THE PROGRESS OF INDIAN LEGISLATION.

To examine the progress of the Indian legislation of this session, is more like reading a chapter out of the New Atlantis, or Plato's Republic, or Peter Wilkins's visit to the folk who wore wings, than witnessine.° a course of actual human sublunary events. When the history of the question comes to be written out at length, after that final legislative issue shall have been consum- mated, of which no mortal ingenuity or wisdom can remotely con- jecture the kind, or time, it will perhaps be the conclusion of readers, that there never was in human history a question in which the wise and practicable were so utterly left out of view by all parties alike. It is an excessively disagreeable necessity to have to distribute censure all round in this manner. But, be- lieving as we do, that in political matters a mere blank void of negation is perhaps the least desirable of results, especially after pompous professions, and in the midst of serious events, we scruple the less to do so. When men have anything substantial to show for their work, there may be some indulgence for its being con- ducted on faulty principles, and to imperfect results. But when sane men set about chaining water, or making a rope of sand, or endeavouring to square the circle, or prove demonstrably the axioms of Euclid, in which effort, if we remember aright, a poor wretch once went mad, it is not to be expected that bystanders, to say the least of it, can view the matter with much reverent admiration. But to see the British House of Commons only seven or eight weeks before the advent of what Carlyle has called the " sacred grouse," setting itself deliberately to the task of " only " reconstructing the home government of India, upon the supposition that a com- plete final piece of legislative workmanship can go through Commons and Lords before prorogation, is a truly wonderful sight. It is difficult to exaggerate the absurdity of which we have been guilty in regard to these legislative dealings with India. First of all nothing is more plain than that, unless the actual working of Indian administration was an impediment to the rapid and efficient progress of Government in suppressing revolt from this side, a thing which the promoters of Bills and Resolutions have carefully abstained from asserting, it was in the highest degree ill-timed to revolutionize the home government in such a crisis, except, and that indeed is questionable, by the mere sub- stitution of the Queen's name for the Company's. In the next place, though perhaps the consideration which. we here urge is, as an abstract point, decisive against the wisdom of the course taken by Lord Palmerston's Government, perhaps it was, in a Parliamentary- point of view, the very worst ground that could have been taken up by the opponents of legislation. How is it that grave men of business can fail to apprehend the just and in- vincible objection of Parliament to affirm were abstract propo- sitions, whether positive or negative ? When Mr. Bentinck asked

the House to declare that the present was not the moment to legis- late on India, the House very naturally looked at the powerful Minister of the moment, the Colossus, which, though it had been by that time fully ascertained to be of brass, was not so plainly de- monstrated then, as after the Conspiracy Bill, to have feet of clay, and felt that it could not refuse to look into a Bill presented ma. der such auspices. Besides, it might have been that in affirming Mr. Bentinck's proposal, the House might have nipped in the bud some unparalleled piece of legislative wisdom, which the world could ill spare. Accordingly the House could not but read the Bill presented by Lord Palmerston. When the catastrophe of his Government followed, the incoming Administration, confident in its powers of legislation, strong in the combined genius of an El- lenborough, a Disraeli, and a Stanley, resolved to throw to the winds the arguments for delay which they had endorsed in Oppo- sition, and bring in a bill which should "witch the world with noble" statesmanship. But, unfortunately, instead of the world being fas- cinated, it thought the authors of that document were themselves bewitched, and Parliament and country rose as one man to explode the bitter-beer Councillor for India. Then came A period when both Bills, that of the bankrupt outs and the in- solvent ins, were suspended in a species of inchoate, or if the word may be pardoned us, exchoate existence : a period when

all men's minds were so baffled and confounded by the com- plexity of the relation between the Bills that were or were not withdrawn, and the different strings of Resolutions, that it might have been pardoned to a Member if he had proposed, upon American spirit-rapping principles, to consult the very table of the House itself, to unravel the intellectual difficulties raised by the matters deposited on it. Then by a feat of Ministerial legerde- main, in a scene never to be forgotten, in which Lord John played the Prospero, and Mr. Disraeli the daliban, suddenly the Mims- terial bill was shuffled out of sight, and in some unexplained manner the Palmerston bill, like the fortunes of that noble Lord, dissolved into the baseless fabric of a vision under Prospero's wand, and men rubbed their eyes, having got into waking day, and saw that the field was clear for the preliminary resolutions, and that the hitherto fatal word "Bill " would no more be uttered until the prin- ciples of the subject had been exhausted in preliminary discussion. A hopeful prospect.

At that moment the House made some way. Determining to pro- ceed by steps, it declined to accede to the proposals of those who wished the relation of Ministers and future Council to be settled

concurrently. The House had got firm hold of the august and

fruitfully constructive principle, that if the Crown governs India there must be a responsible secretary of state, and that being so, how merely impertinent was it for those who had looked a little deeper into the subject to raise their difficulties prematurely. Accordingly, the House resolved that there should be a respon- sible Secretary of State for India, after a discussion which seemed

to be a little pervaded by the misgiving and suspicion of what is certainly very like the truth, that, if there were, it would be a de- cided godsend, seeing that, at this present date, there is but a doubtfully responsible Secretary of State for many of the affairs of

England. Still the House had grasped the words at least, " re- sponsible Secretary of State," with a tenacity beyond all praise,

and felt itself safe in affirming those words. It therefore quashed indignantly the abominable and confusing proposal' to qualify that sublime simplicity of statement by the introduction of a

Council's name, in any shape whatever, into the majestic fiat

which was decreeing a " Secretary of State for India." It was said to be wise to take the Secretary of State's case by itself ; and

the Council's case by itself. And certainly it was so, seeing that the whole gist of the difficulty in the problem before the House is in the relations of the Council to the Secretary of State, a subject upon which the House and the leaders are evidently without the

most distant shadow of perception, and which, therefore, it was at least judicious to postpone. The House was evidently legis-

lating for India upon the principle which animated the illustrious Mr. Micawber's exertions through life, that so:at:thing " would turn up."

Then came a month of interregnum, in which the House was engaged in the more congenial occupation of a faction-fight. And the subject was resumed by Mr. Gladstone last Monday with a proposal, ill-timed with an art peculiar to Mr. Gladstone, and a new illustration of the fatality of no-purpose and no-in- sight, which pursues this great and desecrated subject of Indian legislation. After the mouth divided between faction-fight and holiday, the House returned in a somewhat subdued and repent- ant spirit : precisely that mood in which a sinner in the first flush of repentance for iniquities is in the mood to glorify himself as a saint, and think himself capable of every sublimity of virtue ;

just that mood is which a man resents being reminded of every

day household duties of prudence and common sense. To a House thus minded Mr. Gladstone proposed that humiliation which men are anticipating it must submit to, sooner or later, of

a postponement or temporary provisional solution of the problem, by the adoption, in a somewhat modified form, of the status quo. His

proposal was not very critically skilful in its terms, and it involved

what the House was not at all prepared to acquiesce in. And Mr. Gladstone, who introd uced his amendment in a somewhat shamefaced speech, not at all animated by the Gladstonian thunder, which perhaps is being laid aside by that gentleman in his process of qualifying himself for the leadership of the Tory squirearchy, was of course. defeated. And all Mr. Gladstone took by his motion was sound abuse next morning from all those journals who have

so strangely identified, in their own minds, the destruction of the East India Company with a sort of millennium in Hindostan. Nothing daunted, and feeling that the question is now the classic ground of impracticability, Mr. Roebuck, thirsting, as he almost told the House, for that minority, which always proves himself right to himself, gravely propounded to the House that there should be no Council, which of course was summarily negatived. Then followed a discussion as to the numbers of the proposed Council. And a few sensible Members made a hopeless effort to get the Committee to remember that it is not well possible to set- tle that question without knowing what the Council will have to do. Nothing was settled upon the point, and it was decided that the Chairman should report progress : the progress being the purely negative progress of brushing aside the proposals of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Roebuck.

But perhaps the acute Mr. Disraeli, who was so humbly anxious on Monday night to be guided by the Committee, felt, on going to his well-earned rest that night, that if progress in the ostensible work in hand had not been gained, yet there had been areal gain in the far more important work of steering the Ministry into the blessed haven of " prorogation." To a weak Ministry, not in possession of a majority in the House, it is a great piece of fortune to have some fifty resolutions, with amendments, to be dis- cussed at a late period of the session, upon a subject which, by consent, is not to be made a party question. Was this foreseen by that gentleman when he agreed to proceed by resolution ? It is fortunate that our magnificent Indian possessions are to be won and held by soldiers, not legislators. We suppose that the House will persevere till the end in this task of Sisyphus. But the time cannot be far distant when this farce must cease. For the "sacred grouse" is growing strong on the wing. Why could not Mr. Gladstone have waited a while ? He might then have done a piece of statesman's, instead of a piece of seraphic doctor's work. Who believes it within the range of moral or physical possibility that the Home Government of India can be reconstructed this year ? But what shall we say to the statesmen who have declared so emphatically, that the Company being under notice to quit, is discredited and incapacitated for the great task of pacifying India, while they must know it to be impossible to substitute for it a sufficiently well-considered scheme of go- vernment before the recess ? Verily the anarchy of Parliament is bearing bitter fruit of absurdity. We trust that no permanent calamity may come from pursuing this card-castle constitution- mongering folly, at a time when India might well have taxed the undivided energies of the greatest statesmen that the world ever saw, to subdue and pacify her with the means at our disposal.