Hawes had repeatedly accused the promoters of this inquiry of being unwilling to permit Lord Torrington's defence to be heard. Earl Grey had undertaken to make it in the House of Lords, ‘when the proper time should come'-Sir Emerson Tennent before the Committee. But when the truth was known, from the mouths of these four witnesses whose veracity could not be impugned, the whole available energies of the Government were concentrated to stifle and prevent the exposure which it involved. It was even pre

A

ferred that the charges which had been so publicly advanced against both Earl Grey and Lord Torrington, and which the former nobleman had so arrogantly undertaken to meet and refute, should remain unanswered, rather than that the real nature of the mysteries of Ceylon should be laid bare to the public eye.* And as the power of Ministers, when unscrupulously used, is great, they have for a time succeeded in their object. Report was, after a severe struggle, and the rejection of many draft-reports, agreed to by the committee, calling the serious attention of her Majesty's Government to the evidence which the committee had taken, and again recommending that a Royal Commission should be instantly sent out, unless some step should forthwith be taken by the Government which might obviate the necessity of further investigation.' This compromise was only acceded to on the express understanding that the step in question, the recall of Lord Torrington, should be immediately adopted; and a few days afterwards it was announced that his Lordship had resigned. The publication of his defence, however, Ministers strenuously and successfully opposed, in spite of the just remonstrances of Messrs. Baillie and Hume.

6

The Committee of Inquiry seem to have been in considerable perplexity as to the exact force and meaning of the term 'martial law,' nor does her Majesty's Judge Advocate, Sir David Dundas, who was examined by them, appear to have shed much additional light upon the subject. He described it to be an unwritten law, and admitted that he knew of no authority which defines the precise powers vested in those whose duty it is to carry it out: he considered it to be more comprehensive than military law, as administered under the Articles of War and the Mutiny Act; and showed that Blackstone, in speaking of martial law, says

Both Mr. Hawes and Mr. M'Cullagh have vapoured a good deal in the House about the impropriety of receiving private and confidential letters as evidence before a Committee, and have talked figuratively of 'desks having been broken open and pockets rifled' in order to injure Lord Torrington. By reference to the published proceedings of the Committee it will be found that the only motions made to compel an unwilling witness to produce private and confidential letters were made by Mr. Hawes himself-namely, to compel Mr. M. Christie, the agent in London for the complaining parties, to produce letters of that character which he had received from Mr. Elliott and Lieut.-Colonel Braybrooke.

'that

'that it is built upon no settled principles, but is entirely arbitrary in its decisions, and is, as Sir Matthew Hale observes, in truth and reality no law, but something indulged in rather than allowed as a law; it ought not to be permitted in time of peace, when the king's courts are open for all persons to receive justice according to the law of the land.'

We ourselves should define it to be simply the law of necessity or of self-defence. The right which a governor of a colony has to proclaim martial law over his subjects may be said to bear a close analogy to the right which an individual, in the absence of legal protection, has to slay an assailant. In both cases the evil must be grave. In both cases all regular means of defence must be exhausted or beyond reach before the aggrieved party resorts to extremities. In both cases the burthen of the proof lies on him who has ventured on such an expedient, and, if he fails to vindicate himself, he is liable to severe penalties.

Now, if we examine the despatches in which the late Governor of Ceylon recounts his exploits under martial law, we shall find that he continued its operations long after tranquillity was confessedly restored, and that he even kept his courts-martial actively employed in the very town where the supreme courts were by his desire sitting, undisturbed, trying prisoners for capital offences. No plea of disaffection or of intimidation was offered by him as an apology for this unconstitutional proceeding. He admitted that the juries of the supreme courts were fairly and respectably constituted, and that both they and the law officers of the colony were willing and able to do their duty; but then he complained that their convictions were not so frequent as he could have wished; that they were extraordinarily lenient,' and inconve niently delicate as to the quality of the evidence submitted to them; and that they had convicted but eight out of eighteen individuals put upon their trial, whilst the courts-martial, with 'speedier and highly salutary severity,' had almost invariably' convicted every prisoner brought before them. He even expatiated upon the advantage of convincing the Cingalese that he was invested by the Queen with a power greater than the law itself' more summary and certain in its operation' than the established laws of the land in which they lived. In short, he appears to have considered that it was entirely optional with him whether he ruled his subjects by martial or by common law; and he happened, most unluckily for humanity, for justice, and for himself, to prefer the former (No. 2, pp. 219-221). It is surely not quite sufficient for Earl Grey to inform the English nation that he approves of such unheard-of proceedings as these; he ought to condescend, even for his own sake, to be more explicit,

if

if he desires that his approval or his censure should henceforward carry with it any weight. Stat pro ratione voluntas is a damaging answer for the Chief of the Colonial Reformers to fall back upon under circumstances such as it has been our fate here to

recount.

The matter cannot rest where it is. It must be revived when Parliament meets. And our chief object in submitting this paper to our readers has been to disengage the facts of the case from the mass of official chaff in which they have been so laboriously buried, in order to make them more intelligible and available to those who take an interest in the prosperity of our colonial empire, and in the honour of our public men.

If her Majesty's Ministers choose to forget, we cannot, that but a couple of years ago, at the very time that the follies and horrors we have enumerated were being perpetrated in Ceylon with the entire approval of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, they caused their Royal Mistress to censure, in her speech from the throne, the faithful and gallant servant of one of her allies, who had successfully put down a formidable and bloody rebellion, attributable, in no slight degree, to the open encouragement held out to his traitorous subjects by British diplomats and by British naval officers. Nor has it escaped our memory that, about the same time, the same minister, whose character is so gravely implicated by the recent jobs and atrocities of which we have given this faint but faithful sketch, thought fit, when unsuccessfully endeavouring to defend himself from another charge of delinquency-as unworthy of his official station, though fortunately less serious in its results than the present one-to conclude his address to the House of Peers with the following solemn peroration :

'My Lords, I say that the high character of public men is of the deepest importance to the country. How much of the moral strength of our institutions, of the power-I do not say of the administration of the day, but of the government in its widest sense, including both the executive and the legislative authorities of the state-how much of the power of government in this country depends upon the general belief of the people of this empire that the public business is fairly and honourably conducted! My Lords, I think we have an awful warning on the other side of the Channel, of the effects which a contrary belief is capable of producing. Is there any man who doubts that the sudden crumbling, in the midst of its apparent power and prosperity, of the government of France in the month of February [1848], and the calamities and bloodshed which have since ensued-that all those frightful events, which have startled and alarmed the whole of Europe, are in no small degree to be attributed to the impression which, rightly or wrongly, justly or unjustly, certain unfortunate events and disclosures

had

had latterly made on the public mind of France, that there was something rotten and corrupt in the manner in which public affairs were managed, and in those in high places by whom they were conducted?'

The moral which Earl Grey subsequently endeavoured to tack on to the above magniloquent preface was, not that it was wrong for those in high places' to be guilty of 'unfair and dishonourable' conduct, but that it was unfair and dishonourable in the men whom such conduct aggrieved to bring home their misdeeds to their aggressors. A similar line of retort-we cannot call it defence was attempted on the present occasion; and, as we have shown, foul were the epithets and unscrupulous the assertions which were resorted to by the Ministerialists to discredit and discourage Messrs. Baillie and Hume, and to cloak the conduct of Earl Grey and Lord Torrington. But those gentlemen, strong in their conviction that le scandale est dans le crime; il n'est pas dans le cri du sang injustement répandu,' persevered, combating power by truth, and, to their credit be it said, they have succeeded.

ART. V.-Claims and Resources of the West Indian Colonies. A Letter to the Right Hon. W. Gladstone, M.P., late Secretary of State for the Colonies. By the Hon. E. Stanley, M.P. Third edition.

THIS

1850.

HIS is the remarkable work of a remarkable person, though as yet he has but entered on public life. Mr. Stanley, not choosing, like others of his age and nation, venando aut agrum colendo ætatem agere (pursuits which far be it from us to join the Roman historian in decrying as servile occupations), fares forth to examine with his own eyes those foreign countries whose affairs are most connected with our own-not merely the European states, but those beyond the Atlantic; and having one season gone over the greater portion of North America, he last year made an extensive tour in the West Indies. The result of his visit now lies before us; but he also profited largely by it in the late session of Parliament, when his maiden speech was admitted by all parties to have been one of the most successful, and the most deservedly successful, that have for very many years past been delivered. Besides bringing extraordinary stores of information to bear upon the question, his powers of extempore debating were displayed in a memorable manner at the expense of a certain political economist; and even those who agreed not with the performer, were fain to admire, possibly to enjoy, the infliction. It is, however, not with the speaker, but the writer, that we here have to do; and we may state generally, that with

VOL. LXXXVIII. NO. CLXXV.

K

out

out any regard to the opinions delivered in this tract, all must allow its merits to be great; the composition clear and unaffected; the details of a complicated subject presented with great distinctness; the arguments on a controverted question handled with exemplary calmness; and the sentiments marked by singular moderation, on topics peculiarly calculated to excite strong, if not angry feelings.

There are three subjects presented to our consideration by this tract-the severe depression of the West Indian Colonies-the policy of the mother country which has occasioned this suffering -the connexion between that policy and the African Slavetrade. This last head divides itself into two-the operation of the coast blockade, and that of the course pursued by the government in maintaining the blockade, and yet encouraging, by the admission of slave-grown sugar of slave-trading countries, the slave-trade intended by the blockade to be extinguished. Now of these subjects we mean only to touch the last, after stating a few particulars connected with the first-the distressed condition of our colonial fellow-subjeets.

It is most unanswerably urged by Mr. Stanley that, as the emancipation forced upon the planters was admitted by the government, against the contention of many abolitionists, to give the slave-owners a claim for compensation, and as the sum granted is on all hands allowed to have been much less than the loss sustained (one-half at the utmost), the continuance of the protection against foreign slave-grown sugar was quite a matter of courseelse the argument would have been, You have lost so much and are entitled to compensation, therefore you shall have one-half your loss;' in other words, 'We admit that we defraud you-not, however, of the whole of what we take from you, but only of 50 per cent.' No country ever held such language as this without being for ever after stigmatized as guilty of the most open and shameless injustice. Therefore the removal of the protection which alone could enable our planters to make head against the foreign owner of slaves and importer of slaves, was never dreamt of by any party in 1833, when the emancipation was carried-and would have been scornfully rejected by all parties, had so much as a whisper of it even been heard at that time. We shall give a few illustrations of the wretched state to which the combined operation of the forced liberation, rejoiced in by all, as we now verily believe, and the withdrawn protection almost as generally reprobated, have reduced those once flourishing settlements-admitting all the while that our feelings have been less painfully excited for the West Indian body than for the unhappy Africans, on whom the same wretched policy, so falsely called that of Free Trade, has inflicted sufferings incomparably more cruel.