from risk, must keep pace with it, namely, the abolition of the class of commissioned native officers; but this latter step need not, any more than the former, be taken precipitately; and a slight degree of caution will suffice, in our own opinion, to rob it of all its terrors. For the position of a jemadar or subadar is not coveted by any natives of India above the humblest in point of birth and station; and even these seek it much more on account of the pension which it secures, than because it opens a door of advancement for them in the world. The discharged subadar, when he goes back to his village, relapses into the social place from which by enlistment he had escaped. He sits down in his unfurnished hut, a ryot,- better to do in the world than some of his neighbours, but still only a ryot. The havildar, who on the retirement of the subadar, expected to succeed to the epaulettes, will be quite satisfied if you give him in the meanwhile the pay, and assure him of a jemadar's pension by-and-by. Thus in time, and after no very great lapse of time, the race will die out. Nor need you push on your increase of Europeans one whit more rapidly than space shall by these means be found for them. We will engage to say that such a measure as this would give offence to no class of our Indian subjects. It might and probably would establish the custom of recruiting from low-caste tribes exclusively; for the lowcaste man, as he does not in civil life indulge in ambitious longings, so he enlists for the sake of the pay, and with little or no view to promotion. And he is, for this as well as for other reasons, better suited than the high-caste man to serve in such an army as ours. But it would attract no attention whatever in circles which would be likely to make a bad use of their knowledge, for against them the military service of their rulers is already barred. The measure therefore would be at least safe, though we confess that it could not be made economical or generous.

Again care must be taken under such a change of circumstances to attach officers permanently to the corps which they first enter. The native soldier is susceptible of strong attachment to his officer, provided the latter understand him, and deal liberally with his prejudices. But the native soldier, under the present order of things, has no time to become acquainted with any except the refuse of his European officers. All the rest are taken away from him for service on the staff, or to fill civil offices which would be far more effectively filled by the native gentry of the district. This state of things must be altered. The Indian officer must learn to look again, as he looked fifty years ago, to his regiment as his home; and he will then think

it worth his while to become personally acquainted with the characters of his men, and to conciliate their good will by fair dealing. Meanwhile such a corps as that of the Etat Major in the French service may be formed; for admission into which all shall be allowed to compete; but from which, and from no other source, candidates for staff employment shall be chosen. This will still, to a certain extent, deprive the line of the élite of its officers; but at least it will render staff situations even more than they are now the rewards of transcendent merit, while it leaves with regiments enough both of personnel and of talent to manage them adequately in the field or in quarters. And finally, care must be taken to render superannuation, both in the Company's and in the Queen's service, compulsory. All the improvements in minor matters, which the wit of man can devise, will not render an army effective which has only wornout old men at its head. And the days are not, we fear, distant, when the importance of this truth will be forced upon us.

We have completed the task which we had set for ourselves. It is for the Indian Government, and the general public, to judge of the manner of its performance. For in respect to the groundwork on which our argument rests, we defy the whole body of Proprietors, with the Court of Directors and the Board of Control at their back, to controvert it. We have won an enormous empire with the sword, which is growing continually larger. We have established a system of civil administration there which protects the peasant, and disgusts all the classes above him. If we could exterminate these classes, or stop education, and reduce 120,000,000 of people to the social condition of culti vators of the soil, then with our army even weaker in point of numbers than it is, we might be safe; for it is not among peasant classes in any country that seditions and rebellions originate. But this we cannot do; and with a large body of discontented gentry everywhere, and whole clusters of native princes and chief interspersed through our dominions, it is idle to say that the continuance of our sovereignty depends, from one day to another, on anything except the army. Now the army is admitted by all competent judges to be very far in many respects from what it ought to be. We too are of this opinion. We have pointed out where some of the gravest defects lie, and suggested a remedy. Others must act as to them shall appear expedient in the matter.

the

ART. VII.-1. Des Intérêts Catholiques au XIXe Siècle. Par le Comte de MONTALEMBERT. 2d edit. Paris: 1852. 2. De la Liberté et de l'Avenir de la République Française. Par M. RENDU, Evêque d'Auvergne. Paris: 1849.

MOST of M. de Montalembert's writings and speeches are superior to the Essay before us in liveliness and richness of expression and in originality of thought and illustration. A certain tone of apology chills the fervour of his rhetoric, and his impetuous nature is restrained by a consciousness that the truths he is uttering are unwelcome to those before whom he has prostrated his remarkable mind, and to whose service he has devoted the fairest years of his political life. It is not indeed the young enthusiast, who in the Ami de la Réligion' preached a theocracy founded on republicanism, that appears once more on the scene, but it is the mature politician still instinct with some sense of the worth of civil liberty, and confirmed by experience in his views of the danger and degradation incident to the cause of religion when it becomes the servile acolyte of the civil power. Such a protest at such a moment of French history deserves some notice for its own sake, and for us the interest is increased, when its author is in the first rank of the orators whom the constitutional government of France has brought forth, and the son of an English mother.

The immediate provocation to the work has doubtless been the adulation with which the Church in France has hailed the destruction of political liberty. Of that event we will not now speak further than to say, that the reception which it has met with from the press and public feeling of this country, is one of which no man has a right to complain. We are constitutionalists, or, to use the new French slang, parliamentarists, not by choice of opinion, but by historical necessity; we connect this matter in our minds with the gravest questions of human progress and moral responsibility: we recognise in such institutions something above material prosperity, or private security, or public order: we have won and sustained them by the sacrifice of a national dynasty, by revolution and civil war, and by the continual and contented submission of every separate class or interest to the will of the majority, after fair fight and honourable surrender. It is thus that the capability of enjoying representative institutions enters so largely into the calculation of the amount of respect we bear to foreign nations, and the consideration we attach to them; it is thus the abandonment of

our way

such privileges, whether forced or voluntary, on the part of the most advanced and powerful nation of continental Europe, has inevitably struck us with dismay. No Frenchman, who knows of thinking on these points, can owe us any grudge for appreciating his liberties more than he seems to do himself, and refusing to listen to justifications which in our own case we should disdain to acknowledge. M. de Montalembert says well, that in treating such a political question as the establishment of despotic authority, the character of the person who happens at any particular moment to wield it, is hardly a legitimate incident in the discussion; and when the Russian emperor Alexander called himself a lucky accident,' he pronounced the severest condemnation of the system of which he formed a part.

In alluding to the conduct of the Gallican Church in the late establishment of absolute power in France, we ought perhaps to specify the hierarchy, for there is no evidence that the suppression of liberty has been acceptable to the lower ranks of the clergy. The curés, who as a body were regarded with much suspicion even by the government of Louis Philippe, have taken no prominent part in the affair; and it is not improbable that the consequences of their repugnance to the servility of their superiors may form a portion of M. de Montalembert's anxiety on the subject. If an honest curé has any Jacobinism latent in him, the sycophancy of his superiors would naturally tend to excite it. The Elect of God, The Messiah of the 2d of December,' The Star from the East,' are phrases which every man of true piety would reject with disgust; and the civil power, addressing the father of France, to give us our daily bread and forgive our trespasses' against him, might well provoke the minister of religion even more than the citizen. If it has failed to do so, M. de Montalembert's protest is indeed uttered in vain.

The connexion of the royal and sacerdotal powers in France is an interesting chapter in history; and it is undeniable that the sovereigns have always had the best of it. All the advantages and independence, won at the council of Basle for the Gallican Church, were sacrificed by Francis I. for the immense accession of ecclesiastical patronage conferred on the Crown, and the Gallican liberties became nothing more than the substitution of the authority of the State for that of Rome. The Prince de Condé's well-known assertion, that if Louis XIV. would only declare himself Protestant, all the French clergy would follow him,' and measures like the excommunications of actors and actresses for the purpose of preventing the Grand Monarque

from exhibiting himself on the stage, are but specimens of the relation of the State to the Church in the days of Bossuet and Fénélon. These two names, indeed, typify both the dominant sentiment and the honourable exception; and while in the conduct of many prelates of to-day we recognise the natural successors of the great bishop and orator who pronounced all attempts to check absolute power to be un vain tourment,' and who abruptly closes his universal history' at the moment when the Church participates in the triumph of Charlemagne, so in the pages before us we would hope to welcome the wiser judgment and larger heart of the author of Telemachusa work now too exclusively confined to the school-room, and whose influence over political opinions in France has seldom been justly appreciated. Those who derided the Telemacomanie' and its effects probably understood them far better than we do. But that the supporters of these purer theories were always a minority among the French clergy, is indeed too manifest; and how little the tone of the government in its relations to the Church was changed even by the events of the Revolution and the Empire, is strongly illustrated by the extract which M. de Montalembert candidly cites from the official dispatch of the Duc de LavalMontmorency, Ambassador at Rome, on the subject of the French cardinals who were about to take part in the conclave of 1823.

"The French Cardinals should be sent, without communication with any one whatever, without recommendations, one might venture to say without individual consciences, as far as that word implies a vanity occupied with personal considerations rather than with the interests of the King. Each of them, deeply penetrated with the sense of the duty he owes to his Sovereign, should consent to err with him, if he should chance to err, and should use every effort to bring about such objects as the King may desire, objects which appeal to their conscientious feelings, in their character of prelates placed in the conclave by the King, and who would not have been there without the King."

Surely, no language more derogatory to the independence of the Church could have been devised; and yet its author was a most devout Catholic, and the sovereign he represented a man of strong religious sentiments and of higher views than the brothers of his race.

To a Protestant accustomed to attach spiritual ideas to spiritual things, the principle asserted and defended by M. de Montalembert, that a moderate and well-ordered liberty is fa

* Artaud, Histoire de Leon XII. tom. i. p. 145, 146.