only of whom were British soldiers) against 70,000, and Assaye when the odds were ten to one, would have done more for us than waiting to collect a large army, as if the victory under any circumstances was at all doubtful. What a contrast we have exhibited between 1757 and 1858. Have the enemy shown such qualities as to justify it? If an army of Frenchmen of equal numbers to our own had been at Lucknow, we could hardly have approached it with more caution, and it is impossible that the effects of so much apparent timidity can be lost upon the enemy. He will retire before large bodies, but he will acquire confidence where the chances are more in his favour. It would have been nothing if after all our preparation our victory had been complete and the enemy entirely crushed, but we have advanced only to find ourselves baffled. Lucknow is ours, but the enemy who remained just long enough to brave us in it, and against whom so much pains were taken to make all safe is still at large. The war is said to be over, and honours which were never won in such a manner before, at all events in India, are about to be bestowed; but 50,000 men, the first of their race who ever saw the backs of English soldiers turned upon them, are still to be disposed of; and we have yet to see what our new and approved system of Indian tactics will effect towards getting rid of them. We hear that there is to be a campaign in the hot season; if it is so, wherever is the saving of life in which we have prided ourselves likely to be? Are we safe, moreover, in letting the enemy escape us as he has done, from that system of guerilla warfare, in which his strength and capabilities must lie, and which once commenced must seal our ruin? To have done what we had to do effectively, it should have been done at once and with spirit and energy. There should have been no glimmer of hesitation or want of confidence. As it was, we delayed, and delayed, advanced, and retreated. We collected an overwhelming force of artillery, and made great preparations, and it has all ended as any one might have foreseen, the enemy waited until we were in sight or little more, and then retired. Our very success was a surprise to us; such was our exaggerated estimate of the enemy before us.

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The principal incidents of the campaign which is said to have been so skilfully conducted, are a retreat and an escape, the former belongs us, and the enemy is to be congratulated on the latter. A great deal of stress has been laid on the saving of life that has occurred in the cautious measures of the Commander-in-Chief; but already there are symptoms that we may have carried this sparing of our men too far. Our old enemies, the Sikhs, it is said, begin to talk loudly. It is attributed to them, and repeated by the special correspondent of the Times, that they say, "We have done all the hard fighting; we took the Kaiserbagh, and look, even the Commanderin-Chief takes us as sentries over his tent, in preference to Europeans.' It is no pleasant symptom when natives, allies or otherwise, thus begin to think and talk of themselves. We are holding our own men back, and giving a prestige to Ghoorkas and Sikhs at their expense. How long is our dominion in India to last under such a system, more

especially if we are to be so gentle and considerate with those who have turned upon us? We shall have enough on our hands if we try the experiment; and we have already unfortunately advanced in it so far that we can hardly recede. Our military honours and rewards are truly all a lottery: those who best merit them get none, or, as in the case of Sir C. Napier, Havelock, and many others, fall short of the highest, while some one else, with little or nothing but roughness of manner, and what might be called the exhibition of a stupid courage to recommend him, without high military talent certainly, is carried by good fortune to the highest summit of military ambition. There is enough of chance in the whole affair to make the service popular.

In these days of special correspondents at the seat of war, one has only to commit some dangerous eccentricity like "the thin red line," or the Redan, and to put a bold face on all that is said about it, and he is on the road to distinction. The easiest undertakings in his hands will be lauded as great operations. The simplest movement as a display of the greatest strategy. Every trifling obstacle will be magnified into a great difficulty, and the most bungling surmounting of it as an exhibition of genius. He will be upheld through thick and thin. Nothing but some absolute and crushing failure will ever remove the delusion. It is no part of the genius of our institution to discriminate between true talent and its counterfeit, between the show and the reality of military genius.

We vibrate between aristocratic influence and the popular will. We are generally pretty constant to the former, but now and then the latter is forced upon us. Our authorities yield to it generally, without reference to the justice of the demand for the better preservation of the more normal state of things. The administration of the army does not bear a high character. Those best acquainted with its working will be the last to accuse of any over wrought anxiety to prefer merit to capability, when weighed in the scale with interest; and it is in this part of the public service that the greatest necessity prevails to cover a multitude of delinquencies in the distribution of appointments, by the occasional bestowal of some marked distinction on some popular favourite whose omission might call down a too keen inquiry into the merit of other favours.

Between the heroes made for us in the press, and those forced upon us by influence and patronage, the public service has but a poor chance. The appointment to the command in chief in India, was dangerous to deal with after the usual fashion. There was too much risk in the state of things at the moment to venture upon acting as we had done with regard to China a little before. There was enough of the possibility of failure, and a sufficient dread of the consequences that might ensue from it, to give the chance to some popular general

Our aristocratic capital had been used up in the Crimean war, and India was in consequence given where no charge could be made on that head, whatever the result might be. If Sir Colin Campbell had

failed, it is easy to see how our authorities would have got out of it, and it was their power of doing so that they most thought of. A brave officer he unquestionably is, but we deceive ourselves when we give him credit for anything more. He was responsible for the disposition of the troops under his command at Balaklava, unless he can be shown to have remonstrated against it; but it was the detaching the Turks from any support, in paltry field works, too weak to be in the least defensible, that created and brought on the attack of the Russians, and all the disaster to us which followed it. It was only the day previous that he had written to one of the generals of divisions describing his force, and saying that he could resist anything sent against him. The next morning saw half his position. carried at a run. Who was it that commanded in the trenches before Sebastopol on the night of the memorable 8th of September? and how was it when a message was sent by the French general to say that the enemy were evacuating the place, as if any one with eyes or ears required to be told such a thing, that no effort whatever was made to molest him? The belief in military talent will become a myth if we are so ready to acknowledge its presence in the face of facts and unanswerable questions such as these, and so prompt in giving praise to masterly retreats from a dispirited and ignoble enemy who required no masterly display of any kind, but such as we had always been in the habit of giving him-in the shape of a sound drubbing.

It will lower the tone of the profession, and do incalculable mischief, which we shall feel some day or other, to the service, if we lead to the belief that inferior men can do the work of great generals, or allow ourselves, by the exigencies of the moment, to be forced into rewards of the highest distinction, where the services performed have, if carefully examined, added such trifling lustre to our repu

tation.

When we look hereafter to the recent outbreak in India, it is to those who bore the brunt of it at first, and who, in positions desperate enough to have cowed the bravest, so nobly maintained themselves, and upheld the honour and superiority of our arms; it is to them the national gratitude will be felt to have been most due, and it is in their achievements that our confidence in the destiny of our empire will be most upheld. The meanness of late events have been lost in the glowing description of a mighty pillage, in which Englishmen and natives were intermingled; where the worst passions of both were no doubt exhibited, and where, if we lost no honour, we could at least gain none. It remains to be seen what we are to do next, for an unbroken army is still before us, and a worse enemy in the hot season, has already commenced; perhaps after all, by the dilatoriness of our proceedings, the opportunity may have slipped past us, and the hardest even of our military difficulties may yet have to be met. If we have had too much prudence at the seat of war, we do not want for boldness at home. At the crisis of our affairs we have not hesitated to curb the action and to weaken the authority of the Governor-General. Lord Canning's errors, what

ever they may have been, and he might under the terrible circumstances under which he was placed be excused for many, have certainly not been those of undue severity; and from the spirit he has shewn in resisting the counsels of those who urged harsh measures, he might fairly be credited for something else besides temper in the proclamation for which he has been so rudely condemned by the government of the day.

It would have been fair to assume that he who had never been harsh under much provocation before, would hardly have been so in the case of Oude, unless he saw the absolute necessity for it; at all events we should have acted more wisely in leaving the proclamation unrebuked in public, while we might have carried it out in practice in any mild form we pleased. The confiscation, so harsh in its expression, was, after all, limited to those who were or had been in arms against us, and applied even to them only in degree, according to the offences charged against them. It would surely have been absurd, after such an outbreak, in which the chiefs of Oude had taken such a prominent part, and to which they had given so much encouragement, if all those who had aided us, as well as those who had remained neutral, or violently opposed us, had been allowed to settle down quietly, all with the same privileges and advantages as belonged to them before the outbreak. If this is the justice that is talked of, it is the justice of treating friends and foes alike, or rather of setting aside the former to hold out a hand to the latter, to pat him in the back, and to tell him he is a fine fellow for the harm he had done us. There would be unmistakeable weakness in such conduct, and it would have been read by every nation in that light. Lord Canning's proclamation only recognised a principle-that of reward to those who had been faithful to us, and of loss in proportion to their guilt to those who had rebelled.

We can have no right to be in India at all, and certainly are not likely to remain there long, if some discrimination is not allowed in our treatment under such circumstances. In what other way can we hope to encourage friends, to reward fidelity, but by this distinction? Can there be any considerable portion of the people of England, so infatuated as to object to it, or to countenance its censure as unduly harsh or impolitic? If there are, the world must have entered upon a new epoch, and men can be no longer influenced by those hopes and fears which were once deemed so potent in their effects. No doubt those who have been in arms against us will be seized with remorse, and plot no more to our detriment, when they find how gently we are to treat them, and how prompt we are at home to rush between them and the harshness of our highest authority on the spot. The native must indeed be callous that cannot appreciate such meekness, and accustomed to the kind of justice implied in it, he cannot be otherwise than impressed with the magnanimity and greatness which attach to it. How inconceivably must his respect for us be enhanced by such treatment, by the check given to the Governor-General, and the condemnation of a proclamation which establishes a distinction between the loyal and the

turbulent. The conduct into which we have been led in this instance by the necessities of party politics can never be sufficiently condemned, for at a critical moment, when we can hardly positively say yet how the balance may turn, we have taken the part of the rebel against our own countrymen. Such gross injustice as that shown to Lord Canning can hardly ever be exceeded, for in publishing the despatch before it could have reached him, we have implied that his offence was one of so heinous a nature, that it was necessary not a moment should be lost in proclaiming our reprobation of it. Those who advocate a lenient policy in India, evidently do so with a view to our ultimately giving up our dominion; and their desire is, when that day comes, that we may make the sacrifice without dishonour, and that history should describe us as having made the people over whom we exercised our rule, civilised, prosperous, and happy. It remains to be seen how long we shall be allowed to make the experiment, if the hands in which the government rests, are to be weakened as we have lately seen them.

PORTS D'AGGRESSION.

It is familiar knowledge that France has at this moment a powerful navy, and about half a million of soldiers; and it is beginning to be acknowledged that liberty has all but disappeared from the territories of our "faithful ally."

These are ugly facts and they act as a blister upon the whole European family. It affects every one; kaiser and serf, despot and parasite, the bond and the free. Bon gré mal gré, nolens volens, will he nill he, we are all disturbed and irritated by threats of war. Look which way one will, we see nothing but touch-wood and tinder, fire and tow. We are not going far below the surface to discover where the spark may come from to ignite these inflammable materials. Such a research would only produce a discussion that might serve as a vehicle for the interchange of conflicting opinions. However, without passing through the heated region of politics, we venture to state that a deep distrust of the future policy of our "faithful ally," is now throbbing in the heads of half Europe.

It is acknowledged that since 1848, France has been mainly instrumental in altering the aspect of European policy. We do not know how many revolutions she has passed through since that period, how many emeutes she has suppressed. All we know is, that she is now an Empire. There is something we do not like in this assumed title of Empire. It has an aggrandizing signifiFrance is no larger now than she was when Louis Philippe was contented to be called king; besides, the traditions of the Empire are not of a tranquillizing character.

cance.