Page from Friend of India Newspaper [‎1r] (1/2)

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THE FRIEND OF INDIA.
PUBLISHED EVERY T
No. 1632, Vol. XXXIL
SERAMPORE : THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 1S66.
1 j ice 1 own ILdition Rs. 20 in advauots.
» Post „ „ 23-4
or Jis. 30 in arrear.
Coisiezsis,
The Week,
The Persian Gule, ...
The Flioht to the Hills,
A ngklo- I ndian Aechitectuee, ...
Put not Y ouii Teust in Peinoes,
The Demand for Railway Transit,
The Scarcity in Orissa and Ganjam,
Persia As It Is,
The Eye and the Ophthalmoscope,
Extracts from a Himalayan Journal,
Military Letter, ...
Epitome oe News, ...
The Mail of 10th March,
Marriages, Births and Death,
Shipping Intelligence.
The Bengal Legislature,
The Hooghly River Trust,
Girls Schools in Serampore, .
Europe, ... ... , .
A dvertisements,
Military and Civil Gazette, .
The Money Market,
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THE Wkm.,
THE Week's telegrams are few but satis^
factory An East India Company trading post. . The reception of Mr. Rassam by
king Theodore, and the release of the British
consul and missionaries who have for two
years suffered imprisonment attended with
terrible hardships, is satisfactory, though the
means taken to effect the object are as little
flattering to our national prestige as the Bhoo-
tan business has been. The fear of war
between North and South Germany, which
V. is so imminent, is not likely to be real
ized. The mioor States seem determined
feot- to aRp'^t Prussia which has so seriously
wounded their self-love ; Austria is destitute
of funds and the materiel of war while
the Hungarian difficulty is not yet quite
settled ; and the Dnke of Saxe Coburg has
taken the place of mediator. The Reform
Bill, in "spite of the non-disfranchisement of
the smaller boroughs, has been received in
England with that favour which we expected.
The second reading which will decide its
fate will not take place before the 30th instant.
The Fenian danger has for the time been
met in Ireland by Lord Wodehouse's
vigorous counsels and measures, so that,
when reform has been settled, Parliament
may have leisure to consider those changes
in the position of the established church,
and those concessions to the advocates of
tenant-right and a purely secular system
of education, which the peculiar genius of
jthe people demand, on the same principle
that Scotland enjoys its national institu
tions. The despatch of a squadron to the
coast of Canada will give confidence to Lord
Monck in meeting the threatened attacks
of the Fenians there.
O i - i Saturday the Bengal Council, having
dul} legislated for palkeewallas and against
hackery wallas, will receive the report
of its Select Committee on the Hooghly
Trust Bill. It seems impossible that the mea
sure should pass into law in any form this ses
sion. It would be fruitless for us to discuss the
Bill which the Advocate General described as
purely tentative. One point alone, at pre
sent, demands an expression of public opin
ion.,, The Council seem determined to make
the Tnist a mere branch of the Municipal
department, as the drainage and water
works are. The original Bill proposed that
four of the ten Trustees shall be merchants
or shipowners on the spot. But even this
insufficient representation of the mercantile
and shipping interests has been withdrawn
in the amended Bill, which proposes to vest
the Trust in a committee of ten Justices of
the Peace. Of course the two merchants
who are members of the Council refused to
agree to such a proposal, as will be found
from the report of the Select Committee
elsewhere. But this is not all. The Chair
man of the Trust, or " Committee" as it is pro
posed to term it, in whom alone by the
26th section the members may vest "all
their powers," is to be the already overwork
ed Chairman of the Justices, A despot is
wanted in each capacity, for the river and
for the city, and it is difficult to say which
needs his energetic and skilled action the
more. But to give both classes of duties to
one man is to secure his failure in discharg
ing either satisfactorily. Let the merchants
see to it. The Trust ought to be their
affair mainly, with one or two Justices to re
present the interests of the city. The Chair
man of the Trust ought to be a first class
hydraulic engineer with no other duties,
assisted by a good busineFg man as deputy.
If the port could secure Mr. Leonard C. E.
at any price and give him carte blanche it
would be fortunate. The local legislature
/ should pledge the port in this Bill to noth
ing more than temporary establishments un
der these two officers, leaving any wider
executive machinery to be provided for per
manently after a year's experience. What
ever is proposed the Chamber of Commerce
should look to the wide and almost imperial
interests of the whole trade of the Gangetic
valley and Assam, and not allow a purely
local and necessarily selfish municipal body,
which is unequal to its own proper duties,
to sacrifice a gigantic work to petty local
considerations.
A singular misapprehension as to the treat
merit of the cash balances by Sir Charles
Wood in the current year has been caused
in most of the provincial papers by our
Calcutta contemporaries' incorrect reports
of the financial statement. We see
Mr. Massey denounced for allowing Sir
Charles Wood to draw £800,000 more than
he ought to have done in the year about to
expire, and so causing the deficit. This
is the opposite of what Mr. Massey said
and we reported. Sir Charles Wood drew
that sum less, and sold stock in England to
meet his requirements to the full as estimated.
In fact be undid Sir Charles Trevelyan's
hasty conversion of the surplus cash balan
ces into capital which we condemned at the
time, and which reduced the balances so
low as to imperil the solvency of Govern
ment last December. The resale of £800,000
of capital, combined with the large earnings
of the railways, has restored stability to
the balances, raising them to the estimated
level of- £121 millions at the close of this
month. It now only remains for Mr. Massey
[ to sell stock to strengthen the currency
3 S
brings
reserve before next cold season
iound the annual crisis, unless the recom
mendations of the Currency Commission as
to legalising gold and removing the cir
cles are immediately carried out by the
Home authorities. Meanwhile that Commis
sion persists in what we must gravely
term its silly refusal to publish the evi
dence, and the issue of its Report is de
layed by the flight
mend to the study
these words of the
teres ting review of
by Baron James de
Superior Council of
charged
to Simla. We corn-
of Sir W. Mansfield
Economist, in its iu-
the evidence given
Rothschild before the
Commerce in France,
with the inquiry into " the Princi
ples and General Facts which regula.te
Monetary and Paper Circulation." That
Council, w r e are told, " has committed the
grave error of not publishing day by day a
detailed report of the evidence given before
it, albeit the ostensible object of its mission
was to enlighten the commercial public on
those matters, respecting which considerable
ignorance prevails." So the Economist has
been forced to obtain the evidence by other
means. Yet Sir W. Mansfield has more
than once paraded his desire for immediate
if not full publicity even in political ques
tions like that of Bhootan.
W e are glad to state that the increase of
salaries proposed by Mr. Cust for the Punjab,
the Oudh, and the Jhansi Civil Lists are sanc
tioned, being an additional grant of about one
lakh One lakh is equal to one hundred thousand rupees per annum, while all the proposed reduc
tions of the Agra and Bengal Civil Lists are
disallowed with the following exceptions—•
The Commissioners of Opium are both re
duced ; the Sudder Boards of Revenue, Bengal
and North West are both reduced. Mr. Cust's
own salary is reduced £300 a year which is
the best proof of his -being actuated in this
matter solely by a regard for the public in
terests.
Gun Military Correspondent's letter con-
■ains hopeful news for Indian Officers.
M r. J ohn D ickinson is at it again. In
spite of his own confession as to the recep-
• on of one " testimonial" and the expecta-
tinn of another for agitating about Dhar, in
a petition which he caused to be presented
to Parliament for the right of adoption by
the Mysore Rajah, he describes himself as
" a person who has for many years devoted
himself gratuitously to the task of promot
ing the interests of the people of India in
connection with those of his own country
men ; and that, on various occasions, he
has proved to be possessed of better inform
ation and sounder views of policy than
the executive authorities in India." The
impertinence of the petition is paralleled
onty by the grossnesH of its misrepresenta
tions. The same unscrupulous agency An office of the East India Company and, later, of the British Raj, headed by an agent. in Cen
tral India which took up the Dhar case is
now managing that of Mysore. The oriental
mode of payment is not beforehand but by
" testimonials" dependent on success—testi
monials wrung, as ;n that case, from the un
willing chief and his oppressed tenantry.
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