BOOKS.

GENERAL THOMPSON'S LETTERS TO ]IIS CONSTITUENTS..

THESE Letters of a Representative to his Constituents are a striking example of the tendency of the age ; which is beyond all question more devoted to comment and 'criticism, than to speech as a statesman's means of action, or to action itself. Al- though fallen out of the public consideration from lapse of time and other causes, Perronet Thompson is a very remarkable man, whose merits have not been rewarded with the distinction they are entitled to ; owing doubtless to

"The o'ergrowth of some complexion Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason ; Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens The form of plausive-manners."

Yet is the Member for Bradford a man of independent mind and of various acquirements; a mathematician, a logician, a lin- guist, a scholar, a theoretical musician, and a master of political economy. As editor and proprietor of the Westminster Review in its earlier days, when a quarterly journal had greater influence over opinion than now, he contributed to stimulate the public mind to demand reforms of various kinds—as Catholic Emancipation, Abolition of Slavery, and Parliamentary Reform itself; but his most effective labours were on currency and the corn laws. His views upon the circulating medium are not exactly our views ; but for nearly forty years, and through good and evil report, Perronet Thompson has been the shrewd and con- sistent advocate of a fixed standard of value. To him, as much as to any single individual, the abolition of the corn laws is pro- bably owing ; not merely by the quaint shrewdness of his Cate- chism and other writings, but by his continual activity in various ways, and with purse as well as personal exertions. It does not say much for the gratitude of the Bright-and-Cobden school, or free-traders in general, that while they reaped without scruple the crop which others had sown, they did their best to sink in silence the labours of those who had prepared the ground and sown the seed.

But General Thompson is not merely a man of extensive ac- quirements and a writer sui generis ; he has mingled in public affairs ; he served at the close of the war against Napoleon, on the coast of Africa, and we believe in India ; at all events, he is practically acquainted with that country. And yet we see scholarship and science, peculiar ability, activity, and experience, even when placed in a post where to act, or to contribute to action by advice, is a man's duty, all ending in letters addressed

to the editor," and to be published in the " Bradford Adver- tiser," for the perusal of " my constituents." In explanation of this "lame and impotent conclusion," it may be said, what the writer himself intimates, that he has lost the ear of the House- " I am, and always have been, a man forbid." But surely this is suffering judgment by default. A general whose troops are discontented or mutinous, a manager whose company leaves him in the lurch, a man who is sent to do business and does it not, a deputy with an understood right to address the assembly to which he is deputed, but who makes himself so distasteful that he is put down by the general voice, all plead guilty by admitting the fact. Personal conviction—nay abstract right, if we grant General Thompson to be right, which is often at issue—has nothing to do with the question. The man of action must so shape his pro- posals, the man of speech his discourse, that men will forward the one, and at least listen to the other. In this category of failures, General Thompson does not stand alone ; the " effect defective" —the speech that when made ends in nothing, is perhaps shared by the House at large. It is more marked in the General from his idiosyneracy of character' and the mode he adopts to over- come his short comings. In times of great political excitement— as when more than twenty years ago the then Colonel Thompson began the practice of weekly epistles—or if constituencies really would apply themselves to public affairs, the practice might be of use, as ventilating questions or furnishing hints. But consti- tuencies are like the Parliament they elect, and do nothing, though they grumble much. The present volume of Letters extends over the fourteen months from June 1857 to the end of the Session in August last ; so that the recess is included, as well as the sittings of Parliament. In fact the collection contains the author's comments on the principal events of the period, thrown off at the moment of their occurrence, and with the same temporary feelings as actuate the " leader " of a newspaper. These comments are mostly searching and. terse, frequently pithy ; but age has rather hardened and soured the writer's disposition than softened it. To say that Perronet Thompson is a follower of Carlyle would be ridiculously false. The General had pretty well culminated before the writer of Lat- ter Day Pamphlets was visible above the horizon. And in point of intellect, genius, and erudition, Carlyle is greatly his superior. But they have some things in common. They both love startling paradoxes ; and when they announce a novelty, its truth or false- hood is an even chance. Each has a strong touch of "Sir Oracle," and sometimes proceeds as if his simple affirmation was to override authority, experience, evidence, and reason. In earlier days General Thompson might somewhat temper himself to the "philosophical Radicals" he worked with; but now like Carlyle • Letters of a Representative to his Constituents, from 15th June 1857 to the end of the Session in August MS. By Major-General Thompson, M.P. for Bradford. Published by Bennett. he is "all in all sufficient," Wrapping himself up in what Cobbett called " absolute wisdom," he claims to ale-, with every body in turns, and always to be right luathe' His political paradoxes jarring with general feelings, are na_ turally more offensive than the mere literary and often abstract opinions of Carlyle. In point of manner the General has the ad_ vantage ; his quaint illustrations are often very felicitous, and he sometimes states a truth very pithily ; but his composition has not the vigour or the sustained character of Carlyle's. In one vi of "good taste" the soldier falls below the man of letters, giving coarsish coarsish aud perfectly gratuitous tokens of a training when George the Fourth was Prince of Wales.

Although dealing more or less with every public question as st turns up, the two most distinctive subjects of the Letters are the commercial crisis of last autumn and the Indian mutiny ; both being pursued into their causes and consequences. On the first subject there are very sound truths tersely expressed, or well illustrated as regards the effects of depreciating a currency by an efflux of paper. Here is the text from the author's reminiscences of Pitt's Restriction Act of 1797, followed by illustrations. " Exactly in proportion to the over-issues, the value of the cireulatin, medium became depreciated, the new and increased quantity being per- petually reduced to the same total value as the old. But as the golden

nea need never go for less than its worth as a piece of gold, the guineas made their way into the melting-pot or to the Continent. • " On Monday was a considerably tedious debate on Currency producing little that was new, and a great deal of recapitulation of what might be hoped to be antiquated. On the whole, however, there might be collected to be an approach to the belief, that we want a currency which, like a yard. wand, shall be of some fixed standard ; and that all the consequences of tampering with the currency, are as nearly as possible to be represented by what would be the results of tampering with the yard- wand in similar cir- cumstances. An odd thing it would be, if men were found intimating to the government that they were bound to deliver a thousand yards of cloth on a certain day, and therefore they ;would be obliged if the government would shorten the yard-wand. And equally amusing would be the scene if they were found impressing on the government, that by reducing the yard-wand to half, the yards of cloth in the country would be doubled, to the manifest increase of the public wealth."

Currency, though a most important question, especially at the time, is not the only one connected with the crisis, and the reck- less over-trading which produced the crisis. It is pursued in the Letters into the effects of national character upon national dealings.

" But now to seek the cause of the present commercial evils. They come to us from America, and America has longbeen engaged in two courses of avowed and notable injustice, ' filibustering ' and slave-dealing. The natural effect of doing what a man knows to be wrong, is to dull his sensi- bility to anybody's interest but his owls; and he who has no sensibility to anybody's interests but his own, is in common life on the high road to a felon's fate, and in public to something not unlike. And the effect is not confined to the immediate actors, but extends to those who are brought, voluntarily, or not, into habitual contact with them. A reckless spirit makes head, and shows its consequences in all directions. Nobody would look to filibusters for economy or forethought ; nor to a filibustering nation. Where the overpowering tendency is to doing what no regard to the ordinary rules of right can justify,: a general disposition to run unwarrantable risks for the chance of possible gains, takes possession of society ; the very school boy lays down his bets with increased alacrity, in confidence in the 'T, take up all,' which he feels sure will be the end. And if filibusters are not prudent for the future, neither are they economical of the present. 'Light come, light go,' is everywhere their motto ; and of such is the Bankrupt List."

In connexion with this is a curious speculation as to how far private will produce national insolvency: "It may be a useful question whether it is not possible for a nation to reduce itself to bankruptcy by the over expenditure of private persons, as

well as an individual. Which does not mean that there shall not be a dealer in gingerbread who continues sclvent ; but that there shall be a great and general inability to meet commercial engagements, like what is now M America and is extending itself to Europe. In attempts to gain lighten this, the principal argument on the other side has appeared to be, that what one man over-spends, some other must gain ;—in short the whole ar- gument in favour of luxury. Doubts may be felt on this. If an individual A.B. ruins himself by over-expenditure, it is not asserted that he ruined the tradesmen with whom he dealt ; at least if he paid their bills. What

is asserted is, that he ruined himself. But if in addition to this he has run up. bills which he cannot pay, then he has to the extent of the process ruined other people. If an agriculturist mismanages,—if he puts more into the soil than he takes out of it, and still more if he incurs debts in the pro- secution of his object which he never pays,—he may be held to be going the straight way to ruin both himself and other people. And if there were a hundred thousand such agriculturists in a country, they would go a great way towards making a hole in that country's credit upon 'Change.

In some political questions the General is more radical than the radicals ; but from love of paradox, independence of mind, or ac- tual experience in the subject talked about, he often opposes a popular cry. He stands up for the East India Company and its "traditional policy ;" he opposes the clamour against "red tape." In the main there is truth in what he says, but there is some- thing of paradox in his logic. Those who cry out against red tape, do not, we imagine, mean that regularity and forms are to ln thrown aside, but that they are not to be used to defeat the execution of the business by needless complexity and rigidity. Whether the " cry " is right or not depends upon its real meaning.

What is this outcry we hear against red tape ' ? Red tape mant! order ; red tape means much the same as merchants' accounts. W e know the kind of gentlemen, whose lives are made a martyrdom by the ?I) stinacy of bankers requiring cheques, and not only cheques but effects back them. Precisely of the same kind is the outcry against red tape._ began in the Crimea' where men who thought they ought to have bee, at the top of things and were not, discovered that the way for an ann9,.7 have what it wanted, was foe every man to take what he liked, In I11al. it takes a wider scope. Instead of being aimed at the pen-and-ink hin rangements of a commissary, by men longing to get two rations of rui. where one is due, it was the effort of the Anti-Civil Power party in kinds, to take the conduct of affairs out of the hands of those who had kv.p! them together for a hundred years, and the immediate consequence was II" explosion. ra 1 l 'Traditional policy,' is a branch of the same outcry.

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traditional policy, in spite of many grievous faults, had been on some rtant points the soundest prudence. Among these, was to avoid col- with the religion of the natives—to allow of no insult to them for "f.1.19. s of complexion—not to hurry the process of proselytism, lest there siluuid happen what has happened, a general hatred of Christianity, which ,I,Daa cannot reach, nor the rope amend. To these was to be added, a dul introduction of civil judicature, with its annoying interpositions be—tween the culprit [accused ?] and the hangman, and a steady check on that sublimer law, which teaches a corporal, and taught a rajah, to know the guilty by the inspiration that is in him." The Indian mutiny, however, is the great topic of the book, and Prvades it from beginning to end. According to General Thomp-, e- son, it originated not with native rulers and brave, faithful, hon- ourable sepoys, but in a tacit conspiracy of military officers, anxious to overturn the mild and just civil rule of the Company, for some not very intelligible purposes, and of the baser sort of European settlers, especially of the " planter " kind, whom the wise Company had always set their face against ; and in fact kept them out of the country, till Parliament took away their power of doing so. The motives of this last class for joining the con- spiracy are made definite enough. Like all vulgar men of Anglo- Saxon race, they entertain a contemptuous antipathy for any other colour than their own. They also have in view the more solid purpose of seizing upon the lands of the natives, and making slaves of the mass in order to cultivate cheaply the soil they have stolen. This statement is so singular that it really requires evi- dence in support, and here are some racy passages. "The sensible and wise commercial rulers had always said 'Let India be India. Consent to allow us to keep it, as it has been kept before. Do not encourage the introduction of European settlers ; if you do, they will intro- duce the war of races, and we shall be all blown up together.' Great and able men, whom the magnitude of the Company's concerns attracted to their service, maintained the same. But all this was set at naught ; and to deride and decry it now, is the amusement of the insane press which governs England. A race of men was multiplied in India, whom their own press delights to describe as resembling the planters of Virginia ; reckless, prodigal, unscrupulous, possessed with one leading idea, which is that they must trample on everything with darker complexions than their own. These men gradually got head, and had great success in bringing over the military to their side: Between them and the military was virtually con- cocted the supeiseding of the Civil Government, and the reductien of the Native Indians to a servile class. By degrees they got the crow-bar under the Civil Government. They did not makeprofession of open resistance,- but they found the means of thwarling and overbearing it. Their attack was directed on the religious observances of the native army. They said 'An enlisted soldier is no soldier at all, if he will not taste swine's flesh or put anything else into his mouth his officer bids him. To enlist men under a compact to allow them their religion, was a folly, and therefore we will break it.' They tried their dismeeful game ; and they lost India." * • * "A cool, regular system has been acted on, for telling the Indian po- pulation it is intended to reduce them to negro slavery and they have no resource but to die in the last ditch. The Civil Government is set at de- fiance, and the army is in round terms invited to 'mutiny' in case of oppo- sition from that quarter or from its officers. If I am not mistaken, the some spirit is already visible in your streets. Friends and foes, wealthy and poor, are to be treated alike; and there seems to be a fixed determina- tion to bring out the rupees from the Indian banker's coffers, in aid of the matchlock of the cultivator of the ground. In every direction the thing is put in print, both there and here. The great source of complaint and horror, is that an Indian should hold any office of magistracy. That an ludian-born should hold office, is gall and wormwood to the buccaneers who bare seized the reins in India, as to a Virginian planter it would be to be summoned before a coloured magistrate for breaking the peace. They are grievously discontented with the consequences ; as if all magistracy was not established, that three-fourths of those who come before it should go away discontented. Your friends will remember the published plan for ejecting Indians from their domiciles by the insertion of a pig. A complaint from Bombay is almost equally illustrative ; and Bombay was a peaceable honest place, till the present inundation of barbarians. It seems there is a green, or vacant piece of ground, which the native bankers and merchants, acting under an idea that they were in some sort the owners, chose to devote to pigeon fancying, and they are declared to have spent 4000/. on this harm- less fantasy. A European boy was brought before an English magistrate, for killing one of the pigeons with a stone - and the magistrate,-0 horror ! —fined the boy to the amount of six shillitigs, and declared—the imbecile— that the English law protected animals as well as men. At this the bucca- neers are furious. They say it is a sacrifice to native feelings ; and more- over pigeon-fancying is idolatrous. Who is to keep an empire, in the teeth of men like these ? "

We have more than once, and before the outbreak of the mu- tiny, commented upon the rude and contemptuous treatment to which the natives were exposed by a certain class of Europeans. There is probably a substratum of truth in this idea of the Gene- rals; but so distorted and exaggerated as to become false or lu- dicrous. But his attack upon the Anglo-Indian planters, is as nothing, compared with his defence of the mutineers, and his ca- lumnious assaults on. the English army, for the alleged acts of a few individuals, and the country in general for upholding a stern policy of punishment. The mutiny was quite right the General maMtains; all that followed it was quite right ; for the massacre of Delhi was quite natural and to be expected; while the Anglo- Indian community at large, and the English army, especially its officers, are assailed with a rabid fury that is only explainable on one of the grounds already quoted from Hamlet—that "the pales and forts of reason" are broken down.