INDIA.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume I, Issue 23, 5 December 1861, Page 5 (Supplement)

INDIA.

[From the Calcutta Englishman."] September 2. Trade coniinues in the same unsatisfactory state ; no improvement whatever having taken place. There are several causes for the present utter stagnation. The recent ruinous opium speculations of the native bazaar dealers ; the failures among the Marwatees in Bombay, and the consequent distrust felt in their correspondents in this city, have, together with the uncertainty as to the harvest prospects in the North-west, operated detrimentally on the sale of Manchester goods ; the latter cause also tending to keep tip the present high prices of all country produce. There is, in conscqucce, little prospect of beneficial change until confidence in the tiative dealers is restored and the prospect of a plentiful harvest is placed beyond doubt. Some attempts involving a sacrifice of some thirty per cent, on imported goods, have been made to stimulate trade but without any beneficial effects ; and the markets, export, remain in a state'of confirmed stagnation. The (Calcutta) India Famine Belief Committee have dosed their proceedings, and published a report of transactions. The results, as far as they go, are satisfactory, and show beyond dispute howcharitable and philanthropic is the British character and how generally estimable must be a people who, forgetting for the time the deep and lasting injuries they have received at the hands of the natives of this country, have come fonvard with so much generosity and liberality to the succour of those so lately in rebellion against N them. But, while in this instance (hero is much cause

for congratulation, it is with.flinch pain and sorrow the news will have been received in England of the fearful ravages cholera is making among her people in the late faminestricken districts. One peculiarity of this present visitation is the virulence with which it attacks Europeans, and the comparative impunity from its assaults of the native community. At Lahore alone, the deaths among Europeans amounted, on the 30th August, to no less than 3 GO. irom Dehra Ghazec Khan we learn that cholera is fearfully prevalent, hundreds have died, among them Dost Ali Khan, the Chief of the Muzesee tribe. Murders, robberies, and other outrages are such common occurances at Cawnpore now-a-days, that people appear to have grown quite cailous to thorn. The local papers are generally full of accounts of those horrors, perpetrated in'parts of the upper provinces ; and the disbanding of so many native regiments, have added to the number of daeoits and thieves, by letting loose upon society, hundreds ot men, who have no other employment by which they can gain a livelihood.