When refused, he arrested a native official of our Government as a hostage, to enforce the surrender of the fugitive. This conduct was instantly accepted by us as a challenge to war. We invaded Coorg, dethroned the rajah, and annexed his dominions. His predecessors, our good friends and allies, had prudently invested money (about £100,000) in the Madras public debts. The last rajah, until we quarrelled with him, had received the dividends. After his deposition the capital was judged to be forfeited. To the ex-rajah's letters for fourteen years no reply was given by our Indian authorities. At last he came to England with his daughter, whom he wished to bring up as a Christian, having become a Christian himself. Queen Victoria became godmother to the young lady. But when the prince pleaded for his £100,000 he could get in England no other reply, than that they had had no information about it from India, and therefore could take no notice of it. Moreover, by threatening to stop his salary and starve his family at Benares, the Indian House forced him to return. Such is the rajah's story. We take it from the seventh Tract of the India Reform Society. We admit that if our Indian officials were called into public defence, they might tell facts which soften the hardships of the case; but the intense essential hardship will remain, that the Executive Government should be judge in its own quarrel, and act without public process to give solemnity and moral weight. What sort of high spirit could an English duke afford to indulge in, if some official had power to pick a quarrel with him, to confiscate his funded property, invade his baronial estates, and make his children outcasts or mere pensioners dependent on the good-will of invisible officials?

India needs a HIGH COURT, supreme arbiter and interpreter of Treaties and all other documents; a Court before which both the Government and the Princes should be able to sue and liable to be sued, publicly; and, except by verdict of the Court, the Government should have no more power to touch a prince's inheritance than that of an English duke.

DELIBERATIONS BEFORE WAR.

AT THE OPENING OF THE FRANCO-SARDINIAN WAR AGAINST

THE

AUSTRIA.

From the "London University Magazine," June 1859.

HE question of War is generally looked at from one of two points of view, which we may call the Moral and the International. The Moralist considers whether a war be just or unjust, and compares the prosecutor of an unjust war to a robber who makes lawless attack or resistance, his opponent to the officer who enforces the law. In this view the two parties are not co-ordinate. But the international Jurist, presuming that each side is sure to think itself right, and knowing that good men are fighting on each side, considers by what means the necessary evils of such a state of things may be brought to their minimum. As there is no valid or acknowledged tribunal to determine which side is just, which unjust, he treats the two parties as co-ordinate, calls them belligerents, and looks only to the ostensible marks which make a war "lawful," that is to say, regular. Certain forms are defined, as necessary preliminaries, and certain rights are reserved as sacred, even in the midst of hostilities.

Each of these modes of looking at the subject is right and necessary, although we must lament that the second is apt to present itself so exclusively to every great power, that the moral certainty that one side at least is criminal, is apt to be overlooked. But besides these two points of view, there is a third (which may be called National, rather than International), that seems hardly to be considered at all; yet it is of the utmost moment to a free State, like England, the government of which (we are plainly told by Lord Grey and other statesmen) is (and must be!) a government of Party. Inasmuch as the whole nation is implicated in a war, when once it is undertaken,-inasmuch as we all have the same national disgrace, if it is unjust; the same suffering, if it is tedious; the same loss, if it is expensive ;—it is an obvious principle of justice, equally as of expediency, that

every side of the nation should be heard to plead against it by its legitimate representatives. Even under the strongest despotism, if it have the least pretensions to good order, the king or emperor hears advice from opposite sides impartially,-a rule so vehemently dictated by prudence, that it is seldom violated except by the wantonness of one who is half-mad, and drunken with unchecked power. The most warlike imperial potentates habitually take advice of their privy council, and indeed often of their greater council, or senate, before they voluntarily engage in a war. Such a privy council, equally as the senate, uniformly contains men of opposite tendencies and parties, often habitual opponents and perhaps bitter enemies. Neither the Emperor of Russia or of Austria, or the Sultan of Turkey, nor any of our Edwards and Henries, any more than an old king of Etruria or of Rome, would ever make war without hearing the free opinions of the opposite parties or factions which formed the active political world of the State. At the council table of our Elizabeth, there often sat together men who literally thirsted for one another's blood; and if one of them gave to the Queen pernicious advice, another was ready to expose and refute it on the spot. Although a council may be secret, it is not necessarily one-sided : and those powers alone are judicious in their wars (of their justice nothing must be here said) who carefully secure that both sides of a deliberation shall be sifted by the keenness of political rivals. Justice towards the foreigner is a separate point; but justice towards our own people is obviously violated, when they are dragged into a war without the pleas against it being evenly heard. It is in the nature of collective action that a majority, at least if large, must act for the whole; but this proceeds on the presumption that free deliberation has preceded. For though the minority cannot ultimately refuse to be guided by the majority (estimated as the constitution may dictate), yet, at least as much as a criminal at the bar of justice, the plea of innocent men must be listened to and pondered, before they are sentenced. If fathers or sons are to be dragged from their families for the stern work of war; if the material resources of the kingdom are to be drained for some foreign object, nay, and the whole existence of the State brought into hazard; the Queen is bound fully to hear the voice of those who may happen to think the war unjust and pernicious, before she sanctions it.

It is the singular disgrace of modern England to have allowed the solemn responsibility of war to be tampered with by the arbi

trary judgment of executive officers; who decide on deeds of battle and slaughter, involving the allegiance and permanent state of nations, without a single sacred form which shall bind the adviser to conscientious scrupulosity, or such publicity as shall make it notorious how and why each man voted. The nation ⚫ which boasts of its jury; which will not allow pecuniary penalties. to be imposed, much less a life to be taken, without the unanimous verdict of twelve men, solemnly sworn to give a verdict according to the evidence of Right; the nation which would be scandalized and indignant, if a judge were to avow that he gave his award according to the convenience of those in power, and not according to the rights of the case; this same nation permits war to be made, lives by the twenty thousand or fifty thousand to be sacrificed, provinces to be confiscated and permanent empire over foreign subjects established, at the secret advice of a cabinet, all of one party, acting collectively for party-objects, no one outside knowing how each has voted and this, when its members from time to time plainly avow that to speak publicly according to their conscience in such matters would be foppish absurdity, and that of course they go with their Party. Lord Palmerston lately went farther; and no one, when Parliament met, rebuked him, as far as we are aware. When a vote of the Commons had condemned his Chinese hostilities, he punished them by dismissal, and then publicly ridiculed the idea that Parliament ought to fancy that it met "as if in a jury-box to vote on the Right and the Wrong, and not, to vote which statesman should guide the destinies of England." How dead must Cabinets have become to the profound guilt of an unjust war, before a Prime Minister could have ventured on thus publicly outraging the moral sense of the nation! How accustomed to contumelious contempt from the secret cabinets must Parliament be, when it can endure to be told that each member's vote concerning a war is to be decided, not by the rights of the millions at stake in it, but by considering which of two or three despots they had better elect!

And what is the explanation of this enormity, in the nation which thinks itself the freest and justest in the world? We believe it mainly springs out of the anomaly of the East Indian empire for the evil practice has grown stronger and stronger with that empire, until, in the last twenty years, it has attained a development wholly unprecedented.

From the year 1784, when the Board of Control was established, the power of the East India Directors to declare war and peace

was made merely nominal; but the nominal rights reserved for the
Directors served as a screen to the omnipotent ministry behind
them. The Directors, by legal fiction, appointed the Governor-
General, who had the power of war and peace; but the appoint-
ment was subject to the approval of the crown and as the crown
had power to "alter or amend or keep back the dispatches of the
Directors," and in urgent cases, to transmit orders to any func-
tionary in India without the concurrence of the Directors,―nay and
without the knowledge of any but those called the Secret Committee,
-it would have been simply absurd in the Directors to fight
against the crown as to the appointment of the Governor-General.
In point of fact, the Prime Minister appointed him, as effectually
as by the congé d'élire he appoints the Bishops. The orders to
make or not to make war, went out direct from the Board of
Control, that is, really from the ministry in Downing Street. Two,
or even one resolute man had power to make war without check;
not only when, by reason of the distance from England, the excuse
could be made, that there was no time to take advice, but even
when full debate in England was easily possible. But let us pass
to recent times. In the virtuous days of the first Reform Act,
when an excellently intended Indian Bill was passed, under that
pure-minded sagacious governor Lord William Bentinck we began
to believe in a coming millennium for India. But this very noble-
man had already been ordered to send a spy to Afghanistan (Sir
Alexander Burnes), who in 1832 explored the military opportuni-
ties with a view to that notoriously unjust and disastrous invasion
which a few years later Lord Auckland was commanded to execute,
It does not suit our purpose to dwell on the pretences of this war.
The main argument used for it in Parliament by its chief advocate
Lord Palmerston, was, that it was better that we than the Emperor
of Russia should hold in our hands the keys of Asia. So we stole
the keys, for fear he should steal them!
But let that pass.
What we here desire to insist on, is, that the war became
a terrible reality, was supported by a noble army from Eng-
land, besides the properly Indian troops, that it cost us
the unprecedented butchery of the entire army of occupa-
tion,* added twenty-three millions sterling to the Indian debt,
left the treasury of India in a permanent deficit, drew after it

* But for this terrible massacre, the English armies might have tried to occupy Bokhara also, on the other side of the Hindoo Koosh; for Captains Stodhart and Conollay were sent thither as spies, and the ministerial organs blustered that the Russians were intriguing in Bokhara. In this chase of Russian intrigue over all Asia, a severe fall was certain to be at last encoun