FRENCH PRESS ON INDIA.

Lyttelton Times, Volume IX, Issue 557, 6 March 1858, Page 3

FRENCH PRESS ON INDIA.

Whoever has been in the habit of reading the French papers since the outbreak of the Indian revolt must have been struck by the extraordinarily conflicting statements and opinions they contain. If these amounted only to differences of opinion as to the probable result of the struggle, there would be no cause for wonder, but they also display strange innattention to facts and to accuracy of detail. Tun?, for instance, with respect to the number of European troops we shall have to oppose to the mutineers when all the reinforcements now on their way have srivel, we find it-vario isly estimated at from 30,000 to 80,000, while one paper said that the reinforcements sent would tutfill the gaps created before they reach India. Common attention to statistics easily obtained, and to the precise statements supplied by the English papers of the number of men embarked, would prevent such, strange discrepancies as these. With regard to the causes.of the insurrection opinions equally rash have been hazarded, and the small number of journals habitually hostile to England have da ly shuddered over the newly-discovered misgovernment which has driven the Indians to revolt. With such unfounded attacks as these latter it is agreeable to contrast the juster estimate of British rule in India . contained in an article in to-day's Steele, entitled "England and the Police of the Seas ":—

" One must do England the justice to say that she was the first to renounce conquest in Europe. She transported her ambition elsewhere, and lias had the immense glory to give birth to one of the greatest nations in the world—to the people free par excellence —to the American nation. Her conquests have almost been conquests of commerce and of civilization. Russia, Austria, Prussia, have aggrandized themselves at the expense of free European populations, whose nationality they have killed, and whose development they have stopped. The English have not committed this crime. In this respect they are like France, and have no restitution to make. They pursued their unity, and, like us, they stopped when that unity was complete. They have sought the elements of their expansion beyond the limits of their European brethren; they have peopled the solitudes of America, and called into life the new world of Oceania. If, become masters of India by the fortune of events, they have not assimilated^it to themselves, allowance must be made for the time and for the immensity of the difficulty. But what great things they have there done! How many barbarous customs abolished! how many towns rendered healthy, roads constructed, and rivers bridged! Properly to appreciate English domination iv India one must know what India was before that domination, one must remember the unheard-of struggles of sects and religions, and the inundations of blood of which it was the periodical prey. Millions of men perished from half-century to half-century in wars, in the establishment aid tho fa I', of empires. The massacres that now revolt Europe, from whatever side they proceed, would have been mere festivals previously to the British rule."

The " Siecle " then proceeds to set forth the services rendered by England to civilization, besides that of having been the first to teach Europe that there was another kind of govern-

tnent than despotism, the first to establish the rights of the nation by the side of the rights of the.Throne—the only country where representative and constitutional government has been solidly established and wisely exercised. •*She has been the chief agent in purging the world of piracy and the slave trade, and establishing the freedom and security of the ocean:—•

" If» by an impossibility, her immense maritime power were suddenly to vanish, and no other nation were ready to replace it, the anarchy of the seas would again burst forth, and centuries of new efforts would be required to repair the evil. Commerce, then, no .more than.philosophy and liberty should desire the .fall of England. ■In like manner that our conquest of Algeria was a humane act, a benefit for the world, so is : the. greatness of England at this moment one of: tho conditions of universal security. 'If it did ' not exist'in its present form, it -would have to be reconstructed, and it would reconstruct itself' under a different form. It serves not only-as the j basis of the European equilibrium, to check en-: terpriseg directed against that equilibrium, but, it is one of the elements of the material life of; our politicalnniverse. Suppress it without re-! placing it, you have a catastrophe that cannot be estimated; on a thousand points ofthe world's surfacebarbarism-revives and destroys commerce forages. It has been said rthat there are no necessary men, nor do we believe in necessary -Powers; but there are some eminently useful, whose loss leaves a frightful void. And England is of those nations and of those Powers."