crease expense and establishments, and enable Government to introduce shorter and more simplified forms, consequently 'much easier of check and control than they are at present.

Not only the heads, but the different branches of the service 'will have their character associated with the success of a system " which reposes a confidence which cannot be abused by an indivi'dual without, in some degree, implicating the branch of the army to which he belongs. Much has been done within late years to give elevation of principle to the public service of 'India. Great abuses have been corrected, and no sources of indirect profit are now sanctioned by usage; many establishments and rules therefore, which were essential formerly, may at present be deemed not only unnecessary but calculated to have evil effects. With such impressions, and on the grounds. ' of the facts I have stated, I shall proceed to lay before Government the plan I propose for the execution of the duties of the Military Board, merely stating, that I consider it to be quite indispensable to complete the reform so happily commenced on the Commissariat and other branches of the military expen'diture of this Government.

It is, in my opinion, desirable that the heads of every other department should also have a certain fixed responsibility attached to them individually, from which they consider themselves, and are in fact, relieved, by acting in the name of the Board. "The commandant of Artillery might be vested with authority 'to control all matters connected with the Ordnance department, exercising his power over the Grand Arsenal, Gun-carriage and Gunpowder departments, holding himself responsible to Government for regulating every thing connected therewith. "The chief Engineer, in like manner, and on the same principle, might be vested with authority for controlling all matters connected with estimates for buildings and repairs, submitting them direct to Government with his observations upon them.

"The Quartermaster-general also to be vested with authority for regulating, under the orders of his Excellency the Com'mander-in-chief, every thing connected with his and the Barrack departments."

And he then drew up a series of orders suspending the functions of the Military Board at Bombay, and directing that the heads of departments, then members of the Military Board, should be severally invested with authority to regulate and controul all matters connected with their different departments.

Now we consider this a sensible business-like method of proceeding: making each servant of Government in his own department, to be himself responsible for the due performance of the

duties of it, and giving him liberty and latitude of action, so that he may, as occasion requires it, act with promptitude and decision, and not shilly shally and wait for orders and refer to his colleagues. There is in India a too great dread of responsibility. No man will venture to move hand or foot for fear of the consequences: each is bound by iron laws which should he transgress he is sure to rue it; the rules of the Service are often so complicated, especially in the Auditor General's department, that few understand them, and many an honest soldier has had to fight his battles over again ere he could touch his pay; and the consequence is, that where officers have the chance of losing their pay before them, they do not like to run any risks in ordering things, on their own responsibility, or advancing money which on many occasions is required. We lately read of one case now pending in the Courts of law at home, in which an officer of high rank in the Bengal Service is claimant for a large sum advanced by his father when in the Service in Oude, which money has never been paid to this day, and possibly never will, for without vouchers and documents and technical papers of their own devising, nothing will pass through the Honorable Company's Audit Office. We feel sure that this is the error of system; that it is a system, well intended to guard against careless and remiss habits, and that in reality this Government under whose shadow we repose is far too liberal and highminded ever to wish to do the least injustice to any of their officers; on the contrary we consider that they are liberal in the extreme, and we sincerely hope that their tenure of power in India may long be continued to them.

In this article it might have been supposed that we should have touched on the often-mooted subject of the transference of the Indian army to the crown, but this is too intimately connected with the subject of the Queen's troops in India, which is far too wide a range to take in this article, which we must now conclude in the words quoted in the Quarterly-Si vis pacem, para bellum.

[For the sake of those who may be unacquainted with the meaning of the Native terms here and there used in this article, we must explain that "Sobadars" and "Jemadars" are Native Commissioned Officers of small rank, with but little or no real power, commanded on all occasions by even the junior Ensign in the Army or even an English Non-Commissioned Officer. "Havildars answer to our rank of Sergeants, and "Naiks ' to Corporals. Three English Non-Commissioned Officers are usually posted to each Native corps.]

ART. IV.-India's cries to British Humanity, relative to Ghat murders, &c., by James Peggs, late Missionary at Cuttack, Orissa.

Ir may appear to some a singular fact,-but it is not the less a fact on account of its apparent singularity, that although the intercourse between England and India has been carried on with little or no interruption for 300 years, and although during the last hundred years many thousands of our countrymen have lived and died in India, yet at this day the people of England and the people of India know very little, so very little that we should not be very far wrong if we said nothing,—of each other's habits and character. The days have indeed gone by when the intelligent Hindus believed the Honorable East India Company to be a respectable matron; and the day has gone by also when the intelligent English stuffed the portmanteaus of their friends coming to Calcutta with notes of introduction to their friends resident in Bombay, requesting the latter to shew to the former any little attention in their power, in the way for example of inviting them occasionally to a quiet teaparty, or giving them permission to shoot over their grounds. These days have no doubt passed away, and it is only the very unintelligent either of the Hindus or of the English that could possibly fall into such mistakes now; but still it is true at this day, and will probably continue so for not a few days to come, that the people of India and the people of England are in a great measure strangers to each other. Regarding this as a great evil, and persuaded that such a state of things could not have existed so long without blame being due to the one party or the other, or perhaps to both, we must be allowed to say in vindication of our own countrymen that the main part of the blame does not lie at their door. Had the Indian people been in England as long as the English have been in India, and had they been possessed of as much desire to obtain and as much willingness to communicate information regarding all kinds of matters as the English are endowed withal, we cannot doubt that each people would have known vastly more of the other than each actually does know of the other at this hour. The Hindus are a people self-separated from the rest of the world. Between them in their present condition and the rest of mankind there can be no association. Their religion, which enters into every act of their lives, and, we might almost say, into every feeling of their hearts, has a tendency to isolate them entirely and absolutely, and in proportion as

it is influential, does in very deed isolate them, from all other men. It thus happens that many men, and men of active minds and enquiring habits too, live for a quarter of a century in the very midst of the people, and at the end know very little more about them than they knew when they first cast their eyes on the green banks of the Ganges. Yea the chances. are ten to one that the little that they suppose themselves to know, they know erroneously.

Such, doubtless, is one of the main causes of the conflicting and irreconcileable accounts that have been so often given to the world of the character of the Hindus. The facts on which the accounts are based may have been ascertained with tolerable correctness, but they have not been the whole facts of the case. The inferences have been deduced from a partial induction ; the generalization has been wider than the facts. Thus from the fact that the Hindus, or at least many of them, abstain most determinedly from the shedding of animal blood, it has been inferred that they are by far the most humane and gentle of all the sons of men and from the fact that they were in the habit of sacrificing human victims, and burning widows on the pyres of their husbands, it has been as confidently concluded that they are one of the most brutal and blood-thirsty races on the face of the earth. Now about the facts there was no mistake at all. It is perfectly true that the Hindus in our territory did, as long as they were permitted by our government, and that many of those out of our territory do still, burn the live widows of their deceased friends; and it is also perfectly true that many Hindus will not on any consideration kill even a noxious insect, while very few of them could be induced by any means whatsoever to be parties to the slaughter of a cow. But while the facts are correctly stated, the inferences, one or both, are incorrectly drawn. Were it not so we should have the same men at once the most humane and the most inhumane, the most cruel and the most gentle of our race. But this cannot be. The truth is that both the inferences are erroneous. Inhumanity had little or nothing to do with the Sati rite; humanity has as little or less to do with the vegetable diet of the Hindu. It was not from any natural or acquired blood-thirstiness that the Hindus slew their widows; it is not from any natural or acquired bloodabhorrence that they refrain from slaying their cows. It were perhaps little less erroneous to suppose that the ladies and gentlemen who make their tiffin from a beaf-steak are necessarily more savage than those who fare on the vegetable products of the earth, than to suppose that the man who burnt

his living mother was necessarily less humane than the man who cherishes and sustains her, and makes up to her so far as a manly and affectionate son can make up for the loss of her husband.

The truth is that with the Hindu religion overbears nature and feeling and principle altogether. It is one peculiar excellence of the Christian system in its purity, that it is wholly a religion of principle. It teaches that "bodily exercise profiteth little;" it makes little of external observances, excepting in so far as these are the spontaneous effusions of the heart; and it provides for the rectification of the heart, so that all good. works may become a willing and spontaneous service. Thus it is that the Christian, while "not without law to Christ," is in the highest and best sense of the term the only real freeman. He does just what he likes, for his God enables him to like just what he ought to do. But with the Hindu system it is precisely the reverse. It takes no account of the feelings or affections of the soul. Its demands are fully satisfied when a certain round of external observances is complied with. The good or bad state of the heart can add nothing to, and take nothing from, the imagined merits of these bodily exercises.* From this fact we derive the inference that from the character of the actions required by the system and habitually performed by its votaries, we are not necessarily to infer so depraved a state of the heart as would be implied in the performance of the actions by those whose actions were the spontaneous effusions of their hearts. We say not that the habitual performances of the actions to which we have referred can fail to produce a deadening and deteriorating influence on the feelings and affections of the soul-for this were contrary alike to all sound philosophy and to the facts which observation ascertains; but what we say is that the performance of the acts does not necessarily imply such a prior deterioration of the affections as might be supposed by those who are conversant only with a state of things, in which the external actions are, in general, tolerably correct indices of the state of the heart. The religion, which is the final source of the actions, has not in truth its seat in the affections at all. It is only through the habits of action that it enjoins, and the habits of thought that these actions engender, that it exercises any influence at all on the heart. Thus we should probably be wrong if we should hold that none but

Such is certainly the fact in regard to Hinduism as ordinarily understood by its professors. We do not deny that its sacred books contain precepts respecting the regulation of the heart, but these precepts are completely a dead letter in the estimation of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of its professors.