not lie in saying such things as these the courage is not demanded for such utterances-in Calcutta. The difficulty arises, the courage is demanded, when the speaker returns to England, and faces his old colleagues in Whitehall. That kind of language won't do at the Treasury. We really shall honour Mr Laing very much if he makes such notes as these reverberate from Charing Cross to the Houses of Parliament, shaking the Horse Guards on their way. But if he returns among us rampant with such heterodoxy as this, will not some means of silencing him be quickly found? Will he be suffered to speak out authoritatively in such a strain? We think it extremely doubtfulso doubtful that, unless he be converted on his passage home, it seems not improbable that on his arrival he may be silenced by making him one of the custodians of the Indian House in the Council of India, or by some equally effectual means of reducing him to harmlessness and quietude, if any means so effectual could be found.

It is the fashion to write and to speak scornfully of what is called an imperium in imperio. But if the old East India Company was correctly described by these words, we must say that an empire within the empire is sometimes a serviceable institution. As long as there is a separate purse, it seems to be not so very preposterous that there should be a separate power. There was something intelligible in Mr Company's separate purse, and in his separate powers. We could attach some clear and distinct meaning to the words, "The Revenues of the East India Company." But now that the revenues have become the revenues of the Crown, and the imperium in imperio a department of her Majesty's Government, it appears to us that the anomalous state of things which it was said that the extinction of the Company would remedy has been intensified and perpetuated. The resistance of the

East India Company to unjust attempts upon the revenues which they administered was a reality. It was not always successful, because the adroitness of an English Cabinet might sometimes bring about an evasion of the spirit of the law, whilst maintaining its letter. Every one, for example, knows that the war in Affghanistan was undertaken mainly for Imperial purposes, and at the suggestion of the Crown Ministers. Every one knows, therefore, that the revenues of the empire ought to have borne the pecuniary burden in whole or in part. But the fifteen millions of money which those calamitous operations cost were paid out of the Indian treasury, because the war was undertaken from India, and under the immediate direction of the Governor-General. When at a later period the blunderings of some of the diplomatic servants of the Crown involved us in a war with Persia, the Company, warned by that great Affghan spoliation, put matters on a right footing before they lent their aid, and exacted an Imperial guarantee for the payment of half the expenses of the war. The Company had interests distinct from those of the Empire, and, what was of still more importance, distinct from those of the Government of the day. It mattered not to them whether Whigs or Conservatives were in office. If they made a stand against unjust encroachments, they stood for India, and for India only. They were not embarrassed and perplexed by any considerations of party. But now the home Government of India is a department of her Majesty's Government. The Secretary of State for India is a member of the Cabinet, and the Council of India is made up of fifteen lesser ministers of the Crown. The India Office is indeed only a part of the great machinery of Imperial Government, and we cannot expect from it the independent action which characterised the East India Company. There is some

other directions, where Imperial interests are not concerned; and there every sagacious Minister will be sure to make them, sometimes perhaps against his better judgment-and so everybody is kept in good humour, and India is milked for the sustenance of England. What Mr Laing says about the day being past "in which England can consider India as a milch cow, on which to draw for a little here and a little there in order to round an English budget, or to ease an English estimate," looks very well in a printed speech. Past, indeed! It appears to us to have just begun. The Council of India, under the new military system, can never protect the revenues of India as the East India Company did under the old. It is not their fault. It is the tendency of the system to cause them to be overborne, and to swamp India, as we have said, with a flood of Imperial selfishness. Nothing can be more significant than this matter of the depôts. It is only part of the system that is, and is to be. In vain may Indian commissions report and recommend; in vain may Indian finance-ministers make speeches pregnant in fact and powerful in argument; in vain may Indian Governments, with the same force of logic and of rhetoric, write weighty despatches to the Secretary of State, pointing out the urgent necessity of economy in England as well as in India. So long as a Government, existing by the sufferance of a parliamentary majority, has the means of making things pleasant at home by imposing unjust burdens upon India, those burdens will be imposed, and the military expenditure of the Indian Government will never be brought within reasonable bounds.

Our time and space are both at an end. We wish that we could look hopefully into the future of the Indian service. We can no longer write of the Indian army; that we must regard as dead and buried. But work must still be done in India; and one great question is, Whether

VOL. XC.-NO. DXLIX.

the workmen will ever be what they were before? A great deal depends upon first appointments. People may condemn the so-called "nepotism" of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, but whether the youths whom they sent out were selected on public or on private grounds, they developed in time the right stuff, and might have done honour to any patrons in the world. This question of first appointments is now stated to be under the consideration of her Majesty's Government. At present all appointments to the British army are, of course, made at the Horse Guards, and, we believe, only by purchase. We should conceive it to be a mere matter of course that this would continue to be the normal state of things, if it were not that something of a parliamentary pledge was given, when the East India Company was abolished, that a certain share of Indian patronage should be given to the children of Indian officers. Whether any provision has been made, or is likely to be made, for carrying out this promise under the new system, we do not at present know; but however statesmen of a certain class may sneer at Indian traditions, and desire to see them obliterated, we know nothing of more importance to the permanence of our rule in India than that they should be maintained. As long as they are maintained-as long as the men to whom we must trust to do our work in India have a hereditary and abiding interest in the country and in the people-it will be done well; but the accidents of party and placethe waifs and strays of ministerial or courtly patronage-are not likely to do it well. It is because we do not expect again to see upon the stage such men as our Lawrences, Outrams, and Nicholsons that we tremble for the future of India. Brave and excellent men may go out to India-as, in past times, some of our bravest and best have gone out,

"To shed a dozen drops of blood, And straight rise up a lord"but they will go only as tourists

H

go, for a "ramble" or a "scamper," and stay if something turns up. They will not, as the Company's officers did of old, take root in the soil. It is not to be disguised that India is not a desirable place of residence. Life in India, especially military life, is full of suffering, privation, and danger. Men are Men are reconciled to it only by the consideration that Indian service is their profession, and that, whether they like it or not, they must adhere to it, or be cast desolate and unprovided for upon the world. The recent mutiny in India has not rendered it a more desirable place than it was before; and we scarcely think that men drawn from the classes which at present recruit the commissioned ranks of the royal army will turn their thoughts from general service to a life of continual exile in the East. If anything were done -and perhaps something may be done to maintain the traditions of Indian service of which we have spoken above, we should still have some hope of the great Staff corps

being kept up to the present point of efficiency, and of the real, substantial work of India being well done as in the old time. But will not the selfishness which makes India pay for English reserves, make India pay also the wages of servants selected by the Imperial authorities?

These are the two great dangers, or rather the one great dangerImperial Usurpation, which threatens the Future of India. Of course, it was to have been expected as a necessary result of the extermination of the East India Company. We do not think that we have exaggerated the evil, but we heartily hope that we have. We are not of the number of those who

"Would rather that the Dean should die, Than their prediction prove a lie."

We cordially hope that he may live in undiminished vigour and prosperity for many a year, and many a long century, in spite of the forebodings which at present sit so heavily upon us.

THE Budget has passed, and the session is practically at an end. We can sum up the result in a single sentence. As patriots, hardly anybody is satisfied; as partisans, nearly everybody is pleased. The finance and statesmanship of the session are disliked even by the supporters of the Ministry, and are not to be justified even if they should prove to be successful. On the other hand, the Tories may as heartily rejoice in their momentary defeat as the Whigs do in their unexpected victory.

Victory would have been embarrassing to the Tories. Although they form the strongest party in the state, and could sustain a government much stronger than the present one, still, if they desire permanence of power, it is their interest to wait until their forces are further increased, and until their opponents are further reduced. Their star is in the ascendant, and their future is certain. It is better not to precipitate an event which cannot be long delayed, and which must instal them in office with irresistible power. This policy is rendered particularly desirable by a variety of circumstances, of which we shall mention only two. The first is, that the Whigs, from a long enjoyment of the spoils of office, cannot bear to be deprived of what they regard as their perquisite, and conduct their opposition with unusual virulence. By foul means, if not by fair, by dodges, by calumnies, by unnatural coalitions, they will move heaven and earth to get back to their places. We know of few things more disgraceful than the manner in which the opposition to Lord Derby's first and second administrations was carried on. We do not blame the Whigs for it as if it were all owing to Whiggism-it is much more due to officialism. We dare say that the Tories, though they have never been so fond of

scandal as the Whigs, might, after having been long habituated to office under Lord Liverpool, have treated their rivals in somewhat of the same spirit at the period of the Reform Bill, if their ranks had not been effectually broken by the extension of the franchise. Unless the power of the Whigs is in like manner dispersed, the Tories on reaching the Treasury benches must face not a fair opposition, but a conspiring faction. That the Whig ranks have little cohesion, and must in the course of nature be so dispersed, cannot admit of a doubt. We anticipate a great triumph for our party, and much of it will be due to the shortsighted policy of the Whigs, which taught them to grasp too eagerly at office, and to grudge their rivals a fair trial. Their greed rendered them repulsive to the country, and it also deprived them of that healthy discipline of opposition in which they might have recruited their strength and closed their ranks. Their position now is such that they must speedily fall to pieces, and great will be their destruction. Any attempt to hasten that destruction will give them a rallying point in a sense of danger. The case cannot be better put than in an illustration suggested by one of the most sagacious of the Tory leaders. He is reported to have said that the Tory Opposition is now as it were the heir to a decrepid old grandfather, who must soon die and leave the heir in undisputed possession. But if, not content to wait, the young man should murder the old one, he would certainly not improve his prospects.

The other circumstance to which we referred is connected with the foregoing. Considering the tactics. of the party who style themselves Liberal, it would not have been pleasant for the Tories to accept of office as the result of a victory which, however fairly won, the