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and for 99 years. The same guarantee insures them against "competition from works of a similar character" for the same number of years. What are "works of a similar character"? Lines of roads, railways, or canals calculated to lessen the distance between India and England, to facilitate communications, and lighten the transport charges on merchandise. All this the Euphrates railway proposes to do, and all this it claims to do alone, and for 99 years to come no further facilities of communication, touching upon the Turkish empire, are to be sanctioned by the Sultan's Government. Mr. Andrew tells us, "there cannot be too greatly increased facilities of communication in any direction, and those who uphold the contrary must be weighed down by prejudices which they labour under in common with Jesuits and Japanese." But while he makes these liberal professions, he works with the English Government and its machinery to prevent all communications except the one he proposes to open. He proclaims free trade, but he intrigues for a monopoly of railway-making throughout the whole of Asiatic Turkey.

We are not astonished to find that the connection of General Chesney with the Euphrates Valley Railway Company has provoked some comment in England, but we doubt whether even now the subject is fully and justly appreciated. General Chesney is one of those soldiers to whom nothing is more odious and insupportable than the life of a garrison and the routine of daily duty. He is of a wandering, roving disposition, and he has now for many years past indulged this propensity at the public expense, by professing to explore the Euphrates route to India. It was General Chesney who with his rival scheme obstructed the progress of Mr. Waghorn; it is to General Chesney that we owe the long delays in the establishment of the overland route. He is now an old man, full of years and honours; while his contemporaries pined in garrisons and bled on battle-fields, his life has been one long holiday, with just enough of hardships to give a zest to ease. He has headed an expedition; he has explored the line of the Euphrates; he has acquired a high reputation in literature and science at the cost of the nation. He is a Doctor of Civil Law, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has risen in the profession to which ostensibly he never ceased to belong, and now, at the close of a long and singularly-favoured life, the Major-General in Her Majesty's service is the paid servant of a private company, and leagued with craftier but less influential men in establishing, in favour of Mr. Andrew and his colleagues, a monopoly so gross, so out*See Memoir, pages 200 and 206.

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rageous, so revolting to modern ideas, that even Mr. Andrew does not avow it in all its native ugliness. He uses it to bait his hook, but he covers and disguises it with liberal phrases about the desirability of many means of intercommunication.

route.

We look with favour upon the proposed ship canal across the Isthmus of Suez, but we should consider it with a most suspicious eye if this undertaking, like the one advocated by Mr. Andrew, inspired its promoters with a dread to be calmed only by a guarantee of dividends for a hundred years. And we should absolutely scout it, if it started with the postulate that its existence must annihilate all other schemes of improved communications. Men whose hands are against every man, need not complain that every man's hand is against them. Wherever there is faith in the future, wherever there is hope of the progress of science, wherever a heart beats for the extension of civilisation and the consolidation of British power in the East, there will hands and voices be raised against Mr. Andrew and the monopoly of the Euphrates Valley But is there time for protests? We hope so. The concession and guarantee of dividend and monopoly have been extorted from the Sultan's Government; but so artificial is the life of the Euphrates valley scheme, that, according to the latest news, it is actually trembling on the verge of dissolution. Those to whom Mr. Andrew has hitherto vainly appealed, the men who are not to be influenced even by General Chesney, the capitalists of England, stand aloof. According to their opinion it is not enough that a man or a Government promises to pay there must be a reasonable expectation of the ability to fulfil that promise. The financial difficulties of the Turkish Government are too notorious to encourage, on its guarantee alone, investments in a railway whose commercial prospects are considered to be most desolate. An attempt is being made to confirm the Sultan's guarantee by a guarantee to be extorted from the East India Company. Mr. Andrew has the Treasury and the Board of Control, Sir C. Lewis and Mr. Vernon Smith; but the Court of Directors hold out against this double pressure. In the interest of those extended communications which Mr. Andrew professes to advocate, we hope and trust that the good cause may triumph.

ART. VI.-OUR SOCIAL SELVES AT HOME.

The Newcomes. Memoirs of a most respectable Family. Edited by ARTHUR PENDENNIS, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London; 1855.

THERE has been a great and happy tendency of late years towards what may not be inaptly called the social emancipation of British India. Let us not be mistaken in our meaning. We are not speaking of those whom Sydney Smith designates "our sable subjects. The allusion has no reference to Mussulman or Hindu, to Brahman or Paria. We are not about to broach the torture system, or indeed any system of supposed misrule or mismanagement; nor to dilate upon the advantages of irrigation and revenue survey, or the cultivation of cotton, flax, linseed, or indigo. These and analogous matters have their exponents and agitators ad infinitum; and we fervently hope that when the pampliletwriting mania shall have abated, and the public-meeting ardour cooled, the result will be something in the shape of remedy. The home politician has at present quite enough to do to extricate himself from the maze of Indian words, Indian usages, and Indian technicalities, into which he has been led by official reports and personal lucubrations, to be troubled with further local suggestions. Indeed, in this practical age, it might not be unadvisable that Members of Parliament should pass preliminary examinations to qualify for particular subjects. Certificates, granting authority to speak on an Indian question, would undoubtedly limit the number of speakers; but the fewer the cooks the better the fare, is, the negative assurance derived from an old proverb; and we see no valid reason to doubt its soundness or truth.

Having said thus much, it seems almost superfluous to disclaim any intent of discussing the important subject of Native Education. Here too, we find no want of will in promoting the cause, no lack of funds in supporting it, and, to use an agricultural simile, it is to be hoped that in course of time there will be as many actual labourers in the field as there are landholders and middle-men. The views of German theorists and our own political economists need no more deter us at this later hour,

than the unsatisfactory practical illustrations of our former system afforded in the precocious and ill-timed dissertations of "Young India" collegians. If extremes, whether of interference or of indifference, be avoided, no man can question the propriety of bringing the great state engine to bear upon moral and intellectual development, in a country which is far without the pale of Mirabeau's "société bien ordonnée." It is to a people exemplifying a constitution of this latter kind, that the principle of noninterference would apply; but who shall argue that the education of the native of India is a matter (to use the words of Humboldt) "beyond the limits within which political agency should properly be confined"?

Our theme, then, is strictly national as regards ourselves. We are about to treat of the British social element in India; or, with reference to individuals, of him whose birth and home must be considered Anglo-Saxon, though his profession and fortunes are necessarily Anglo-Indian. In using the masculine gender, every wish and intention to include man's helpmate must be understood. Ladies in India have too little need to be informed how particularly essential is their presence in this far quarter of the globe, to suspect a countryman of ungracious forgetfulness of their claims to notice. But it is to the apprehension of these matters in our own fatherland, that the reader's attention will be chiefly directed. Our aim is to show that the British public are now welcoming their exiled sons and daughters from India with a heartiness to which they are justly entitled, and no longer in the invidious light of poor relations. The tardy acknowledgment of rank for Company's military officers on either side the Cape, has been a necessary result of this less palpable admission of the moral status now accorded to them and their brethren in exile.

There is, alas! (the sigh is involuntary,) but little need to describe us in our artificial or professional condition or guise. We are not so very interesting in our dens (bungalows, if it must be), beneath our punkas, beside our tatties and thermantidotes. We are perhaps rather to be pitied than admired. The chronicler would have no easy task to arouse sympathy for us; nor would he derive much encouragement from injudicious friends in this country advising him to publish. A late article in the Bombay Quarterly, the first in the July number, does not hold forth any vain hopes to the candidate for honours in this species of literature; yet we seem to detect in it a lament that no one does step forward to record our daily life in India," our trials, our enjoyments, our hopes, our responsibilities." We will not dispute the dearth in

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this respect. Under all circumstances, however, let us be contented to bide our time for becoming, in our professional capacities, a literary spectacle; and confine our attention to the contemplation of our social selves in the home mirror. Such few writers as we have-who have become writers, as it were, by the union of an observant mind with a certain practical knowledge acquired in their professional exile-do not give us the English view of Indian life; nor, in the second place, do they possess wide-world reputations. Some clever books have been written by a few ladies or gentlemen after a brief sojourn in one or other of the presidencies, but upon the whole the number is limited; and unreadable novels or travels will not be considered at all. Historians and orientalists belong to a genus unconnected with the subject.

And though our lot be indeed cast in these warm latitudes, and many of us are destined to lay our mortal remains in these plains and jungles, if sensitive on what the world thinks at all, should we not rather be so on the opinion held of us in the circle of our "ain firesides" in our native towns or villages, than on on the estimate formed by those under whose guidance we work, or those whose interests aro committed to our charge, in the great field of duty? The question looks, at first sight, equivocal; but let it be put home to men old in experience and usefulness, as well as to the novice; and what will be the answer of the best? Will it not be in favour of this view? We suspect so, and will endeavour to show the reason. A strong mind and sound principle will insist upon obedience to professional calls, whether under surveillance and control, or whether wholly unobserved and unchecked. To this same mind and principle, acknowledgment of successful result of professional labour will afford satisfactory and encouraging support no more. The merited applause of superiors, and the grateful testimony of inferiors, cannot fail to have good effect of some kind. But its reception would be different with differently constituted minds. The sincerely religious man would thank Providence for the accomplishment of a noble end, without a sign of self-gratulatory exultation for his own efforts. The strictly moral man would felicitate himself on his strength and constancy. On the other hand, it would scarcely be an offence to religion, and must be approved by morality, to experience an inward joy that our acts would be peculiarly gratifying to the members of our family household.

Take for instance Colonel Newcome, of whom we shall have much more to say by-and-bye. He is great in duty matters.