.

are a perpetual source of danger and annoyance. Whilst the great landholders are thus deprived of the power of evil and encouraged to the performance of good, the great mass of the people must be dealt with in the same manner. They must be disarmed to a man. At the same time the Indian Government must be careful not to irritate them by the introduction of new fiscal regulations affecting the daily habits of the people and pressing severely upon the very sources of their existence. It must not measure with the English rule, or square with the English plummet. It must be tolerant and compassionate; and not attempt to make model provinces after six months of energetic work. We have now, indeed, no apprehension of a renewed eagerness to see miracles of rapid conversion in newlyacquired provinces. The rulers of India will in future, doubtless, fully appreciate the assistance to be rendered by that invaluable coadjutor, Time. With such aid, we believe that Oude may eventually become one of the most prosperous and the most peaceful of the British possessions; and as under its native rulers it has not been, and could never be anything more than a vast den of robbers, we conceive that to restore it to such masters and to condemn it to such a fate would be a great national crime.

ART. IX.-1. Earl of Clarendon's Speech in the House of Lords on the recent Communications with the French Government, March 1. 1858. London: 8vo.

2. A Bill for the better Government of India. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 18th February, 1858. 3. A Bill to transfer the Government of India from the East India Company to Her Majesty the Queen. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 26th March, 1858.

ON

N the 29th of January, 1855, the vote of the House of Commons upon the motion for inquiry into the conduct of the siege of Sebastopol put an end to the Government of Lord Aberdeen, which had already been weakened by the announcement of Lord John Russell's resignation. Of the majority of 305 who voted on this occasion, about two-thirds were Conservatives and one-third Liberals. Her Majesty, accordingly, applied at once to Lord Derby, as the leader of the Conservative party, and authorised him to form an Administration. This task he endeavoured to execute, but failing in his attempt to induce some of the leading members of the preceding Ministry to join him, he abandoned it, from a sense of his inability to

obtain such parliamentary support as would enable him to conduct the affairs of the country with satisfaction and success at so critical an emergency. In explaining to the House of Lords the grounds of his refusal, Lord Derby, with that copiousness and felicity of diction of which none of his predecessors in his high office was perhaps a greater master, dwelt upon the painful and humiliating position of a Minister, who commences his Government, not even with a precarious majority, but with a sure minority; who is therefore unable to carry his own views with energy into effect, but is forced, by petty shifts and expedients, by successive concessions to small knots of men, by clipping and paring down his measures, to appease opponents, and by this submissive policy is alone enabled to flounder on to the end of the session.

Upon Lord Derby's failure to form an Administration, the Queen turned to Lord John Russell for assistance. Lord J. Russell, though he had for several years been ministerial leader of the House of Commons, and had been Prime Minister from 1847 to 1852, was, on account of his recent secession from the Aberdeen Cabinet, and his personal relations with his late colleagues, in a position unfavourable to the difficult task of conducting the negotiations for the construction of a Ministry at a moment of national alarm and disaster, and of that mutual crimination among public men which national alarm and disaster usually bring in their train. He undertook the responsibility of the attempt; but made little progress, and soon desisted from his enterprise. Her Majesty next addressed herself to Lord Palmerston, who had for many years filled the office of Secretary at War, who had subsequently held for a long period the post of Foreign Secretary, and to whom, on account both of his vigour and ability, and his special experience and fitness, the country had looked as well qualified to conduct operations of war. Lord Palmerston succeeded at last in forming a Cabinet, composed to a considerable extent of the members of the preceding Government Lord John Russell was for a time a member of it, but resigned at the end of the session.

At the accession of Lord Palmerston's Government, the eyes of all England, and indeed of all Europe, were riveted upon the Crimea. Nothing was thought of but the physical privations and precarious position of the British army before Sebastopol. The first object was to supply its wants, to relieve its sufferings, and to reinforce its numbers; the next, to take Sebastopol, and to put an end to the war by a secure and honourable peace. Those objects were accomplished within a time, which, when we compare the duration of former wars between great Powers, and

the magnitude of the contest then raging, is certainly unprecedented, and may fairly be deemed to have surpassed any reasonable expectation. War was declared by Great Britain against Russia on the 28th of March, 1854; the expedition to Sebastopol sailed from Varna on the 4th of September following; the preliminary agreement which virtually put an end to the war was adopted at St. Petersburg in January, 1856; the definitive treaty was signed at Paris in March. The entire duration of the war was therefore only twenty-four months, including one winter during which there had been no fighting, and the interval between March and September, 1854, during which the British forces had not been engaged by land. When it is considered that the three greatest Powers of Europe, -Russia, France, and England, were parties to this war; that two secondary Powers-Turkey and Sardinia, were likewise involved in it; moreover, that Austria was on the point of joining the belligerents, and would have declared war if the terms offered in December, 1855, had been rejected by Russia; it must be admitted that the termination of hostilities and the conclusion of a satisfactory peace within the space of two years, was no ordinary feat of military and diplomatic skill. By the treaty of Paris, the objects for which the war was undertaken were unquestionably accomplished; and although some ulterior arrangements were left by the treaty for subsequent agreement, they have not since given rise to any differences which negotiation has not succeeded in removing, and the settlement effected in 1856 promises to continue on a permanent basis. Treaties of peace are in general unpopular with both belligerents; each party, whether conquering or conquered, commonly believes that if its negotiators had not been overreached, it might have obtained better terms. Although the peace of Paris was not, like the short-lived peace of Amiens, hailed in this country with an explosion of popular joy, it has received the deliberate approbation of the nation, and subsequent events have proved that, though concluded with celerity, its texture is solid and its materials well-cemented.

The Persian campaign of last year may be considered as a sequel of the Crimean war. The occupation of Herat by Persia was, doubtless, instigated for the purpose of threatening our Indian frontier, and the withdrawal of this fortress from the possession of a Power under the immediate influence of Russia has been considered by competent judges as an established maxim of our Asiatic policy. Instead of committing the fatal error which produced such disastrous consequences in the Affghanistan war,

instead of attempting to reach Herat by a land expedition

through the Khyber Passa naval expedition was sent from Bombay to the Persian Gulf, which speedily, and with little loss of life, brought the Persian Government to terms. The expedition sailed from Bombay in November, 1856; in March, 1857, a treaty with Persia, stipulating for the evacuation of Herat, was signed with Ferookh Khan, the Persian envoy, at Paris.

The two first sessions of the Palmerston Government were almost exclusively occupied with war, and its consequences: for one of the evils incident to a state of war is that the transition to a state of peace is not made with ease or without much exertion and arrangement. Interests grow up in a time of war which require consideration; and the very adaptations which, in a civilised state, render war tolerable, are obstacles to the speedy re-establishment of the natural order of things. Extraordinary measures become, by habit, our ordinary mode of existence; and it requires an effort to relinquish them. It was therefore impossible that the improvement of our legislation or of our political institutions should receive much attention in the years 1855 and 1856. The old saying, Silent leges inter arma, applies not less to the amendment and reform than to the execution of laws. In the winter of 1856, there was, however, reasonable ground for hope that the temple of Janus would be firmly closed; the hostilities with Persia were about to be terminated by a satisfactory treaty; our relations with the European States were pacific; our disputes with the United States about the recruiting question and Central America had either been settled, or had assumed a tone of moderation. Everything seemed to portend a tranquil session, during which the amelioration of our domestic institutions and social reforms would receive an undivided and uninterrupted attention. This apparently well-grounded anticipation was however doomed to be disappointed. Two events, springing out of our extensive empire and the wide ramifications of our commercial and colonial interests, came at this time to disturb the prospect of external tranquillity.

6

The first of these was the affair of the Arrow,' and the consequent hostilities at Canton at the end of 1856, the intelligence of which reached England about the beginning of the session of 1857. It is far from our intention to re-argue, or even to re-state, the case of the lorcha, and its colonial registry, and the demands of Sir J. Bowring upon Commissioner Yeh. This subject received ample elucidation, in Parliament and out of Parliament, at the time. The result was, that a few words in a despatch of the Foreign Secretary, conveying his approbation of Sir John Bowring's conduct, incurred, upon the motion of

Mr. Cobden, the censure of the House of Commons, which condemned the policy of the Government as unduly aggressive and warlike, by a majority of 263 to 247. The resolution affirmed that the papers laid upon the table of the House' failed to esta'blish satisfactory grounds for the violent measures resorted to at 'Canton in the late affair of the "Arrow." (March 3.) From this decision Lord Palmerston appealed to the country; and the result of a general election showed that the view of the House of Commons with respect to the support of British functionaries on distant stations, where their instructions were necessarily vague, and a wide discretion was confided to them, was not shared by the people at large. The doctrines of the Peace Party in Parliament, as applied to the Canton dispute, met with no response out of doors, and the new Parliament did not exhibit any disposition to re-affirm or follow up the vote of censure carried by its predecessor.

The dissolution of Parliament, produced by this vote, interrupted and retarded the progress of business; but after Easter the Government succeeded in carrying an important bill for the abolition of the Ecclesiastical Courts,-a question which had defied the efforts of successive Governments for a long course of years. This was followed by a measure for altering the procedure and some of the conditions of the law in cases of Divorce; which, though it had not the importance that the rhetorical inflation of parliamentary debate sought to affix upon it, was nevertheless in reality a measure of considerable utility, inasmuch as it placed this branch of our law and practice upon a consistent and intelligible footing.

But another event had by this time occurred, which, even more than the affair of the Chinese lorcha, arrested the attention of Parliament and of the public, and diverted it from the even course of domestic improvement. After some scattered outbreaks in regiments of the native army of Bengal, a native cavalry regiment stationed at Meerut broke into open mutiny, was joined by the other native regiments at the same station, and marched to Delhi. An alarm at that time pervaded the Bengal army that the Government intended to take away their caste and religion; but up to the present moment no proof of conspiracy or concert in the Bengal army, either among Hindoos or Mahometans, has been produced; and the most competent and best informed judges in India are of opinion that the cartridges were the immediate occasion of the revolt.

It would be superfluous in us to pursue this subject in detail, or to trace the steps by which this outbreak spread to the rest of the Bengal native army; but, although large dis