INDIA.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume XIV, Issue 69, 24 November 1855, Page 3

INDIA.

In the overland summaries of the Bombay Times of the 10th and 26th of June, we find the subjoined items :—: —

The catherans and robbers on our Peshawur frontier, whose amiable characters seem to have secured so much sympathy at home, have been gii'iug us some annoyance, sacking the villages within our frontier, burning the grain stored away for the season, and carrying the inhabitants away with them. Major Edwardes, the Commissioner, with a Brigade of the Punjaub Irregular Horse under the command of Major Neville Chamberlain, had been out endeavouring to bring to order a series of villages which for three years had not only refused us tribute, and spurned allegiance to us, but joined in the raids of those who annoyed us. On the approach of our troops, the rebels sued for peace, oifered to pay up their arrears, and promised to be on their good conduct henceforth ; and as this was all that was desired, they were left unmolested. Village burning is only resorted to with those who, having invaded our territories and done all the mischief in their power, retire before and defy us ; our object is to show, that if they will molest our subjects, they shall not do so with impunity; and to endeavour to convince them how much more advantageous it would be for them, and satisfactory to us, to live on terms of good neighbourhood — they bringing their raw produce for 6alc, and we purchasing it on their own terms, than to indulge in deeds of violence to which they have hitherto driven us, for the protection of our own peasantry, and to prevent them from being plundered and carried away captive without resistance or punishment, by a set of lawless marauders. Sir Charles Napier first led us into these courses, by pushing our frontier to the base of the mountains ; he pursued the system he is said to have reprehended, and added to villageburning, the deportation of the inhabitants, in rtie idle hope of converting the shepherds and robbers of the mountains (who fled as soon as they were left unguarded) into peaceful farmers and peasantry. This is the only military movement we have since last mail to chronicle — not very formidable for an empire of above a million and a quarter of square miles, a million and a half of inhabitants, and which contains in its bosom above a million of men under arms.

The Government of the Punjaub is so scarce of money, that half a million, the amount subscribed to the five per cent, loan, mostly by natives, has been ordered by telegraph to be forwarded express from Bombay, and was sent off on Monday — a singular want of foresight, surely, to defer the despatch of specie, to be transported, 1,500 miles by water, to a period of the year when a voyage to Kurrachee is never unaccompanied by danger, the experiment having been first made in June, 1853. The census of the Punjaub took place on the 31st December, 1854, and its results have just been published ; the population amounts to thirteen millions, the males being to the females as 55 to 45. In the Punjaub one pei son in G/l, aud three females in every 100, are tenants of a gaol ; in England the numbers corresponding to these arc 11, 56, and 18. The Punjaub has scarcely been six years in our possession, Bombay was 200, before a correct census was attempted — the people of Bengal are not yet numbered. Two curious instances of the anxiety of Government to improve the resources of the country, for which so much desire is professed to be felt, have just come to light. The chiefs of Kattiawar, in a fit of superfluous subserviency (for they were no subjects of ours, were perfectly independent, and might have cultivated anything they liked, the British Government having no more right to prohibit poppies than onions, pease, or wheat) asked leave three years since to cultivate the white poppy, guaranteeing Government against all risks of loss of opium revenue by undertaking to make it over at market price to the political agent : they were refused, and the poppy fields lie waste. In November, a joint-stock company for cutting canals of irrigation, was organized in Bombay, and capital sufficient for a general -survey paid up. It was not intended to interfere in any way with the revenue or police arrangements of the country, or any other Government operation whatever. The same organization was to remain, collecting Its. 3, 4, or 5, for the acre of watered land which now collects Rs. 1 for what is dry, and the authorities were asked what share of this they would allow in the name of compensation or profit to the company — every penny Government put in its own pocket being unmixed gain. Six months have elapsed, and no reply been received ! India would very easily pay the charges of the present war from her increased revenues, were private enterprise and capital allured into the country. When capitalists make their appearance, asking no guarantee, boon, or obligation of any kind of the Government, this is the way they are met.

The Madras railway is expected to •be opened a few months hence : the locomotives have been landed in safety : Europeans and natives are said alike to exhibit the most profound apathy on the subject. They will awake by and by : the snort of the iron horse can nowhere be resisted, any more than his speed or power can be equalled. We wonder who it is that gets up for the home press so large a mass of unmitigated nonsense about the importance of the movements of Persia, the most imbecile and contemptible power in Asia. It seems to be forgotten that it is not seventeen years since she took eighteen months to move an army through her own territories on Herat, the distance being under f»00 miles, and that after spending nine months in attempting to take the town, the siege had to be raised . So long as we hold the Persian Gulf, we have no occasion to do more than copy on a somewhat larger scale the plan we pursued in 1838 ; secure near the sea a base of operations, and then occupy Teheran so long as we deemed it expedient, and dictate terms to the Shah from his own capital. With an army of 70,000 men, Bom-

bay can at any time spare 15,000 for such a campaign ; with a less force than this Lord Keane traversed Afghanistan from end to end. We have the Gulf, the grand highway to India, to rest upon : our armies in Afrghanistan were cut off by an almost impenetrable barrier of mountains from reinforcements and supplies. The Shah could, within three months of the order for his subjugation being given, be compelled to do anything we pleased : he moves about masses of useless men which a smart brigade would disperse in an hour, as a matter of state, bullying or bravado, and believes he by this means can chouse us out of ourmoney. His alliance is as worthless as his enmity — a cyclopedian craven beggar. Mr. Lovey has succeeded in his search for the Peninsular and Oriental steamer Pacha, which, in a collision with the Erin about two years ago, went down in the China Seas ; she is in twent)'-six fathom water, and Mr. Lovey is in hopes of being able to recover all the treasure on board — .£60,000.

The revolution created in the Indian army by the Secretary at War by a stroke of his pen, annihilating the odious distinction whose abolition was so long prayed for in vain, will draw after it a vast number of consequences not apparently foreseen. The present v»ar has shown the absolute impossibility of maintaining a British army worthy of the name by ; seniority, purchase, or .. interest promotions, and the intellectual and moral standard of j qualification for entering it must be imme diately elevated. The Company's army must in thi3 manner follow pan passu, or rather perhaps we should say it must lead the way, and cadets once selected on the score of qualification, the system of patronage, whose sole attraction consists in its enabling the patron to promote those who have none, will be immediately extinguished. A revolution in the furlough regulations must follow next ; it will never do that Queen's officers should enjoy the privilege of going home, from time to time, to recruit their health when not just yet at the grave's mouth, or to improve themselves in i their profession, while their brethren, of whom they only take precedence in order of seniority, are imprisoned in the steamy miasma of Ilindostan, till reduced to all but the last stage of TYVGYitnI or bodily inanition. We tru^t that one of the very earliest reforms, as following the present change, will be a positive order interdicting, so soon as the existing time bargains have expired, the most pernicious system of "purchasing out," which has done sofnuch to steep the army in the present state of unprecedented and disgraceful indebtedness in which they now stand.' Although common sense and common morals show, in a moment, that buying steps is of itself a dishonest mode of acquiring promotion in India, opposed to the very first principles on which a strictly seniority service is based, the India House has given a positive permission for its indulgence : the Bengal ryot, in fact, paid the prematurely acquired pensions, the individual Directors had the benefit of the additional patronage, and this sufficed. We were lately presented with the most disgraceful spectacle of three field officers. — Lieutenant-Colonel Maling, commanding 08th Bengal N. 1., Brigadier May no, commanding Nizam's Cavalry, and Major-General Warren of the Bengal Army — all of whom at no distant date had been in' the receipt of betwixt £'2,000 and ;£2,500 a year, requiring to solicit a charitable fund for as much as would pay their passage home, they deponing that they were not worth £700. Of course this was the result of the most disgraceful, inexcusable, and reckless extravagance; but we will venture to affirm that the root of it was the embarrassment occasioned by purchasing steps. A man early involved in India soon come 3to abandon all hope of extricating himself, and becomes a confirmed spendthrift, lost to all sense of honesty and truth, so far as money matters are concerned, who would live beyond his means had he the income of the Governor-General. Hitherto, not only have our officers been degraded and debarred from employment, where they could have rendered the most important services to their country, while they distinguished themselves, but for the sole purpose of providing patronage for the Horse-guards have been most disgracefully excluded from the command of those armies, through the inferior grades of which they had risen to eminence, with the habit and constitution of which they were thoroughly acquainted, in a country with whose geography language, and climate, they alone were familiar. At the head of the 300,000 men the GovernorGeneral has at his disposal, we have a wornout octagenarian who never saw a shot fired, while the whole of the compaigns shared by the Commander-in-chief of Madras have beeii parliamentary. Not content with uttev want of capacity and experience, nearly all our military chiefs are sent out so old that had they been "Wellingtons or Napoleons at forty, lapse of years must have incapacitated them for service in an Indian climate at seventy or seventy-five; aud accordingly, within these three years, one, Sir John Gray, has been sent home from total disability; General Armstrong was unable to inspect his men save in his arm-chair, and died worn out on his passage to England. His successor, General Staveley, w-lio was in his dotage on his appointment, died almost before he assumed command. Is it wonderful, under these circumstances, that our armies at home, for whom generals of experience could only be obtained in India, should be found unserviceable when brought into the field ; or even with the finest soldiers in the world, would it not be a miracle were it otherwise, where men of experience over whom the most inexperienced men are set, are as it were kept purposely out of the way of joining them ? We were lately highly amused to see some of the home newspapers recommending Lord Ellenborough as the only fit administrator of Indian affairs, seeing that it was notorious to every man who could observe, that had the noble Earl been suffered to serve out his time he would have left us no affairs in India worthy of being administered. He himself proclaimed his administration to be that of! brute force : " the proper place," said he, in a ' Calcutta public address, "of the GovernorGeneral is by the side of the Commander-in-Chief ; as India ha 1 ? been won by the sword, it must bo kept by the sword."

The Italian Opera House in the Ifaymarket has been mined as the pvobabla locale of the rew west end branch of the Bank of England.