nary demands on the exchequer, the Government was spending far more than it could collect, and that it was compelled to resort again to a form of taxation peculiarly obnoxious to all who came under its operation. The Indian Chancellor of the Exchequer has to make up his annual budget from the returns of no less than eight distinct administrations, and he labours besides under signal disadvantages with regard to the increase of taxation and the sources of wealth. Irregular modes of recruiting an exhausted treasury, familiar to Rajas and Vizirs, and employed at a crisis and with arbitrary incidence, would be opposed to public opinion in England, although we suspect that they would be tolerated and even welcomed by the people. Schedules and forms, perfectly familiar to us, strike the Oriental with the dismay felt by Hayraddin Maugrabbin when asked by Toison d'Or to explain his heraldic scroll. The taxable wealth of India is confined to certain areas, and limited by unalterable rules. Recent ex

periments have satisfied Indian administrators that, for all practical purposes, India is a poor country. Wealth is either hidden altogether, is squandered in ornaments or festivities, or is disbursed on social considerations which seem alternately to invite and repel the tax-gatherer. So, what with the prejudices of caste, the danger of disaffection, the necessity of favouring and protecting English interests, and the difficulty of trusting one native with authority where the purse of his fellow is concerned, the Imperial Government is forced to tread in the old grooves, and to wait patiently until the gradual but certain expansion of the sources of revenue shall prove adequate to the increased requirements of every department of the State. The financial condition of the Empire is, however, radically not unsound. The Government, in 1869, had tenders for its loans, in excess of its wants, at 44 and 4 per cent. The old securities command a high premium in the market. The total debt of India does not equal three years of its public revenue. Money has been freely offered to the Government by several of the leading princes. And it may be fairly pleaded that there was nothing to excite lasting distrust or alarm in the condition of the finances as handed over by Lord Lawrence to Lord Mayo, though there was ample cause for inquiry, retrenchment, and economy, and for accuracy in the framing of all future budgets.

As regards the disaster in Orissa, Mr. George Campbell, from whose last essay we have already quoted a passage, was appointed as head of the Famine Commission, and he showed conclusively that though more alacrity might have relieved the

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Local Government from odium and reproach, yet no human exertion could have prevented great loss of life and suffering. We must not forget the gigantic areas over which these eastern visitations extend, the difficulties of communication in the tropical rains, the amazing apathy of the natives, and their superstitious regard for the purity of caste. Lord Lawrence has been blamed for not forcing the Government of Bengal into action, or for not overruling its operations by his own. But that Government was then in the hands of an able and experienced civilian, who had risen to high employ under statesmen so different as Lord Hardinge, Lord Dalhousie, and Lord Canning, and who had enjoyed in turn the entire confidence of each. Lord Lawrence, though officially reassured of the prospects of Orissa by reports forwarded from the Lower Provinces, had, unofficially, a feeling that the true state of the case was not disclosed, nor the magnitude of the danger apprehended. Personally, he was anxious to store grain, to provide against contingencies, and to place the machinery of Government in a condition to meet the calamity. This was not done in time, and it is to be regretted that the Viceroy did not formally express his own convictions to his colleagues, or make the scarcity a matter for deliberate discussion in Council. No human foresight or exertion could, however, have prevented great loss of life in such an isolated but extensive province as Orissa. We do not readily comprehend a state of things in which a dozen or score of Englishmen are suddenly called on to direct untrustworthy or inefficient native instruments in some great public undertaking, to force a nation of fatalists to exert themselves in the face of a stupendous visitation, or supervise operations which cover the area of three ordinary English counties. The Irish famine and the distress in Lancashire, mitigated as those occurrences were by the mighty resources of England, are, by comparison, insignificant when measured with the famine of Orissa.

A review of the five years for which Lord Lawrence governed India as Viceroy, whatever effect it may produce on the readers who live close to the event, will, we believe, lead posterity to the conclusion that it would be difficult to find any other period in the history of British India in which the reforms have been so numerous, the redress of evils so practical, and the advance so unlikely to be followed by a revulsion. The hand of a vigorous and experienced workman has been apparent in railways, telegraphs, and irrigation, in jails and post-offices, in the education of the people, and in opening avenues for their employment when educated without

impairing the efficiency of our machinery, or abnegating that position of command, which for some time to come we must on no account desert. Lord Canning had his time fully occupied with the mere reconstruction of the edifice which had been so rudely shaken, and several of the plans which he sketched or commenced were left to his successors to be filled up or completed. Credit is not usually given to many of the splendid internal reforms of Lord Dalhousie, because he has been unjustly assailed by one class of writers as an unscrupulous despot, who passed his time in deposing sovereigns and annexing kingdoms, and in thus preparing the minds of the people to receive the rebellion which commenced with the army. The career of Lord Hardinge lasted only three years and a half, and posterity will remember him more as the gallant soldier than as a successful administrator. The conspicuous talents of Lord Ellenborough were employed in repairing as far as was possible the national disgrace which we had suffered at the Bala Hissar, and the Khoord Cabul, and in reducing the military strength of Gwalior within due limits. Lord Auckland, though in some respects not ill qualified to advance Indian interests in time of peace, will always be associated with the reverse just mentioned, and as the author of doubt and disaffection in the minds of the sepoys. In reascending the roll of Proconsuls we must really go as far back as the era of Lord William Bentinck to find a turning-point in Indian annals similar to the days of Lord Lawrence. Undisturbed by visions of aggrandisement or consolidation, and never pressed by the necessity for military combinations, Lord Lawrence was enabled to bring his extensive knowledge, his power of rapid despatch, and his gift of recording his decision in a few phrases of sententious brevity, to forward those material improvements which command the applause of all classes, as well as to grapple with sundry questions, which might, in the next generation, have ended in some terrible explosion. Some critics have described Lord Lawrence as a weak man easily influenced by evil counsellors, and guided by the course of events which he ought to have shaped. Others, again, have censured him for his trenchant and despotic mode of doing business and his proneness to treat the inhabitants of civilised provinces as he formerly might have treated a Sikh chief of the Manjha or the head of a border tribe. The truth is, that the late Viceroy easily saw through the shallowness of those educated natives of whom the Virgilian Drances was the prototype; and that, on almost every subject, he had at once clear and welldefined opinions, or else he had the tact to consult others

whose local information he very soon moulded into shape and converted to a practical issue. The differences which arose between him and some high-minded and experienced colleagues, however unpalatable to one accustomed to rule alone and to take the shortest cut to a distant goal, in the end prevented error and elicited truth. Making all fair deductions for the mistakes to which the wisest are liable, for the deficit, for the famine, for the want of Parliamentary adherents or acquaintance with English political life, we may sum up the case by saying that Lord Lawrence governed with firmness and never shrank from controversy, was occasionally unpopular because he aimed at pleasing no one class or favouring no one interest to the exclusion or detriment of another, served his friends when they were qualified to interpret his policy or to represent him in high office, simplified justice, consolidated the laws, was zealous for the education of the mass, for the rights of the agriculturists, and for the comfort of the traveller, and handed over to his successor an efficient army, a disciplined civil service, and a peaceful empire fitted to draw forth all the highest qualities of the statesman, and to become the scene of many more bloodless victories to be gained over error by truth,

The career of Lord Lawrence from the lowest post to the highest may warrant the prediction that, whenever a certain combination of qualities shall again be found in any one Indian civilian, and political exigencies shall demand his services, the precedent will be followed instead of being cast aside, and the highest post out of the British Isles will again be entrusted to one who has not graduated in Parliamentary honours. But, as a general rule, the Viceroy ought to be an English statesman, any want of local or special knowledge being counterbalanced by freedom from prejudice, by familiarity with political tactics, and by the invigorating discipline which the rivalry of two great parties affords. It is very desirable that, except in cases of extraordinary merit, a fresh English intellect should administer a revenue of nearly fifty millions, and govern four times that number of souls. We are but too conscious of the union of qualities necessary to make a first-rate Governor-Generalquickness of decision, breadth of view, insight into character, power of continuous exertion, and aptitude for gleaning information from discordant sources and combining the result into one harmonious whole. But, in spite of the difficulties of the task, we shall not despair of a prosperous future for India, while sixty thousand English soldiers hold our forts and arsenals; while the powerful Hindu princes and nobles are dazzled

by our supremacy or attached to us by self-interest; while the civil service is composed of men who unite intellect with principle, and do not disdain traditions which teach them how aliens must be ruled; while British merchants aid the Council by their experience instead of distracting it by their contention; while the Press adopts a tone of earnest but dispassionate criticism; and while the common welfare of Christians, Hindoos, and Mahommedans is intrusted to an English statesman who shall apply himself to discharge the functions of his high office in emulation of the philanthropy of Bentinck, of the vigour and sagacity of Dalhousie, and of the noble clemency of Canning.

ART. II.1. Supplement to Volume I. and Volume II. of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain, preserved in the Archives of Simancas and elsewhere. Edited by G. A. BERGENROTH, and published under the Direction of the Master of the Rolls. London: 1868.

2. Sur Jeanne la Folle et les documents concernant cette princesse qui ont été publiés récemment. Par M. GACHARD. Bruxelles: 1869.

3. Gustave Bergenroth: a Memorial Sketch. By W. C. CARTWRIGHT, M.P. London: 1870.

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LL those who are interested in historical researches, both abroad and at home, have been considerably startled by the announcement of the discovery of documents which reduce one of the best-known historical facts of modern Europe to a legend. If this statement is to be believed, the madness of Juana, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, the wife of Philip the Fair, and the mother of Charles V., is a cunning invention, used by her father and her husband, to prevent her from reigning as legitimate Queen of Castile, and to punish her for heretical opinions. Her long incarceration, as well as the indignities of treatment and torture of body and mind to which she was subjected for forty-seven years, give her a right to be considered as a Protestant martyr. Her son, Charles V., not only did not attempt, on the death of his father and grandfather, to alleviate in any way the sufferings of his mother, but he even countenanced the application of the rack and of other instruments of torture, and abstained altogether from rendering her any filial attention. Here then