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    No . 419 , Apb . Hi 3 , 1858 . ] THE LEAD E R . 323

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    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 Bitting at Vienna could stereotype according to ancient precedent the official procedure of every province in England , France , Germany , Italy , and the Ottoman dominions . "We may establish a common principle hut 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 he folly at Iiahore ; beneficence in Madras might be tyranny in the North-West Provinces . The old maxim , that refined policy haB 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 Bpot 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 London , with full power and full responsibility . It is for the Central Government 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 Mx > oltan with a pack of instructions assorted in Cannon-row . These questions are left unsettled by the Government 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 . Disbaem 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 Btands 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 Miui 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 bo to secure 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 security of our empire . Upon these vital points the Government pronounces no opinion . With all its elaboration , the Eiji / enborotjan India Bill ia miserably incomplete 5 popular in aspect , it is an attempt to create a bureaucratic despotism ; it is a mass of incohorency and contradiction , and , if established as law , ¦~~ WoUrd" ~ leavd' xit'tMy ^ uTrdetermin'e"d" ~ ' © very problem arising directly from the recent convulsionsin British India . The legislative legerdemain of the Derby Cabinet results in a gigantic juggle ; but if this bo thy mystery , O ¦ Di sBABLi , and if tho Coming Man bo Elliot * - Bonorcm , bettor let drudgery eit in high places , for genius is clearly not to bo trusted .

    THE NEW DIPLOMATIC APPOINTMENTS Halt a dozen important changes have been made by the present Government in our diplomatic representation at the courts of Europe ; but 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 very intelligent , efficient , and thoroughly English statesman at St . Petersburg in Lord Wodehouse : we desire to say nothing against Sir John Crampton , 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 su 6 jiidice , and Mr . Buchanan may be an efficient successor . Mr . Elliot may do as well 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 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 are 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 1000 / . ; yet who would elect Viscount Chelsea or Mr . Howard to the Council ? Or , if the Council is at all prop erly filled , who would venture to say that the principal members of that Board are persons inferior to Lord Chelsea or Mr . Howard ? lj ; 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 , and in protecting British subjects . But how far does the fact answer to this view ? What peculiar power have British Ambassadors exercised lately in France or Italy to defend and promote British interests ? What have they done which could not have been done by British Consuls , and perhaps in some respects better done ? 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 ; ho grows reconciled to the customs of tho place in winch 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 abuso , howovor fatal to tho welfare , and sometimes to the safety , of his countrymen . It was Lord Normanby who sanctioned the Fronch expedition to keep down Kbmo ; it wns Lord Cowley who saw the possibility of reconciling his duty as an English representative with acquiescence in tho Imperial dictation . Permanence of residence , we find , only ends in denationalizing tho representatives of the nation . So purely ornamental have some of those offices become , that they are rogarded as proper retreats for gentlomonwho have not succeeded in publio life at homo , or who aro superannuated . Floronoo ¦ was-a- 'proviaion-for-lhe-old'age-of-JLiord-Nornnianby- ; - tho Paris Legation ia a retreat for tho parliamentary inefficiency or Lord Chelsea . Thus the higher diplomatic appointments have become sinecures which are supposed to bo in tho { rift of the Minister of tho day for tho bonout of his friends and connexions . Wo uro far from pronouncing that embassies and ambassadors avo ou all occasions usoloss ; ou the contrary , such moans of communication between

    the crowns-of two-countries are absolutelynecessarv 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 half forgets the country for which he is sent * and dawdles away the duties of the half that lie remembers . The real want is a special Envoy for each occasion , his residence to cease as soon as bis 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 chance of zeal and'activity . It were better to spend the money laid out on embassies in giving efficiency and dignity to special missions , than to waste it , as it is now wasted , on the maintenance of sineoures which end in providing stated apologies for the wrongs that foreign countries do to us .

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    WOMEN AND WILLS . A win- 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 ( bis only children ) on peculiar conditions . The father had , 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 forj feiture of the inheritance , were not to marry ; and , in addition , he forbade them to marry any person witliin certain specified degrees of relationship and connexion—carrying in this 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 g irls 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 maiden 3 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 I" 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 have embraced , or rather shut out from the embraces of his daughters , a very large local circle of the eligible men of Hull . Possibly some of the expelled may heartlessly regard it as a release ; and some feminine pretenders to individual hearts amongst them must thank the irritable old gentleman for diminishing rival attacks on the besieged fortresses . Some of the forbidden are of course plunged into all the agonies of 3 vol . octavo' despair . Considering that it is now the custom to give portraits and ' lives' of all groups and series of celebrities—from groups after photographs of the most eminent orators of the Discussion Forum to lives of the Waterloo-bridge tollkeepers from the earliest period to the present time —we do not despair of seeing in the illustrated papers portraits of the one hundred and twenty-six , special unfortunates , with fac-simile 3 of their rejeoted addresses , and short memoirs of their melancholy careers . But why melancholy ? ' Equity may rescue them from that only rcsouroe of unfortunate lovers , an early gravo ; tho restricted damsels of scvontecn have , by their guardians , appliod to Chanoery for leavo to oppose tho will . The forbidden cousins and tho other sot , forbidden though not cousins , should form a society to emancipate themsolvos and appeal to a British Parliament for a now law , removing the terrible prohibition which shuts within a legal deer-park the tempting- twins , moderately rich and sweet seventeen . These persecuted young men aro nearly-aa numerous as tho Jews who wish to got into PurUar mont .-jaud possibly as interesting as all tuoso oruolly-usoil sistors-in-lnw , who , it is saia ^ are- ^ waiting for a now law to disturb existing homes , demanding ' divorce for two and a wedding-ring tor tho survivor . ' . A oaso that camo under our observation nugat offer a hint to tho protesters against tho will . A gentleman loft his property to his daughter , aa only child , but with tho condition that she . was not

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), April 3, 1858, page 323, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2237/page/11/