vince has been for ever forced from the yoke of the Mantchoo Emperor, and, in all probability, long ere these lines are in type, Pekin will have fallen, and the unfortunate Hièn-foung will have been deposed! What religion, what institutions, Tièn-tè, or his representative, may then establish, it remains to be seen. The hap Chang-chow and Tang-wang have both lately succumbed to the insurgents, though not without severe loss to the latter. At Tang-wa the inhabitants en masse, though sanctioning the ejectment of the mandarins, have refused to allow the insurgents to have any thing to do with the government, and have proceeded to declare themselves free and independent burgesses, who could govern for themselves. We have just learnt that the main body of the insurgents still remains at Nankin, Chin-kiang-foo, and on the northern banks of the Yang piness and destinies of hundreds of millions will be in his hands, and the amount of good or evil he may achieve it is impossible now to predict. Since the days of Mahomet, no one man has ever attained such eminence with such slight pretensions, and, as it appeared at the outset, with such slender prospects of success. tse-kiang. They have taken Tai-ping-foo, a city of great strength to the westward of Nankin. No movement has been yet made northward, or in the direction of Soochow and Shanghai. Mr. Taylor returned to Shanghai from visiting the insurgent general Loo at Chin-kiang-foo, who forwarded him on to Nankin on his expressing a wish to go there. The tents of the Imperial troops were distinctly seen from the walls of that city. A FEW MORE WORDS ON INDIA. I. An Act to provide for the Government of India. 20th August, 1853. II. Précis of the Great Surat Case, compiled from official documents: being an illustration of the mode in which justice is occasionally administered in Western India. Chesson: Bombay, 1853. By JAMES SILK BUCKINGHAM. 1853. Every Director must henceforth acknowledge the Queen's Government of India after the fol lowing fashion "I, A. B., do swear that I will be faithful to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, and will, to the best of my ability, perform the duty assigned to me as a Director of the East-India Company in the administration of the Government of India in trust for the Crown. So help me God." III. A history of the Sikhs, from the origin of the nation to the battles of the Sutlej. By JOSEPH CUNNINGHAM. Second Edition. Murray, 1853. IV. Plan for the future Government of India. THERE is a temporary lull in the storm of Indian pamphlets. All the world is out of town; the India Bill has passed; the new Charter Act has not come into operation; the machinery for working it is scarcely beginning to be prepared. Yet British interest in this great question was never higher than now; and we earnestly exhort our Indian fellow-subjects not to allow themselves to be discouraged by the apparent cessation of movement, but to renew and exercise their efforts for the enlightenment of the public mind as to the nature of their grievances and the conditions of their redress. Much remains to be accomplished; but much has been achieved. When, this very day twelvemonth, we addressed our first article on the measure then contemplated for the misrule of India to a public whose habitual heedlessness but too well justified the despondency under which we wrote, was it possible to foresee the change that has since come over the English mind, the miscarriage of the Herries project, and the concessions-inadequate as they are-which Parliament has at length made to that public opinion which it is our boast to have called into existence? Since our last Number the "Act for the Government of India" has received the royal assent. Our observations with respect to it are necessarily brief. It is essentially the same with the "Government of India Bill." One of the most noticeable differences between this grub and that chrysalis consists in the Directors' oath. The Bill proposed, in the old form, that every Director, after swearing to his qualification in "stock of the East-India Company," should "further swear that he would not, directly or indirectly, accept or take any perquisite, emolument, fee, present, or reward, upon any account whatsoever, or any promise or engagement for any perquisite, fee, present, or reward whatsoever, for or in respect of the appointment or nomination of any person or persons to any place or office in the gift or appointment of the said Company, or of him, as a Director thereof;" and the formula ended with the usual clause of fealty and allegiance to the Company and its Government, all mention of the Crown being utterly excluded. In this last respect the change made by the House of Lords is a decided improvement. Coupled with Section 35 (which was inserted on the motion of Mr. Vernon Smith, and the purport of which is to place the President of the India Board on the footing of a Secretary of State), we cannot but regard this amendment in the terms of the directorial oath of office as one of the most significant among the many indications now abroad of an intention to assume, formally and openly, the reins of Indian government into the Queen's hands; a transfer of power virtually accomplished by the present Act. The prospect thus afforded of the speedy extinction of that useless, cumbrous, and expensive pageant is one on which we cannot but congratulate our readers. the We scarcely know whether we ought to disapprove of the omission from this new oath of the customary abjuration of bribe-taking and jobbery. Certainly it has had no practical results. Directors hitherto have taken the oath and the bribe with the same peace of mind; and so they would have continued to do so long as the oath stood in their way to the bribepot. Nevertheless, there was some pleasure in making them gulp it. Our feeling is not precisely that of the Coeur-de-Lion of Walter Scott-" I will have him perjure himself! I will insist on the ordeal! How I shall laugh to hear his clumsy fingers hiss as he grasps red-hot globe of iron! Aye, or his huge mouth riven, and his gullet swollen to suffocation, as he endeavours to swallow the consecrated bread!" Our interest in the solemnity is purely historical. The oath was first devised by Parliament in the days of Clive and Verelst, in the vain hope of checking the corruptions of that epoch. It is good for us to remember such things, and not to let Directors forget them. Their mock indignation on the late occasion of Mr. Bright's disclosures, and the sham prose cution of Mr. Norman Wilkinson which fol lowed, will deceive nobody. Their character A FEW MORE WORDS ON INDIA. as "men of business" is by this time too well established. If Lord Ellenborough enjoys the credit of having procured the amendments on which we have been remarking to be made, to the Bishop of Oxford's excellent speech on the second reading of the Bill in the Lords we owe an amendment not less important, but of another kind. The thirty-ninth clause of the Bill proposed merely to empower the Board of Control to appoint examiners, under regulations to be made by that Board, for conducting the examinations of candidates for admission into Haileybury and Addiscombe, "and of students or persons leaving such college and seminary for the purpose of entering into the civil or military service of the said Company, and of other persons entering such military service, and of persons desirous of being appointed assistant surgeons in the said Company's forces." The effect of this proposed clause would have been, to leave the civil service of the Company the private patrimony of Haileybury students; a monopoly, the evil consequence of which the Bishop of Oxford most forcibly depicted. Lord Granville yielded to the remonstrance, and Section 42 of the new Act accordingly extends the provision generally to all "candidates for appointment to the civil and military service respectively of the said Company," without regard to the place of education, or any other test than that of fitness. Notwithstanding these decided improvements upon the original plan, it must be confessed that the new Indian Charter Act is a wretched failure, and open, with but little modification, to every one of the vital objections to which the Bill was liable, and which, in our last One Number, we endeavoured to point out. comfort is, that it cannot work, and that, session after session, the legislation of Parliament will continue to be invoked by the jarring functionaries and the agitated people of India, and likewise by the perplexed and confounded occupants of Cannon Row, The thing cannot work; and before CREATION, CHAOS! A somewhat better result might have been obtained had it pleased the "Young-India party," as Mr. Bright's parliamentary henchmen absurdly call themselves, to be rational, reflecting, and patriotic. We advised them well, when we urged them to reserve themselves for a series of combined and sustained amendments in Committee, and not to expend their fire in the vain attempt to cripple the Bill on the second reading. Lord Stanley, an able and well-meaning young nobleman, was but the cat's-paw of his noble parent and chief on that occasion; and the success of "Young India" under such auspices might have restored the ex-minister to power, but could not pos sibly have placed his son in a position either to Mr. Bright, whose party, by the In the meantime, great is the excitement in Leadenhall which of the Directors shall be eliminated, under Section 4, "on the second Wednesday in the month of March?"-which retained? Mr. Wigram, the brewer, an octogenarian at the least, will resign quietly, and so will old Sir Robert Campbell. But then there will still remain thirteen actual and nonactual Directors to be extruded by brute force; and who shall they be? Colonel Sykes, Mr. Leslie Melville, Major Oliphant, and one or two other Directors of reforming predilections, think that the unreforming and jobbing majority, of which Sir James Weir Hogg is the head, and his son-in-law, Mr. Marjoribanks, the youngest Director, is the tail, ought to perform a noble act of abnegation, and furnish from their own ranks the thirteen victims, by way of grateful sacrifice to the offended justice of their country. But the said majority think far otherwise, and, being the majority, are not unlikely to do precisely as they think; and the imperious voice has been heard to mutter his expectation of being speedily rid "of such men as Colonel Sykes.' From that collision may light be vouchsafed to irradiate the vaults of the India House! The Outram and Khutput papers are still there; a living memorial of the forbearance of the disregarded Parliament. At the rate at which these discoveries proceed, the generation of wrong-doers will have slept with their fathers before the last sheet of copy has reached the Queen's printers. The delay, indeed, is not unaccountable, for the Directors thrive best upon the Fabian policy; but what is really unaccountable is, the supineness with which professing inquisitors have sat by and allowed them to pursue it. But the Indian press, at least, is not idle. The valuable document lately published in Bombay, which stands the second on the list at the head of this paper, is the crowning act of accusation--we had well nigh said condemnation—against the system which Outram endeavoured to uproot, and to which he was made a victim. Surely some member of Parliament may be found to expose the foul business toe censure of the House, and to procure the redress of the wrong and the chastisement of the offender. The friends of Mr. Roebuck will be gratified to hear of his complete restoration to health, and of his confident expectation of being able to resume his active functions in the House of Commons at the beginning of next session. We shall doubly rejoice if these news be indeed certain; for his presence there will be the sure earnest of the searching inquiry which we demand, being instituted and followed with perseverance and success. The tale of Surat may be briefly told. Ardaseer Dhunjishaw, in 1835, held his present offices of inferior magistrate and chief constable, and Small Debts' Commissioner at Surat under Mr. Simpson,the then Collector at that place, but now a judge of the Sudder. Ardaseer is described in the "Précis" as "a man of consummate ability, greedy of power, tyrannical, unscrupulous in the means by which he sought his ends, and perfectly au fait at all the complicated relations of the British authorities and subjects of Surat with the petty native chieftains of the neighbourhood." Withal, he was greatly in debt, and his principal creditor was a wealthy banker at Surat. In fact, "he owed nearly forty thousand pounds," says the "Précis," "within his own jurisdiction," whilst his official income was scarcely 8001. a year. He contrived, however, to enlist the good grace of "the English officials of the old school" on his side, by negociating loans for them in like manner, and also "by other services infinitely more degrading, according to European ideas;" for the race of "Brahminised Englishmen" (as Mackintosh dubbed that "old school" of officials) was then in full vigour. His creditor, the Surat banker, died in 1838. His nearest of kin were his father's widow and his own half-sister; and the former being, by Hindú law, entitled to succeed before the latter, he bequeathed his property accordingly to them in that order of succession. Ardaseer, as we learn from the report of Mr. Hutt, a judge of the Sudder Adawlut of Bombay, finding his debt to the bank accumulating largely from the unpaid arrears of interest, and having been obliged to mortgage his property and twothirds of his pay as a security, conceived the idea of ridding himself of it altogether by getting the sister to contest the right of the matter, and by obtaining the appointment of himself and a friend to be joint trustees for the management of the estate. But his views could not be carried out without the help of his chief, Mr. Simpson; and it is here that the connection of the European officials with the disgraceful business commences. Mr. Luard, of the Bombay Civil Service, who was judge of Surat in 1843, distinctly states, that Mr. Simpson, whilst Collector at that place, " promised to forward Ardaseer's views, provided he would obtain for him the person of the half-sister, who was young and pretty; that he obtained his desire, and that he kept his word by supporting Ardaseer with the greatest energy against all comers in the subsequent proceedings, and by writing (though himself at the time on the Sudder Bench) to assure Ardaseer of his support the latter was under trial on a criminal charge in an inferior court." The half-sister was while A FEW MORE WORDS ON INDIA. delivered of a son in August 1839; and Mr. Simpson was soon after succeeded by a Mr. Elliott, who is charged in Mr. Hutt's report with trusting implicitly to Ardaseer, with omitting all supervision over his proceedings, and "with leaving to him the performance of the whole of his own magisterial duties." On his side, Ardaseer was not unsuccessful. A forged deed gave him a pretext for seeking the intervention of the friendly tribunal, and a falsified the suborned "native law-officer " Hindù law of succession in his favour. Mr. Luard charged this official with the receipt of a bribe of 5000 rupees from Ardaseer. To avoid the inquiry he resigned his post; and Government subsequently refused to allow him to recal his resignation. But this did not prevent Mr. Andrews, who succeeded Mr. Luard as judge at Surat-and whom Mr. Luard, in 1851, charged with having himself received from Ardaseer a bribe of 10,000 rupees-from promoting that disgraced native official, and employing him at Baroda, where he took a leading and an effectual part, as the Outram Blue Books shew, in the robbery of the widow Joetabhaee, and the frustration of Colonel Outram's endeavours to bring the perpetrators to justice. Ardaseer and his friend by these means obtained possession of the coveted inheritance: they carried off the books of the firm; its business was stopped; and the lawful owner was turned out to starve. She endeavoured to appeal to Bombay, but the all-powerful Ardaseer prevented the departure of herself and her agents. One of them, indeed, succeeded in getting on board of the Bombay steampacket, but he was taken out again, and forcibly brought back. In the language of Mr. Hutt's report, "Such a series of tyrannous and oppressive acts could hardly have been supposed possible to have been perpetrated under British rule; and yet all this is clearly established by Ardaseer's own records, and under his own hand." Mr. Elliott resigned in 1842, and was succeeded by Mr. Richardson, a man of intelligence and honesty, in the Surat judgeship. Ardaseer found it impossible to deceive Mr. Richardson, or to obtain his connivance. He died on the 21st of May 1843, and Mr. Luard, who succeeded him, expresses the belief that he was poisoned. The unfortunate widow having petitioned Mr. Luard to review Ardaseer's proceedings in her case, that gentleman, instead of dealing with it himself, forwarded her petition to the Bombay Sudder, and recommended that a case of so much gravity should be tried, not by a single judge, but by a commission from the Sudder itself. Mr. Hutt, one of the Sudder judges, was accordingly appointed, in the beginning of 1844, to conduct the inquiry; and the result of his investigation was, the conviction of Ardaseer on every one of the charges alluded to, and the reversal of every decision given by Messrs. Simpson and Elliott prejudicial to the rights of the widow. She was accordingly restored to her possession, and Ardaseer was suspended from office until the final determination of the Sudder could be taken as to the proper steps to be pursued in his regard. But Mr. Simpson was himself a Sudder judge, and in his colleague, Mr. Bell, possessed a powerful friend. Mr. Luard's accusation, and their colleague, Mr. Hutt's, unexpected report, exasperated them beyond all bounds; and the coarseness of their strictures on their colleague's conduct was such as to draw down the marked censure of the Directors themselves, Mr. Luard, as being "most reprehensible, exceptionable, A Mr. Reunbecoming, and inexcusable." however, was otherwise treated. mington, who was "about twenty places below Mr. Luard in the Civil list," was selected to try Ardaseer's case and that of the widow over again: the trial was conducted in English; no counsel was allowed to Mr. Luard; the leader of the Bombay bar appeared for Ardaseer; and Mr. Luard himself, after preparing the charges, was allowed to take no further part in the proceedings. The consequence was, that the report made by Mr. Hutt, the judge, was overruled by this young gentleman; Ardaseer restored to office; the widow again reduced to poverty; Mr. Luard removed to Ahmedabad; and Mr. Remington rewarded with the succession to him in the judgeship of Surat. The Directors, in their letter to the Bombay Government of the 3d of March 1847, express the opinion, that the trial was so conducted as to be at variance with the principles of equal justice to all parties concerned;" and, having expressed that opinion, allowed the matter to rest where the result of the trial had placed it. The triumphant Ardaseer now in his turn charged Mr. Luard with intemperate and arbitrary behaviour, while at Surat, towards himself; and Mr. Luard was aroused from his sick furlough in the hills to meet this new charge. To do so with effect, he found it necessary to prefer, on his own part, against Mr. Simpson, of the Sudder, specific and formal charges of corrupt relations with Ardaseer; and these charges the commission which was to have tried Mr. Luard would have had to entertain and investigate. "But," says the "Précis," "the Court of Directors sent out orders that the whole proceeding should be quashed, as being calculated, if further ventilated, to bring discredit on the administration of justice in 2 K |