TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD DERBY'S INDIA BILL.
WE cannot estimate very highly the judgment of any person, whe does not see that the question of legislation for India involves con- siderations of far greater gravity, as far as regards the fitness of Parliament at this Juncture for the task, than belonged to it at the commencement of the session. At that moment the Govern- ment of Lord Palmerston appeared an unassailable erect colossus of brass : the cloven feet of clay had been but partially disclosed. Without metaphor, we appeared to have a strong and vigorous Administration' whose head was a man of strength, of will and purpose, and whose majority and Parliamentary position, if not its ability, entitled it to take up a subject so deeply important as India legislation, free from the suspicion of being likely to treat it upon the merely corrupt motive of strengthening its own hands or official power generally. But the millionaire is sometimes more grasping than the man of moderate means. " Crescit indulgens sibi dims hydrops." Lord Palmerston's lead was turned by his majority, and he could not resist the temptation of adding to his stores of authority and influence by the provisions of the new Indian legislation. If the wealth of the millionaire Minister Palmerston did not secure us from an undue admixture of corrupt or apparently cor- rupt motive in the business of revolutionizing the Anglo-Indian constitution, we had no right to expect that Lord Derby, playing, as be does, the part of Parliamentary pauper, would abstain from turning his India Bill into a legislative begging-letter. The principle which would animate his Government in the presence of an adverse majority and a doubtful nation was declared empha- tically, from the first, in the attitude taken up in reference to this very question of India. To contest with energy the wisdom of legislating for India in Opposition, and proceed immediately upon taking office to the very task opposed, was certainly not so much the deference of a wise statesman to the exigency of the hour, as the yielding of a servile Minister to an adverse House of &lu- mens. Allowing the greatest latitude to the application of that vague doctrine that the Queen's Government must be carried on, we do not well see how a statesman can surmount the practical moral contradiction of attempting to legislate upon a question the very hour after he has exhausted himself in the effort of proving the moment inauspicious for the purpose. The result as regards this particular India question may be described without ex- aggeration as calamitous and ridiculous. Lord Palmerston does not consider his bill as completely superseded by events. Lord Derby's is before the country. Neither gives satisfaction upon the point which is the vital part of the subject, the composition and. functions of the new India Council. The result is, that in- stead of the matured well-weighed measure of a legislator' strong in his position, profound in his views, truly capable, such a mea- sure, for example, as we might have hoped for from the Govern- ment of Sir R. Peel in the year 1845, we have a competition of "bad or.doubtful " bills, expecting their supplement of efficiency and vita force from public opinion, which is too little informed for the subject, supposing it were ever capable, which is an ab- surd supposition, of determining the provisions of a constitution. But the very effort to do so is somewhat painful to witness. A respected contemporary calls upon the "tiers parti" to come in as a dens ex machina and produce its bill. We are surprised and more than surprised to find public writers of merit supposing that questions of such delicacy and difficulty can be advanced by a competition of proposals from the various sections of Parliament. Is the Manchester school to produce its bill, and the Roman Ca- tholic party to produce its bill too ? Practical men must see, that by this method of procedure the Indian question would be lost sight of in contending vanities. Somebody has actually advised a Select Committee of the House for the task of framing a bill; perhaps one of the most serious instinctive expressions, yet uttered, of that profound distrust of the energy, insight, and capacity of the Cabinet-Ministerial element of the constitution, for which there is too much reason as times go, and which may breed mis- chief hereafter.
It is abundantly clear, by this time, that the bill of Lord Derby
has attracted no more of popular sympathy and approval than that of his predecessor. Obviously, nothing could justify his Cabinet in taking up the question, unless its leading members felt themselves equal to the task of solving the great problem. For we cannot too frequently repeat our conviction, that it is a public misfortune for great questions such as these, to be trifled with. Neither India, nor the Legislature of England, is the proper "cor- pus vile" of a mere experiment in lawgiving. It is doubtless a very fine thing to have the opportunity of propounding a scheme for the abolition of the great East India Company, and constructing a new body to perform the important work of ruling India. But such a task should be approached in a spirit of reverence' and not of levity, and it should contain no element which forces to the lip of the critic the damning word "clap-trap." Of all forms of puffing perhaps the vilest is that of a Government endeavouring to prove its equality with the liberalism of the age through a sa- lient provision or two of a measure, which the slightest serious inspection shows to have for its true object only the increase of Ministerial patronage and power. It is the misfortune both of Lord Ellenborough and Mr. Disraeli,. that with all their brilliant faculties, they are both deficient in the preeminently English faculty of understanding Englishmen Otherwise they never would have fallen into the mistake of supposing, that their countrymen could be fascinated by such a palpable piece of legis- lative " soft-sawder" as the Indian suffrage given to the live great towns by the bill. This suggestion has produced upon the public mind precisely the same impression as that which causes a man in a crowd, when in proximity to a gentleman too highly dressed and perfumed for the occasion, to button up lus pockets somewhat precipitately. The impression is justified. We may be pardoned for selecting the greatest novelty in the proposed measure as the first subject of our remarks. For certainly in the annals of legislation there has never been anything like. the suggestion, seriously made by such a body as the Enghsh Cabmet, to assikn to the constituencies at large of certain English towns the right of selecting a portion of the Council of India. The only palliation of the proposal is one which the Ministry will have some difficulty in urging, that the proposed Council is not. of sufficient importance for the matter to signify much. But the proposed constituency is not one whit more absurd than the quali- fication of candidates. Perhaps even the ex-Administrative Reformers would have shrunk from committing themselves to such an absurdity- as is implied in the proposition, that the ex- portation of goods to a distant ,country involves a capacity, or a right, to take a share in its supreme government. For, be it observed, it is not as representatives of the proposed constituencies that the elect of London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Belfast, would sit ; but as councillors for India. In Laputa the proposal and its execution might have been in keep- ing. In England it is almost an offence against the dignity and the principles of representative government, thus to seek to make it caricature itself. Besides, what sort of legislator must he be who suggests, as a sufficiently defined qualification, the "being engaged in the commerce between India and England," or in the "manufacture of goods for exportation to India." It is hard enough for the vexed spirit to have to bear with the slip-slop of Parliamentary talk. But to see it introduced into a bill, and laid upon the table of the House in cold blood, and supposed to amount to scientific legislative definitions and categories, is a subject of real mortification. "Engaged in commerce " ! "Engaged in the manufacture of goods for export to India " ! the very phrases ought to have caused the framers and proposers of the bill to pause. We will not delay our readers by a full exposure of the absurdity of these phrases: which would qualify the sleeping partner, or the foreman, of a bitter-beer firm for the unspeakably important function of acting as Councillor for India. The truth, however, of this bill, and the real purposes and mo- tives of its framers, cannot for a moment elude the feeblest per- son. Under the provision of the measure, nothing more definite in the way of powers or privileges is given to the Council, than "the conduct of business transacted in the United Kingdom in re- lation to the government of India" ; while it very explicitly as- signs to the Secretary of State, all the " powers now exercised by the Company or the Board of Control." The Secretary is to wield the " powers" : the Council is to "transact business." This is a sly bit of humour, that forms a fit companion piece to the puff collateral cf the suffrage for the great towns. The duties of the Council are purely consultative ; and all the world knows, that consultative councils are perfectly inoperative bodies, unless their consultative action is obligatory upon them, in a written form, intended to be submitted from time to time, together with the decision taken on them, to an independent revising authority. The bill makes no such provision. The Council is not as a matter of course to be consulted. It is to transact business for India cer- tainly. But the Secretary may send despatches, which is a mild form of saying "take legislative decisions," proprio motu, subject only to the duty of hanging them up (except in cases of urgency when he may despatch summarily) in the Council-room, for seven days previous to their departure. The check upon the despatches is a power given to six members of the Council to call a meeting. But this does not much signify. For it is carefully provided, that, when the Secretary differs from the Council, the Secretary's decision shall be final ; which is certainly not an encouragement to Councillors to call a meeting, in a case where they direr beforehand. Should six Councillors, however, be guilty of the extremely un- gentlemanlike conduct of putting their twelve colleagues to the trouble of attending a meeting, which can be of no possible use, the Secretary's inevitable adherence to his opinion may, in the last, be visited with the terrible calamity, that a dissenting mem- ber of Council may require his opinion and reasons for dissent to be entered on the minutes : that is to say, he may, as Lord Ellen- borough told the man, "protest and go about his business." When we add that the Council is to meet only on the summons of the Secretary of State, or on the requisition generally of six of its members ; that all the patronage of the Court of Directors is expressly conferred upon the Crown, subject only to a right of recommendation of individuals by resolution in meetings of the Council, we shall have abundantly shown that Lord Derby's India Bill is a mere mockery of legislation. Indeed it eludes, under a semblance of dealing with them in a spirited manner, every difficulty of the ease. It is a thinly-disguised attempt to establish a supreme autocratic Secretary for India. It places all real power in the hands of the Minister, as distinguished from the Council. With a principle so radically false, attempted to be covered by the affectation of a spurious and most ridiculously ill- placed, because insincere Liberalism, it is not necessary that we slioiild go further into the analysis of its details. And it is in no spirit of mere opposition, but in sober seriousness, and indeed
sadness, that we say, we do not know what other course Parlia- ment can adopt with regard to the measure, than to reject every part of it, except the preamble ; unless, indeed, the signal failure of two successive Ministries to produce a satisfactory bill, should induce a doubt whether it is indeed expedient at this moment that the Queen's Government should supersede the East India Company.
We do not, and cannot allow, that it is the province of journal- ists to suggest great schemes of government in detail. We shall ever continue to insist upon the necessity of such a thing as statesmanship. The exponents of public opinion can do it no greater service than confining it to its own appropriate province. The general consciousness of a nation will find its own rightful expression not in the details, but in the principles of legislation. It has grown to be a fixed faith with the English people, that
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India s not to be governed despotically by a Secretary of State : but by a wisely-constituted Le. gislative Council. And we ear- nestly trust that no difficulties in the way of finding a proper con- stituency for such a body, will cause the English Parliament and public to put up with the mere fiction of an India legislature. 'When we are told by a bill introduced into the House of Com- mons, that a Council is to "transact business for India," we re- quire to see that it is real business that is to be transacted, and real powers that are to be wielded. It is for this purpose that inquiry into the actual working duties of the East India Com- pany seems to us necessary ; for this, that it seems to us of the importance mportance to know what such men as the Lawronees, the Elphinstones, the Outrams and the Herbert Edwardses think should be done in India, and what in England. We understand the general sentiment of the public mind, involved in the demand for the cesser of the East India Company's power, to be, that it is the duty of England to bring herself into closer contact for know- ledge, for power, for influence with her magnificent dependency. The purpose is a noble one. And if the establishment of the Crown's name, and the direchtficvernment of Crown and Parlia- ment, be necessary to its fulfilment, the existence of the Com- pany is as nothing in the balance. But the questions attending the reconstruction of the India Government are so delicate and varied, the hands of English statesmen at this conjuncture are so weakened by the sectional divisions of Parliament, the excite- ment of great calamities so recent, that we would fain see some pause in the execution of a design, which must influence so deeply for all future generations the lives and fortunes, and liberties of two hundred millions of men. And, certainly, we shall continue to hold this view, so long as proposed legislation presents to us the vague phrase of the penny-a-liner, precisely in those parts of the subject where serious definitions are most vitally necessary.
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