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; -Mto 419, Apb.Ui 8, 18s4l T&I E i 1/ E...
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THE NEW DIPLOIOLTIC APPOINTMENTS-. Haxf ...
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WOMEN AND WILLS. A wiitti case in the Ch...
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Lobd Eljienboeough's Indian Juggiie. The...
mines the props of our imperial authority . He can . no more gather in his own hands the actual administration of British . India than a council sitting at Vienna could stereotype according to ancient precedent the official proeedure of ev province in England , France , G-ermany , Italy , and the Ottoman dominions . " We may establish a common principle but not a universal method . What would be well-timed in one district of British India might be ill-timed in another ; wisdom at Calcutta might be folly at Lahore ; beneficence in Madras might
be tyranny in the North-West Provinces . The old maxim , that refined policy has ever been the parent of confusion , prohibits the establishment of administrative unity in India- ~ We have conferred a civilized government upon India , but that government is perpetually in danger of becoming too strong for the people , of forcing their growth , of encumbering them with new institutions . The nations of the East progress slowly , and while they advance , it is our principal duty to stand by and keep the peace . What is to be done in the way of interference should be
done on the spot by honest and capable men , intimately acquainted with the peculiar requirements , conditions , customs , and creed of the provinces and populations under their control ; untrammelled by pedantic regulations , undelayed by continual references to Calcutta or iLondon , with full power and full responsibility . It is for the Central G-overnment to select administrators for India , to trust them when selected , to disgrace them for misconduct , but not to visit their failures upon their successors by loading a commissioner in Mairwaira or Mooltan with a pack of instructions assorted in Cannon-row .
These questions are left unsettled by the G-overnment Bill . Of parallel importance is the future organization of the Indian army . The Chancellor of the Exchequer announces that it is not at present in contemplation to propose any change ; but the President of the Board of Control had previously declared in favour of the military occupation of India by a British force . It is true that Mr . Diseaeli hints at certain innovations ' necessarily resulting from the general scope of the bill , ' but he must be a
little more precise before the public will ratify the Government scheme . The question stands thus : Are we to govern India by the natives themselves , or by a permanent military occupation ? Is it to be a British India , or an Indian Algeria ? There is an incredible rumour afloat that Government contemplates a system of half confidence in the natives , that it is proposed to pass penal sentence upon India , to trust the Sepoy with an old Brown Bess but not . with a Mini 6 rifle , that English gentlemen are to command soldiers whose range of fire is limited to a hundred yards , lest they should pink their own officers
at six hundred . As if to degrade the native troops would be to sebure their loyalty ; as if a vast region abounding in impenetrable wildernesses could be disarmed ; as if India were a walled town ; as if a perennial Pindaree war were the best seourity of our empire . Upon these vital points the Government pronounces no opinion . With all its elaboration , the Ei / lenborottgh India Bill is miserably incomplete ; popular in aspect , it is an attempt to create a bureaucratic despotism ; it is a mass of inooherency and contradiction , and , if established as law , wouio leave unueiieruuueu
, utterly . ovorjf problem arising directly from the recent convulsions in British India . The legislative legerdemain of the Dubby Cabinet results in a gigantic juggle ; but if this bo thy my story , 0 DiSRAEiii , and if tho Coming Man bo " ElwIxuonouun , better lob drudgery Bib in liigli places , for genius is clearly not to bo trusted ,
; -Mto 419, Apb.Ui 8, 18s4l T&I E I 1/ E...
; -Mto 419 , Apb . Ui 8 , 18 s 4 l T & I E i 1 / E A % E R . 323
The New Diploioltic Appointments-. Haxf ...
THE NEW DIPLOIOLTIC APPOINTMENTS-. Haxf a dozen important changes have been made by the present Government m our diplomatic , representation at the courts of Europe ; hut if we might find some fault with certain representatives of the country abroad , we have no confidence in . the substitutes ; and , in some cases ,, the . change , is certainly the reverse , of good . We have a reiy intelligent , efficient , and thoroughly English statesman at St . Petersburg in Lord Wodehouse .: \ ye . desire , to say nothing against Sir John Cramptoiv the present Minister at Hanover , but in the United States he failed either to conciliate our ally or to maintain our independence . Lord Howden ' s conduct at Madrid is . sub judice , and Mr . Buchanan may be an . efficient
successor . Mr . Elliot may do as Ttreli as Mr . Buchanan at Copenhagen ; but we have yet to ascertain the fact . Mr . Howard may be less negative than Lord Normanby at Florence ; for who knows Mr . Howard , or what he is , except that he has been a not very efficient Secretary of Legation at Paris ? And Lord Chelsea ' s qualifications for Paris are unknown to any living soul . There is one conclusion which is established by these changes : if any of them are for the _ better —which might perhaps be shown by straining a point , —upon the whole they are much for the
th & croncns of two . countries . axe . absolutely necessary but they lose their force and validity by being made permanent . The ambassador degenerates into an exile naturalized in the country where he resides . He hah , forgets the country for which he is sent , and dawdles away the duties of the half that he re members . The real -want is a special Envoy for each occasion ,, his residence to cease a * soon as his . mission has terminated . Let an English statesman go * hot and hot , from . London * filled with the importance of the particular duties which he has to . perform , and we have some ekance of zeal and activity . It \ p * re better to spend the money laid out . on embassies ^ \ n giving efficiency and dignity to special missions , than to waste it , as it is now wasted , on the maintenance of sinecures which end in providing stated apologies for the wrongs that * foreign countries do to us .
worse . The public gains nothing ; it is a tribute to the party at the expense of the empire ; it is a sacrifice of efficiency to routine . According to the scale of payment , the posts in question ought to be most important to us ; and in proportion as thenduties ate momentous is the offence of filling them with men that are unequal to the work . Many of them are places greatly more important than the posts in the Council of India in which the salary is to be only 1 OOCM . ; yet who would elect Viscount Chelsea or Mr . Howard to the Council ? Or , if the Council is at all p ro p erly filled , who would venture to say that the principal members of that Board axe persons inferior to Lord Chelsea or Mr . Howard ? It is a gross misappropriation of patronage and
pay , therefore , if these important offices are handed over to men unequal to their duty . One excuse , indeed , may be made . It is , that the posts are not of importance ; that it is customary to nave such functionaries abroad , but that any person trained in the routine of that department , and the customs of the country in which he lives , can conduct the business of an embassy . May be so . We are inclined to think that the excuse holds good ; but then what becomes of the public money paid to maintain these offices ? It is , of course , simply wasted , and the recent appointments are as strong evidence as we could have made up for ourselves to prove what we have long maintainedthat permanent embassies are costly encumbrances which return no value for the country .
The notion is , that a British statesman residing near the court of a foreign sovereign assists in representing British interests , ana in protecting British subjects . But how far does the fact answer to this view P What peculiar power have British Ambassadors exercised lately in Prance or Italy to defend and promote British interests ? What have they done which could not have been done by British Consuls , and perhaps in somo respects better done P A nobleman or a gentleman who is sent over to a foreign country as a permanent resident , inevitably becomes , to a certain extent , infected by
the atmosphere ; he grows reconciled to the customs of the place in which ho lives . Removed from active business , a slow life becomes habitual to him ; he tolerates what is hateful to British feeling , and grows , in short , rather an advocate of any foreign abuse , howovor fatal to tho welfare , and sometimes to the safety , of his countrymen . It was Lord Normanby who sanctioned tho French expedition to keep down Rome ; it was Lord Cowloy who saw the possibility of reconciling his duty as an English representative with acquiescence in tho Imperial dictation . P . ermanenco of residence , wo find , only
ends in denationalizing tho representatives or tho nation . So purely ornamental have somo of these oflioos become , that they arc regarded as proper retreats for gentlemen who havo not succeeded in public life at homo , or who arc superannuated . Morenoo 'w as-a-provision-for-the-old-age-of-Lord ^ -Normanby-i the Paris Legation is a retreat for the parliamentary inofllcionoy of Lord Chelsea . Thus tlio higher diplomatic appointments have bcoomc sinecures which aro supposod to bo in the g ift of tho Ministor of tho day for tho bonofit of his friends and connexions . * Wo aro far from pronouncing that embassies and ambassadors arc on all occasions useloss ; on the contrary , suoh means of communication between
Women And Wills. A Wiitti Case In The Ch...
WOMEN AND WILLS . A wiitti case in the Chancery Court on Tuesday opens up the -whole question of the power of persons to dispose of their property after their death ,. In itself the case is interesting . A gentleman , named Barkworth , lately residing at Hull , died , leaving his moneyed property to two daughters Chi & only children ) on peculiar conditions . The father , hadV it seems , quarrelled with all his wife ' s relations , and with several other persons . He therefore made a schedule of one hundred and twentysix persons whom his daughters , on pain of iox } feiture of the inheritance , were not to marry ; and , in addition , he forbade them to marry any person within certain specified degrees of relationship and connexion—carrying in thas respect his prohibition far beyond the law of the land , or even the very strict canons of the Roman Catholic Church . The young ladies are twins , and are now nearly seventeen , years of age . It is certainly a curious position for two English girls to find a certain set of men , numbering probably at least two hundred , shut out from the list of possible husbands . The world , it is true , is wide enough , but we can easily understand the excusable curiosity of the young maidens to know some of the sinners exiled from the paradise of their love , and if pity for the unfortunate
men developed itself into love it would be a very natural consequence indeed in the heart of any daughter of Eve . One can imagine the young ladies suddenly discovering in a ball-room some , of the forbidden fruit , and the sudden whisper , "Mary , he is one of the men we are not to marry ! " When the father selected one hundred and twenty-six of his acquaintances ( for we cannot suppose that , like Captain Absolute , he objected to persons he knew nothing about ) , and added to them a wide sweep of relations and connexions , he must liave embraced , or rather shut out from the embraces of his daugh ^ ters , a very large local circle of the eligible men of heart
Hull . Possibly some of the expelled may * lessly regard it as a release ; and some feminine pretenders to individual hearts amongst then * must thank the irritable old gentleman for diminishing rival attacks on the besieged fortresses . Some of the forbidden are of coarse plunged into all the agonies of ' 3 vol . octavo * despair . Considering that it is now the custom to give portraits and ' lives * of aJU groups and series or celebrities— -from groups after photographs of the most eminent orators of the Dis » oussion jrorum to lives of the Waterloo-bridge talk keepers from the earliest period to the present tune —we do not despair of seeing in the illustrated papers portraits of the one hundred and twenty-aWR speoial unfortunates , with fao-simUc 3 of their rejected addresses , and short memoirs of their
melanoholy careers . But why ' melancholy ? ' Equity may rescue them from that only resource of unfortunate lovors , an early grave ; tho restricted damsols of seventeen have , by their guardians , applied to Chancery for leavo to oppose the will . Tho forbidden cousins and tho other sot , forbidden , though not cousins , should form a , society to emancipate themsolvos and appeal to a British . Parlinmont for a now law , removing tlio tornblo prohibition which shuts within a logal deor-park tUe tempting twins , moderately riok and sweot seventeen . Those persecuted young men arc nearly as numerous as tho Jews who wish to got into Parliament . ftwLpossibly aa interesting as all those ' oruofeua ^^ i ' s ^ rOT ^ waiting for a now law to disturb existing homos , demanding ' divorce for two and a wedding-ring tor
the survivor . ' . . , A oaso that oamo under our observation nugiip offer a hint to tho protostcra against tho will . A Ronlloinun lol ' t hb property to his daughter , fttt only child , but with the condition that aho was not
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), April 3, 1858, page 11, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_03041858/page/11/
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