home Government possessed the same power over Indian legislation as the Crown did over colonial. It would be in the recollection of the House that the only interference with legislation on the part of the Crown on record was on an Indian question—namely, when Mr. Fox was passing his India Bill through the Lords, and a note was circulated that George III. would not consider those Peers as friendly to him who apposed that measure. He would ask what were the changes to be introduced by the Ministerial Bill? He must say that it was his impression that the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Control was about to leave the question of the double government of India in a worse position than he had found it. The Bill introduced six nominees of the Government into what was formerly a homogeneous body, and left it at the mercy of the Minister of the day. He had no objection to strip the Directors of some of their prerogatives, but he objected to stripping them of those prerogatives in order that they might be transferred to the Crown. There was not, moreover, a single clause in the Bill which increased the responsibility of the President of the Board of Control—there was not even a proviso that there should be an Indian budget every year; but the Presi-dent of the Board of Control was left at full liberty, should he desire it, to juggle with the names of the Indian Committee, and to sign the names of the Chairman and Vice-Chairman at the foot of every Indian despatch. He knew it would be said that the only escape from all these difficulties was the establishment of a Parliamentary Government. He knew he should hear it asserted that India was better governed than our colonial dependencies. But let them take as a test the comparative imports and exports of India and our Colonies—their relative population and their consumption of British manufactures, and he believed it would be found that the Colonial Office would beat Leadenhall Street out of the field. If they took the instances in which Parliament interfered with our Colonies, and compared the amount of evil with the good caused by that interference, it would be found that the evil was very little, and the good was very great. Where would free trade in our Colonies have been —where would negro emancipation have been—but for the interference of Parliament? Where would the freedom to the Indian trade granted in 1813 have been, had it not been that the pressure of Liverpool had been brought to bear on Parliament? Where would the missionary efforts have been but for Mr. Wilberforce? It was Parliament which had passed the clause admitting Natives to offices—it was Parliament which had established that Legislative Council to which he had referred. The President of the Board of Control had, in introducing this Bill, made a special appeal to the House that it might not be made the theme of party conflict. Now he, for one, did not dread the exhibition of a party spirit, believing that from hence some of the noblest efforts of statesmen had originated; but if party spirit were, as the right hon. Gentleman hoped it would, to be excluded altogether from this debate, there should have been no Treasury whips this evening—there should have been no hints thrown out that Government might be possibly annoyed by the division. If the question were to be fairly left to the impartial spirit of the House, he, for one, should have no fear of the result. He felt that it was to the commercial Members of that House that he was to look for a support of the Amendment proposed by the noble Lord (Lord Stanley); and if that Amendment were fairly put, as a question of economy against wastefulness, of simplicity against intricacy, he should have no fear of the verdict which would be pronounced by the dispassionate feeling of an impartial Parliament.

VISCOUNT JOCELYN

said, that having often brought forward Indian questions, he was desirous of addressing the House on this occasion; and of doing so, not in a party spirit, but with a wish to do justice to the subject; and while acknowledging the defects and demerits of the Indian Government, to give it credit for what deserved approval in its administration; the only object he had in view being to point out the best mode of improving that Government. The present, perhaps, was a fortunate period for bringing forward the subject, because the disruption of party ties had left the House at liberty to consider the subject in an unbiassed frame of mind. It was most important to consider it in a fair and impartial spirit. The representatives of a free people, who were proud and jealous of their constitutional privileges, were about to legislate for a people wholly destitute of these advantages, and to give them a despotic Government— the only Government they were capable of receiving. When the British Parliament was about to form a Government for India on the principles of despotism, it was their duty to frame such a Government in a paternal spirit, and as much as possible adapted to the wants and wishes of the people. In framing a Government for India, it was necessary to look back to her past history, for in the history of a people we could trace the character of the race For centuries India had been subject to strife and invasion, and had found under our rule the blessings of security and peace. The rise and progress of our own rule in India was one of the marvels of history. Scarcely a century ago we were only a company of merchants on a hostile shore; since then our empire had extended and expanded almost against the wishes of our rulers. It was clear that a far higher power than human will had destined the vast extension of our Indian rule; and therefore our object ought to be, not so much to prepare the natives of India for self-government, as to prepare them to take part with us in her internal administration, and teach them the blessings of a Christian rule. He was sorry that, though there were few points of difference in principle between himself and his noble Friend (Lord Stanley), he felt compelled to vote against his noble Friend's Amendment. He could not, however, do otherwise, considering, as he had stated a few weeks ago, that Parliament already possessed sufficient evidence to enable them to form a Government for India, and he did not know what advantage could be gained by waiting for further information. He knew that his hon. Friend opposite (Mr. Hume) was anxious that the Natives should have been heard before they framed a measure for their rule. So also was he; but at the same time he did not think that the opinions of the Natives could assist them towards the conclusion as to what the Government of India should be. He could not agree with his noble Friend (Lord Stanley) that delay in legislation was unimportant. He did not, it was true, believe that the effect of delay in legislation would be the upsetting of British rule in India; but he felt that delay would tend to paralyse the Government both at home and abroad, and would engender in the minds of the people of India hopes and expectations which could never be fulfilled, and which must eventually lead to discontent. He did not in all respects approve of the Government measure; but this he would say—whatever they did, let them legislate now, and let not the people of India think that they were hesitating as to the course they would adopt. Look to the past, and see what had been effected by the Indian Government. First, with respect to revenue. He was astonished to hear it said by a learned Gentleman that the course of the Indian administration as to land assessment had been disgraceful. Such language was, to say the least, very presumptuous, when it was considered that some of the wisest and most experienced of the servants of the Indian Government, after twenty years' residence in the country, had not been able to arrive at a clear conclusion on that most difficult subject, which had engaged the consideration of Lord Cornwallis, Sir T. Monroe, Mr. Holt Mackenzie, and others of the most illustrious men India had ever known. The system now adopted—that of leases—had been an improvement, and it could not be said that on this subject the Indian Government had neglected its duty. Next, as to the judicial department. He admitted it had been one of the greatest blots on our Indian administration. But the very pamphlet of Mr. Norton—the great source of the accusations against the Company on this head—was compiled from statements procured by the Company themselves in their anxiety to promote improvement. Then, with reference to education. Nothing was more important for Christian rulers than to provide the blessings of education for the people. He admitted that what had been done on this subject was below what it ought to have been; but he could not admit that the Government had neglected its duty. Native youths were seen, who were educated in our schools, and were now taking part in the literature and politics of the day, and the very petition presented upon this subject from Natives of India proved the progress they had made. Suttees and infanticide had been abolished under our rule; and he could not say that if the Indian Government had not fully performed these duties, they had wholly neglected them. He now came to public works. He was fully sensible of their advantage. He himself had first brought forward the question of railways in India; and in his travels through that country he had seen the injuries arising from the want of irrigation displayed in all the horrors of famine. He had even entered villages depopulated, and spots where once the cottages of men had been, now the haunts of the panther and the tiger. He could not deny, when he saw the small sums expended by the Indian Government on public works—when he found that out of the revenue—between 28.000.000l. and 30.000.000l. a year, only 5,000,000l., in the whole, had been spent in public works—it might truly be matter of wonder that the Indian Government should have been so regardless of their own interests. But his wonder was diminished when he found that during that period 16.000.000l. had been expended in unjust and reckless war—the wars in Scinde, the war in Affghanistan—a war not called for by our security, and which almost terminated in our disgrace. The Governments which carried on th6se wars ought to have been brought to the bar of Parliament; but the truth was, Parliament had not felt any interest in the subject. It was idle to pretend that the Home Government were not responsible for these wars. The President of the Board of Control had been as much responsible for the affairs of India, as the Secretaries for Foreign Affairs, and for the Colonies, were responsible in their respective departments; and it was Parliament alone that was to blame for this dereliction of duty on the part of the Government. He was desirous of imposing some species of check upon the Minister, to prevent his acting in opposition to the will of the Directors. The truth was, that Parliament had neglected its duty, and it was not fair to rest the blame upon the Company. It was not true that the Government of India was a curse to the country. If this were Be, it was a terrible slur on the character of this nation. But it was not so. The simple fact was, that an Englishman might walk unarmed all through India, and be received everywhere with civility and courtesy. They held India at this moment with a force of 40,000 men; and yet since 1833 they had had no insurrection against their authority in India which had called for any interference on the part of Parliament; but he would remind the House that since that period they had had a rebellion in Canada; they had had two wars at the Cape of Good Hope; they had had a revolution in Ceylon, and an insurrection in New Zealand; and during all that time pot a single arm had been raised against British rule and authority in India. They had there a faithful army of upwards of 200,000 following their banners, and acting and co-operating with them in the field. These were all facts which could not be denied; and he firmly believed that the rule of the British Government had been, on the whole, a blessing, and not a curse, to the people of India. He came now to consider the measure proposed by the Government. In the principle of that measure he entirely concurred. He thought the propositions of his right hon. Friend went in the direction in which he himself wished to proceed. One of the great evils of the present system, as regarded the Court of Directors, was the system of canvass; and he did not think that there could be any good grounds urged for maintaining the present system—it was utterly indefensible. He thought the canvass a bad arrangement, and the Court of Directors so constituted a monstrosity. Then, with regard to the six new Directors whom it was proposed to introduce. Friend as he was of the double government—believing, as he did, that it was necessary that the debates upon Indian matters of detail should be kept out of Parliament, and not discussed in that House—that it was necessary, if they did not mean to extend constitutional government to India, at least to give the means of discussing the question of what was advantageous or otherwise to the interests of the people of India, by men of experience, knowledge, high position, and character—he was an advocate for the maintenance of the Court of Directors. He thought the Court should be established and maintained for these reasons; but he was satisfied that many able men were excluded from tendering their services to the Indian Government owing to the difficulties attending the canvass. He did not dissent from the appointment of six new Directors as regarded the principle of such an infusion of a new element; but he thought it most essential that they should appear to the public independent, and that there should be no doubt about their exercising an independent action. He doubted, however, the efficacy of the means taken to attain that object. The tenth clause merely provided that they should be nominated by the Crown; but in order that they might not remain dependent on the caprice of a Minister, the most effectual means would be to make them removable by Parliament only, as in the case of Mr. Fox's India Bill of 1784. In regard to the question of patronage, he concurred with his right hon. Friend in thinking that Ministers were right in throwing open the civil service of India to general competition; but he did not consider the mode in which this was*proposed to be done one that would possibly work. He doubted whether any satisfactory decision as to the merits of the candidates could be arrived at from the proposed examination, and thought it would have been far better that the patronage should have been given to the great public schools—he did not mean the schools of the Church of England, but the schools and large seminaries throughout the country; otherwise a large portion of those who were entitled to compete for it would be shut out. The effect of the Ministerial proposition would be to shut out from patronage a large class of persons who had hitherto looked forward to it as a provision for their children. He did not say that was a sufficient reason why it should not be thrown open to competition, as it was their duty to procure the best and ablest men for the public service of India. He concurred with his right hon. Friend in thinking that a portion of the appointments in the military service should be reserved for the servants of the East India Company. Whilst not disapproving the plan of throwing open the civil service to competition, he thought it would be well that the appointments should be distributed by the authorities of India. It was not a-man's passing an examination creditably here that should give him a right to a place, but proofs given of character and abilities such as would justify the Government of India in conferring a high trust on him. He felt bound to add, that he knew it was the opinion of some of the highest authorities that there would be no small danger in opening the whole of the civil service to the Native population. He had endeavoured to state his views and opinions with reference to the future government of India. He could assure the House that his statement had been made from no other motives but what he believed to be for the public good. He had turned his attention to India at a time when few persons had done so. He believed, from all he had seen of that mighty empire, that the real improvement of India was not to be effected by the Court of Directors, or the Board of Control, but by those whom they would entrust with the government of India. He said, give these functionaries great power and great responsibility, and call them in question if they did not perform their duty in a satisfactory way. There were some who looked forward with distrust and gloom to the future prospects of our rule in that vast territory; but he was not afraid to avow himself more sanguine. The people of India, as they gained political information, would learn that they enjoyed greater prosperity and comfort under our administration than they had ever obtained under other foreign rulers, or under their native princes; and, learning to live and respect their governors for the blessings they received at their hands, they would make allowances for inevitable deficiencies. Knowing our faults as they did, they yet were evidently disposed to consider them in a more generous spirit than was evinced by many Gentlemen on the benches opposite.

MR OTWAY

said, that throughout all the various speeches that had been made in the present debate, he observed a universal concurrence as to the importance of the question that was now engaging the attention of the House. That question was one of such magnitude that he would almost have shrunk from obtruding on the House the opinions of a Member so inexperienced as himself; but since the Amendment of the noble Lord the Member for Lynn had been moved, the question had assumed a somewhat different aspect. It no longer referred exclusively to the determination of a form of government for India; but they had the alternative offered to them of delaying a decision, and were thereby afforded an opportunity of acquiring further information on this subject. He had heard nothing to induce him to alter the opinion he expressed in the House when the question was first mooted —that before they proceeded to legislate for India, it was expedient to obtain from the Natives themselves some information as to their wants, their opinions, and their views in the matter. He could not think it wise or just to legislate for a population of 150,000.000, differing from us in language, laws, and religion, without having done so. The advocates of delay, on the ground that it was necessary to collect further information before legislating, had been taunted by the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Control with having already made up their own minds decisively to oppose the present system; but it appeared to have escaped the penetration of that right hon. Gentleman, that this measure might be regarded as a bad measure, and that those who were opposed to it might, with perfect consistency, consider it their duty to stir up discussion and expose the iniquities of the system they condemned, until the supporters of the Bill were obliged to yield to agitation what they denied to reason and justice. But the main feature of this Bill was the continuance of the system of double government for India—a system which was attended with two of the gravest evils, irresponsibility and secrecy. This was strikingly illustrated in the case of Colonel Outram, the resident at Baroda, who felt it his duty to bring charges of corruption against the officers of the Company; but the conduct of the Government prevented these charges from being properly investigated. Again, it had been proved over and over again that the Court of Directors had been compelled by the President of the Board of Control to sign despatches to be sent out to India, against the contents of which the majority of them solemnly protested; and on the other hand, Mr. Campbell, an eminent authority on this point, declared that it was most difficult to determine the authorship of any despatch. Therefore, the double system was manifestly what the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Buckinghamshire would call an organised hypocrisy. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Edinburgh had alluded to the prosperity of the people of India, and referred for the proofs of it to the dress, ornaments, and general appearance of the native population; but Mr. Marryatt, speaking of the Bombay Presidency, said that the people were verging on the lowest state of pauperism; and other eminent authorities bore testimony that there were everywhere marks of general deterioration. Another point to which he would briefly refer, was the administration of justice. He was astonished to hear the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Control say, that the Judges of India were universally believed to be incorruptible. The very reverse was the fact. A circular was recently sent round to fifty of the principal officers, judges, commissioners, and political officers of the Bombay Presidency, requesting answers with regard to the feeling of the Native population of their respective districts as to the integrity of the judges; and the result was that thirty-eight out of the whole fifty of these officials returned answers to the effect that among all classes of the inhabitants of Western India there was a belief in the corruptibility of the persons appointed to administer justice. Nine declared their partial belief to the same effect; and only three out of the fifty gave a negative reply; and of these three, two of them were, he believed, British agents in non-regulation provinces, and the third, he regretted to say, was an individual who was accused of being personally implicated in dishonourable transactions. He (Mr. Otway) need not cite instances in illustration of this state of things; but the case of Jotee Persaud, a native contractor, who had rendered great services to the army, and who, when he sent in his bill for 400,000l., instead of being paid, was placed in the felon's dock upon a fictitious charge, was familiar to the public. With regard to public works, he should really have thought, after the able articles which had recently appeared in the Times and other papers, that the right hon. Gentleman would scarcely have spoken so highly in praise of them as he had done. The hon. Baronet the Member for Honiton had taken great credit for the canal connected with the Godovery river; but he forgot to mention that the works ought to have been, and might have been, constructed many years ago, and for a less sum than was spent by the Directors upon dinners in Leadenhall-street. Again, could the hon. Baronet deny that the revenue of India was in a perpetual state of deficit—that the charges were constantly increasing in a greater ratio than the revenue—that at this moment the resources of the country were being squandered in a Burmese war —and that the finances of the country were largely dependent on the opium trade, which rested upon a most precarious foot- ing? With regard to the existing form of double government, he asked if there was anything about it to recommend it to them? The House were aware how the Directors were elected, and that those gentlemen most distinguished in the Indian service were almost never chosen. The right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Control had directed that, in the course of a few months hence, the thirty gentlemen who at present formed the Board of Directors should, somehow or other, make themselves into fifteen. But how was this process of elimination to be carried out? Was the hon. Baronet the Member for Honiton (Sir J. W. Hogg), like another Brutus, to sacrifice the hon. Gentleman the Member for Berwick-on-Tweed (Mr. Marjoribanks); or was the hon. Member for Berwick-on-Tweed to raise a parricidal hand against the hon. Member for Honiton? However the matter might be accomplished, he believed that it would not be the best members of the Board—it would not be those most acquainted with the affairs of India—that would remain in the direction. The right hon. Gentleman had said that the Directors were necessary for the distribution of the patronage of the Company, because, if the Directors were not there, that patronage might be made instrumental for increasing the influence of the Crown. Now, he (Mr. Otway) could not admit that such a conclusion necessarily followed from such a premiss, because a mode of distributing the patronage of India might be devised by which a portion of it should be set apart, as had been suggested, for the sons and orphans of the servants of the Company, civil or military; and another part might be put up to public competition, not at Haileybury or Addiscombe merely, but at all the public schools of the kingdom. But, on the other hand, he conceived that these fears of the increase of the power of the Crown were idle and chimerical, and no more rational in these times than any unworthy apprehensions of the increase of the power of the aristocracy. There might have been cause for such an apprehension in Pitt's day; but he did not think there was any in these days. Recent events had shown that the institutions of this country were rooted in the hearts of the people; but if there was one thing more repugnant than another to Englishmen, it was an irresponsible bureaucracy; and such a system it was that they were now called upon to maintain for the people of India. He said that by that bureaucracy the faith of treaties had been violated, the Native population had been impoverished, degraded, and oppressed; and for these reasons he was anxious to release India from the grasp of a rapacious Company. He should vote for the Amendment of the noble Lord, because the Government Bill contained no remedy for the evils of which he complained, and because it proposed to carry on the government by means of those who had shown themselves unfit to be entrusted with it.

MR. ADDERLEY

rose for the purpose of making a suggestion, which he thought would put the question before the House in that simple position in which it seemed to him it really ought to present itself to their minds, and which, besides, offered the advantage of a much smaller field of discussion than that over which the debate had hitherto travelled. He could not but think, indeed, that if the question were simply, succinctly, and clearly placed before the House on its true merits, no independent or unbiassed Member could possibly hesitate to prefer the Amendment to the Motion. He fully agreed in all that had been said by those who had gone before him with regard to the great importance of the subject they were discussing; and he believed that upon the wise treatment of the question of the government of India would depend their retention of that great dependency. The question was, would they accept the Bill proposed by the Government, or would they accept the alternative proposed by the noble Lord? There were some, however, who seemed to think that a third course might be taken, because they did not think the bearing of the noble Lord's Amendment. The right hon. Baronet the Member for the University of Oxford (Sir R. H. Inglis) thought that they might condemn both the Bill of the Government and the Amendment of the noble Lord, and yet so alter the Bill in Committee that he could arrive at the object he had in view; hut in the course of the speech of the right hon. Baronet, it was clear that he contemplated the cutting up of the Bill in such a manner that nothing essential of the Government Bill would remain, and he would end by virtually having the same measure as that which was proposed by the noble Lord the Member for Lynn—namely, nothing more or less than a Continuance Bill. It appeared to him that certain hon. Members who had spoken were not aware of the full bearing of the noble Lord's Amendment— that they were ignorant of the fact that the noble Lord's proposition involved the necessity of passing a Continuance Bill, for the purpose of affording time for the more deliberate consideration of an amended Act; and he would therefore suggest the addition of a few words to the Amendment, to make that point clear to everybody. With regard to the Bill before the House, he really had not heard one single individual unconnected with the Government, either in or out of the House, attempt to defend it. The East India Company condemned it; and the Manchester Chamber of Commerce condemned it; he hardly knew which condemned it most loudly. There might seem to be one exception to his remark in the speech of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Edinburgh, who from the Treasury bench had undertaken the defence of the measure; but he appealed to the House whether, after all, that eloquent address was not the most remarkable condemnation that had yet been passed upon it. For what had the right hon. Gentleman done, in order to enable himself to undertake the defence of the Bill? He had been obliged to lay down principles which excluded from the discussion the first three-fourths of the Bill, containing the main features of the measure. The right hon. Gentleman, for example, had told them that the Home Government was not the principal subject to discuss; he allowed, indeed, that that was an important question, but said that the Government of India was a still more important question. That might be so; but was not the alteration of the Home Government one of the main features of the Bill? Was it not the fact, too, that almost all the eloquence of the right hon. Gentleman was expended on the 35th clause of the Bill? ["Hear, hear!"] Well, then, he would ask the Government, if, adopting the right hon. Gentleman's defence of their measure, they would be ready to omit the first 34 clauses, and limit the Bill to those parts of which the right hon. Gentleman had expressed his approval? If they did, he believed that the Bill would be allowed to pass without opposition. What had been said against the Amendment of the noble Lord the Member for Lynn? The one sole objection that he had heard to it was, that it would cause delay; but everybody allowed that as much delay attached to the Bill as to the Amendment. The only question was, what sort of delay would be the best, whether the delay of a provi- sional and temporary form of government, or the delay of a Continuance Act. For his own part he should prefer the latter. It had been said that they must do something, because the British empire in India rested upon public opinion in that country. What sort of public opinion was referred to?—was it a blind and barbarous public opinion, that mere rapidity of action would dazzle? If so, that was not the public opinion they ought to respect in India; and there was in that country a higher class of public opinion to refer to. He thought that public opinion would be much better consulted by the cautious adoption of wise Acts, than by the most rapid passage of crude and imperfect measures. It was said that the first part of the Amendment was not borne out by the fact that "further information" was not necessary. He did not care whether we wanted "further information" or not; but he maintained that there could not be a better proof that we wanted more preparation than that which was afforded by the Bill itself. The only means they had of knowing what were the real intentions of the Government, was, by the few letters that had passed between them and the Court of Directors. In that correspondence, the right hon. Baronet the President of the Board of Control told the Directors that he wanted to make them a better instrument of government, and, at the same time, to maintain their independence. Now, the way in which he proposed to maintain their independence, as laid down in the Bill, was, by introducing six Government nominees. The Bill, therefore, did not meet the avowed object of the Government; for, instead of maintaining the independence of the Directors, it did quite the reverse. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Edinburgh told them, most truly, that the Government of India must be a despotic form of government, and he also told them that for India to be well governed it must he governed in India. If this was so, then the object should be to make the references home as few, as free, and as simple as possible, and that those references should, if possible, only be made on questions clearly affecting Imperial interests. Now, the system of duplication in the governing body at home prevented this simplicity of reference, and that was one strong reason why this duplication should be removed. In conclusion, he would say, that if the measure proposed by the Government was such, that their great champion, the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Edinburgh, had to shirk every great principle of the Bill, and rest almost entirely on one clause at the conclusion of it, little would be required to induce him to support the noble Lord the Member for Lynn, and vote for further time. At the same time, he would take the liberty to suggest to the noble Lord, that he should make his proposal still more clear, by adding to it the following words:—"And that it is expedient to continue the present Act for the government of India for two years."

MR. MANGLES

said, he would not have spoken on the question were it not that his silence might have been misconstrued, and that it might be considered he was willing; to allow judgment against the Court of Directors to go by default. From one section of the House he certainly thought he was entitled to a fair hearing —he meant those Gentlemen who clustered so closely below the gangway, and who went by the name of "Young India," because he had always been an earnest and laborious reformer, and had never attempted to conceal the errors and shortcomings of the East India Company, with which it was the pride of his life to be connected, but, on the contrary, had always done his best to remedy them. But the hon. Member for Manchester (Mr. Bright) had taken advantage of his candour, and, in alluding to his evidence, had carefully suppressed the fact that his (Mr. Mangles') preponderating conviction had been expressed in favour of the Company, although he had never failed to point out the blots in our Indian administration. And here he must observe that the only good argument in favour of delay came from the almost incredible ignorance of Indian affairs exhibited by some of the Gentlemen who had spoken on this question. He believed that the Indian Government had nothing to gain from concealment; but that, on the contrary, the better it was known the more favourable would be the judgment formed of it. If the East India Company had committed no errors, then it would be very unlike any government that ever existed; but he honestly believed that it was the best government of a great dependency that the world had ever seen, and he was satisfied that impartial history would not fail to do it full justice. He did not think that he was called upon to defend the measure of the Government; and, for his part, he should be ashamed to make any objections to that part of their scheme which affected the Directors personally. The retention of the principle of double government was, in his opinion, the great recommendation of this scheme, which happily reconciled the difficulty of having a superintending control lodged in the Supreme Government, and at the same time having some intermediate body standing between India and the strong political action of the Home Government. It was insisted that a direct Parliamentary responsibility was needed. Well, they had a direct Parliamentary responsibility, fixed in a Minister of the Crown, who had the power of deciding on all matters relating to peace and war. But, he would ask, what had direct Parliamentary responsibility done for our Colonies? What had it done for Canada? Had it prevented the Kafir war? Had it been of any use to Ceylon, or had it averted an inundation of convicts into our Australian colonies? The hon. Member for Manchester. in one of his recent "starring" excursions in the provinces, had had the rashness to say that the debt of India had increased to the extent of 20,000,000l. since 1833, and that assertion had been repeated by the noble Lord the Member for Lynn. [Mr. BRIGHT: It is stated in the evidence of one of your own servants.] But what was the fact? If the hon. Member would take the trouble of referring to a Parliamentary paper recently laid on the table of the House, he would find that the Indian debt ostensibly up to 1851 had been only increased by 13,000,000l while the balance in the Treasury bad been increased by 4,000,000l.; so that the real increase of debt during the period mentioned had been only 9,000,000/. The noble Lord the Member for King's Lynn made a statement with regard to the Punjaub, the fallacy of which was so great that he (Mr. Mangles) wondered that it could have been entertained by a mind so acute as his. The noble Lord said there was an apparent balance of 500,000l. annually against the Punjaub, and he then called upon the House to consider the enormous military establishments we had there. But those were charges against the revenue of the North-Western Provinces, on the revenue of Bengal; and if they were so charged on Bengal, if the noble Lord would inquire he would find a corresponding balance there to cover the expense. Again, if they had such a number of troops as was complained of in the district of Lahore, the House must recollect there was a corresponding decrease in other districts. It was asserted that the finance of India was in an awful state, and the word "bankruptcy" was not unsparingly applied to that finance; whereas the fact was, that taking the last four years, deducting the deficiency of one year from the surplus of the other three, there was a surplus revenue of not less than 850,000l. With respect to the complex subject of the public works, if the Government had not done in that way what might have been expected of them, it was because of the lack of money. The funds that might have been usefully expended on those public works had been squandered in wars, in the origin of which the East India Company had little or nothing to do. He might say, in reference to those wars and the parties interested in them, it was the old story —delirunt reges, plectuntur Achivi. Talking of the public works in India, let the House think for a moment on those at home. Let them look at the Woods and Forests, for example. Was there any part of the administration of India, with regard to public works, so discreditable as the management of the Woods and Forests in this country, though they were entrusted to the care of a Minister specially appointed for the purpose? With respect to the employment of the Natives, he did not think the Government had proceeded so rapidly as it might have done. At the same time, nothing could be more cruel to the Natives themselves than to thrust them prematurely into offices which they were unable to fill. It appeared to him that they ought to be introduced gradually into the administration of affairs.

On the Motion of Mr. F. VILLIERS,

Debate further adjourned till Monday next,