motion, capable of universal application. In fact that the opinions of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Calne (Mr. Lowe) were carried out to an unfortunate extent in India. What was considered economical and good for England was considered equally so for India. The great point insisted on by the officials in this Correspondence was, that we should never make the people of India-however prosperous they might become-so contented with our rule as they might be, until the Natives of rank and ability were more fully admitted to social honours and municipal offices than they were at present. By so doing we should diminish the rigidity of our centralization system, and make our laws, as it were, the bond of feeling and custom between us and the different nations which lived under our rule in India. Sir Robert Montgomery, alluding to the spread of education in India, implied that we incurred a great responsibility; because if we educated the people, and developed their intellect, and gave them a desire to take part in the administration of the country, our injustice to them was heightened if we stamped out that desire thus created. In one of the despatches it was said we erred not so much from bad intention as from want of sympathy; but he ventured to say, that as the people of India became educated, and were fully admitted to share in the government of the country, our sympathy with them would increase-for sympathy was produced by respect. In speaking of our shortcomings towards India, we must not dwell so much on this or that bad law, or point to the fact that some Native Princes had been perhaps too hastily and unduly annexed to our Government; but we had much to answer for in speaking opprobriously of the people of India as a set of niggers. To make them contented with our government, we must not only give them good laws and an equitable system of taxation, but we must respect them as they deserved to be respected. We ought not to consider them as a barbarous race; but consider that when England was in a state of barbarism, India had a civilization of her own, and that she possessed a remarkable language that had produced an illustrious literature. The test of the efficiency and excellence of our rule in India was, whether we had done our duty in preparing the people of India ultimately to govern themselves, so that when we left that country we might say that we had discharged our duty by giving them so much of our civilization that in future they might become a greater and a happier. nation than they were before they felt the effects of our dominion. VISCOUNT CRANBORNE: I should not wish to prolong this debate by a single word if I had not a personal reason. But as the Viceroy of India has been good enough to spread throughout the length and breadth of India that I took occasion to doubt whether the system of British administration possessed, in the estimation of the Natives, any superiority over the method of government pursued in the independent States, I hope that I may be allowed to say in this place that I never said anything of the kind. I have no doubt the Viceroy drew his impression from an imperfect Report; but what I said was of a much more modest character. What I said was— "I am not denying that our mission in India is to reduce to order, to civilize and develop, the Native Governments we find there. But I demur to that wholesale condemnation of a system of government which would be utterly intolerable on our own soil, but which has grown up among the people subjected to it. It has a fitness and congeniality for them impossible for us adequately to realize but which compensates them to an enormous degree for the material evils which its : rudeness, in a great many cases, produces." I once heard it stated on eminent authority that nothing was more disagreeable than repeating one's own words except eating them, and I should not have done so but for the unfortunate prominence given to another version of these remarks. I venture to express my agreement with my hon. Friend behind me (Mr. Smollett), and to doubt whether it is desirable that the speeches of Members of Parliament should be made the subject of comment in official papers. I think it would be better if official papers contained remarks only upon matters which had previously appeared in official documents. With reference to this debate I must say that I am much pleased if I have been the humble instrument of bringing out these papers, and also of bringing before the House the remarkable and able speech of the noble Lord the Member for Taunton, which will be a valuable addition to the literature we possess in these papers. The sum and substance I take to be this :-You must have a despotism in India; you are naturally frightened at this despotism, because it is uncongenial to your feelings and repellant to your traditions, and therefore you surround that despotism with every imaginable check. It INDIA-BANK OF BOMBAY. QUESTION. has now come to this-that there is no despotic power in India in anyone beneath the Governor General, and his despotism must be exercised entirely through the law. MR. DYCE NICOL, in rising to ask The consequence is that every agent of the Secretary of State for India, What is this despotism of yours is worried, ham the present position of the Bank of Bompered, and fettered by eternal regulations. bay; and, whether he will institute any You have all the disadvantages of a sys- inquiry into the circumstances of the failtem in which the people take comparatively ure of the Old Bank of Bombay? said: small, if any, part in their own Govern- I am glad to find that the right hon. Baronet ment, and you have not the undoubted ad- has recently sent instructions to the Govantage of the elasticity and vigour which vernor General of India to appoint a Comare given by a patriarchal system of Go- mission of Inquiry into the circumstances vernment. I believe that these evils are of the failure of the old Bank of Bombay, only in their germ at the present time; and I beg to thank him for an act of justice but we see their tendency, and we see their to the unfortunate shareholders, which was result as stated by the noble Lord-that denied to them by the authorities in India. these regulations produce such an amount I may mention that the Bombay Governof employment in the way of writing and ment were shareholders in this Bank; that drawing up Returns, that the time of the they had the power of nomination of three officials of India is taken up to such an of the directors; and that they exercised extent that they cannot mix with those that privilege in the appointment to the who are under their charge, and ascertain Board of the highest officials in the finanthe real state of public opinion among those cial Department of the Government. And whom they govern. That evil is, I fear, without its being supposed that I cast imgrowing rapidly-the evil of over-regula-putations on anyone, I hope that I may be tion. If you wish to apply a remedy it will be done by getting rid of some of the departmental distrust which is an essential part of our Government at home. In India the departmental distrust is out of place. It would be better to run the risk of a few mistakes-of an occasional great blunder -to trust men more on the spot where they are conducting their Government, and to feel certain in the long run that the elasticity, the freshness, and vigour which belong to your Government, will more than repay you for any occasional losses which may occur in particular instances. That appears to me to be the sum and substance of this controversy. I will only say further that I trust that the critical Members of this House will not think that these Indian debates, thinly attended as they are sometimes, are waste of time. I believe the best service which any of us who take an interest in India can render is to stimulate in every way the somewhat languid attention of the people of this country to the affairs of India; and that we shall never thoroughly fulfil the tremendous responsibility we have assumed towards that country until there is more familiarity in the minds of the people of this country with the distant and somewhat unintelligible affairs of that great Empire. allowed to urge on the right hon. Baronet the Secretary of State that this inquiry should be of a most searching character; and I press this the more earnestly, seeing that the shareholders are chiefly members of the civil and military services of Western India, who, on the faith that this Bank was a Government institution, invested their money in it under the same feeling of security that they did in a Government Loan or in Government Stock. meeting held at Bombay on the 13th of January for the winding up of the Bank, then present for information as to where an appeal was made by the shareholders their money had gone, and who were the persons for whom their property had been sacrificed. The official liquidator replied to this effect, as reported in The Bombay Times of the 29th of January— At a "If the shareholders wanted to make an inves tigation as to where their money had gone and it and not him. If it was to be one of his duties as liquidator, he should decline to take another step in the liquidation, and should at once place his resignation in the hands of the shareholders. He would not be the leader or mover in such an who was to blame, it was for themselves to make inquiry as the one suggested." The Accountant General of Government, then present, confirmed this statement. The opinion of the Governor General in Council on the subject of the Bank is given in a despatch under date of the 18th of April last, addressed to the Secretary of "We have the honour to forward the documents in the annexed list, and to state that it illustrates the scandalous manner in which the Bank of Bombay was conducted at the period to which the correspondence alludes." birth to a very strong demand for redress. That redress had hitherto been denied, and explanations even had been resolutely refused; so that the unfortunate shareholders were not even accorded the poor satisfaction of knowing by what means their wrongs had come upon them. The painfulness of their position had even been aggravated by seeing a second Government Bank reared on the débris of the old one, buttressed by the vicious system of Go I shall only add that I trust the Report of the proposed Commission will be laid before this House with as little delay as possible, so that it may have an opportunity of discussing the connection of the Bonbay Government connection, and advertised with vernment with one of the grossest cases of joint-stock mismanagement on record. I now ask the right hon. Baronet, what is the present position of the new Bank? I much regret that the Bombay Government has been authorized to become shareholders in it. I had hoped that, after the disastrous experience of the past, any new bank with which they became connected, would have been put on an entirely different footing; that the Government would have retained complete control over its capital and deposits; and I fear that the proposed appointment of an inspector over a board of directors selected from a community who have shown of late years so little moderation and prudence, will not inspire confidence. But it is, Sir, most desirable that this House should have a full statement of the position of this new Bank, and the nature of the security it holds out to the public. In conclusion, I hope that the House will permit me to say that I have no interest, direct or indirect, in these Banks, but have ventured to bring the subject before it solely on public grounds. SIR HENRY RAWLINSON endorsed the opinion of the hon. Member who had last spoken as to the importance of the questions arising out of the failure of the Bombay Bank. The essential features of the case were these: A capital of £2,000,000 had been dissipated, and in consequence hundreds, perhaps thousands, of most deserving persons had been reduced to beggary. And more than this, the sufferers were for the most part retired officers and civil servants of India, who had been induced to invest the savings of years in the Bank of Bombay, on the credit of its being a quasi Government establishment; or at least in the belief that it was an establishment under the supervision of Government, because three of the directors had been Government officials. The inference put upon the connections of Government with the Bank might have been right or wrong, but it had naturally given the same delusive disguise of Government These were the words of the "And in case of difference of opinion on any question decided at any meeting the Secretary of State may require that his opinion and the reasons for the same be entered in the Minutes of the Proceedings, and any member of the Council who may have been present at the meeting may require that his opinion and any reasons for the same that he may have stated at the meeting be entered in like manner." The evident object of this clause was to provide a constitutional check against the possible exercise of power in an arbitrary or unwise manner by the Secretary of State, since, by placing the recorded opinion of the members of the Council at the disposal of Parliament it brought those disputed points under the supervision of the House. This had accordingly been the practice ever since. In no single instance, he believed, had the recorded Minutes of Council hitherto been refused; and the House would remember that in the Mysore case, recently before the House, the Minutes of the members of Council both for and against annexation were appended to the Correspondence, and formed an integral part of the Report. He had therefore fully expected the House would be put in possession of the opinions of the members of Council, in the case of the Bombay Bank, involving as it did two most serious questions; one affecting private interests to the extent of £2,000,000, the other dealing with the adoption by the Government of a very questionable policy. The House would, therefore understand his surprise when the right hon. Baronet declined to produce those Minutes of Council. As reported by The Times of Wednesday last tion of the Minute would be contrary to the interests of the public, of course there was no more to be said. But the right hon. Baronet would, no doubt, name a time for its production, which would probably be at the same time as the Report of the Commision. But, sooner or later, the Minute must be forthcoming; otherwise, the precaution deliberately sanctioned by Parliament for enabling members of the Council to record their opinions would turn out to be no precaution at all, but a mere snare and delusion. MR. KINNAIRD thought the Governor General of India had shown himself oversensitive; but that the feeling upon his part was justified by expressions which had fallen in debate from the noble Viscount (Viscount Cranborne), who had himself formerly administered the affairs of India. If we had left the country a little more under the rule of Native Princes, perhaps a greater suc"Sir Stafford Northcote said there was only one cess and contentment among the masses of such Minute recorded under the provisions of the the people would have been the result, and 23rd section of the Government of India Act, and, this, probably, was in the Governor Geneinasmuch as it referred to questions having relation to the personal character of individuals about ral's mind. But looking to the security in to form the subject of judicial inquiry, he did not the tenure of property, and the other bethink it would be right to consent to its produc-nefits which had resulted from our rule, tion." He (Sir Henry Rawlinson) was not aware that any judicial inquiry was pending. Ile was aware that a Commission was about to be ordered in India to collect evidence, and of course the examiners would in due course send in their Report; but he did not see that the production of a Minute recorded by an individual member of Council would affect that Report in any way whatever. If, however, the Commissioners were so plastic or so subservient as to be affected by the opinion of a man in authority, then it must also be held to be most injudicious to have included in the Correspondence furnished to Parliament, the Minutes of Council of India, and the despatch of the Governor General. The same objection to publications applied equally to the Minutes of the Council at Calcutta and at London. Both sets of documents should either be produced or withheld; and, in his view, both should have been produced, simply because in cases of this sort no good would result from concealment. If the right hon. Baronet had acted wisely he would have gone in advance of public feeling rather than have tarried behind until it became necessary to demand of him what was nothing short of a public right. If the right hon. Baronet rose and stated upon his responsibility as a Minister that the produc it might be said with truth that that rule has been on the whole beneficent in its effects, and history would show this. MR. AYRTON said, that from time to time the House was startled by occurrences in India. But a few years back everybody was aroused by the statement that torture had been resorted to in the collection of revenue. Everybody denied the truth of the statement. The matter, however, was inquired into, and the fact was established. A year or two ago they learnt that hundreds of thousands of persons had died through the neglect of officials in India. His hon. Friend that night had brought under the notice of the House some circumstances connected with the administration of Indian affairs, which, though not so terrible in their immediate consequences, were yet exceedingly grave in their nature. The hon Member who had spoken last appeared hardly to understand the gravity of the question, which it was impossible to state without exciting a feeling of amazement that such things could occur, even in India. It was not simply that £2,000,000 had been lost to innocent depositors. A Bank had been established, after great consideration, by the Court of Directors of that day, with all the commercial knowledge and accurate business information at their command, and under conditions ad trophe was an illustration of the way in which our Indian administrations were constantly breaking down, and the truth was, that while a certain system of Government existed on paper, a wholly different one existed in fact; and this was the explanation of much of the discontent which attended our rule. He hoped the Secretary of State would show that whatever demoralization there might be in the conduct of the Bombay Government, there was in this country a high sense of morality, which would insist on a proper performance of their public duties by local adminis trators. mirably calculated to promote the security | waver between the discharge of their duty and success of the undertaking. The and the profits they could obtain by manimanner, in fact, in which it was estab-pulating those companies. This cataslished was calculated to convey to persons in India the idea that the Bank had as much claim to their respect as the Bank of England had to that of persons in this country. And what, he asked, would persons here think if, one fine day, the Bank of England ceased to exist, and they were told that no one could be held responsible for the disappearance of one single farthing of the capital of that great institution? Such an event would startle the whole country, yet it was precisely such an event which had happened in Bombay. The Government had declared, "We will become partners in the concern; we will appoint three of our principal civil servants to represent us there; and we will have the rules of its administration put into a law, so that there may be no mistake about the nature of the duty which the shareholders have to perform." His own personal experience of banking at Bombay had probably been as great as that of any hon. Member in the House, and he had no hesitation in stating that the rules laid down by the court of directors were admirably calculated to secure the objects which they had in view. He remembered warning Viscount Halifax, when he proposed the creation of local legislative councils, of the danger of substituting for the responsible servants of the Crown persons with no real position or responsibility. Now it was alleged by the victims of this failure that the Council varied and altered the fundamental laws of the Bank for their own sinister purposes, granting unlimited powers to the administrators of the Bank, and jeopardizing the interests of the shareholders without giving them any intimation of the change. It was clearly the duty of the Secretary of State to require a thorough investigation into every circumstance attending those proceedings; and that Government ought not to be allowed to screen themselves by the fiction of the responsibility of the Legislative Council. Again, it was asserted that high officers in the civil service had conducted the bank in a manner lacking not merely in discretion but in morality. This imputation, too, ought to be inquired into, so as to show how every shilling was withdrawn from the coffers of the bank. The besetting danger of public servants in India at the present time appeared to be their relation to jointstock companies; for they were tempted to SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE: Sir, the hon. and learned Member for the Tower Hamlets (Mr. Ayrton) has stated strongly, but, speaking with some qualification, I am bound to say, not too strongly, the case of the failure of the Bombay Bank. I say with some qualification, because I feel it necessary to reserve my opinion on the history of a transaction which is at present the subject of inquiry. I quite agree with him that the charges which have been made against the Legislature, and several high officials of Bombay, are charges which it would be discreditable and disgraceful for us to pass over without a full inquiry. An inquiry has been ordered; and I have received a communication from the Government of India, stating that, in accordance with my directions that they should issue a Commission, they propose one armed with powers of obtaining evidence compulsorily, and composed of two members nominated by the Governor General and one by the Government of Bombay. [Mr. AYRTON here intimated disapproval.] The hon. Gentleman cannot think it right that the inquiry should be one-sided. The inquiry should surely be conducted by those who have a perfect knowledge of the case, and the Commissioners will inquire thoroughly into all the allegations which have been made. I wish, however, to remark that when Members speak of the liability of the Government in a matter of this kind, they must mean the liability of the taxpayers of India; and it will be a question for serious consideration whether any case can be made out justifying the imposition of a burden upon them for the purpose of replacing the funds lost through the failure of the Bank. I have heard a good deal said on both sides with regard to |