agent of a nobleman would settle, on a
Scotch or English estate, on his own
responsibility, or at one interview with his chief,
are obliged to be referred from the local governor
of Madras or Bombay and his Council,
to the Governor General and his Council,
from the Governor General to the Court of
Directors, from the Court of Directors to the
Board of Control—each power having its own
consulting engineers and lawyers, and its own
reports: so that, in nine cases out of ten, the
matter is buried in paper. For instance, when
the Godavery River Works were nearly
completed, the engineer applied for five hundred
pounds to take a steamer up, and ascertain
what were the obstructions in the way of
opening a regular communication of five
hundred miles of water, with the cotton growing
country of Berar. Water communication
had been used by a private firm, years
previously, and it was calculated, by those who
had travelled over it in boats, that fifty thousand
pounds would open it the whole way,
or a cost of one thousand pounds a mile.
The local government, afraid of the responsibility,
estimated the expense of a survey at
one thousand pounds—a sum beyond its
control; and so, shifted the responsibility to the
Governor General. The Governor General
considered the object too unimportant to risk
one thousand pounds upon, in the then state of
the Indian finances—there being only thirteen
millions sterling in the treasury. On another
occasion, a request for one hundred pounds to
dredge away a bar of sand, which was ruining
a harbour, after a delay during which
the harbour was quite destroyed, shared the
same fate. If a question arise as to repairing
a few panes of glass in a barrack, a mountain
of correspondence accumulates; if the
engineer of an Indian railway desire to turn a
skew bridge into a straight one, he has to run
the gauntlet of about thirteen officers and
their reports. He cannot alter the form of
his sleepers, without consulting the Board of
Control in London.

The coast of India is sorely in want of
ports, piers, and breakwaters. The terminus
of the Madras Railway will be a black man's
raft, or a Massoola boat. India wants
common roads; rivers cleared and embanked;
railroads of all kinds, from the best to the
lightest and cheapest: from the centre to the
sea; canals of navigation wherever possible;
irrigation everywhere. But, India wants
these immediately; thirsty for water, she
cannot afford to wait until a vineyard, not
yet planted, shall grow wine.

England wants millions of pounds of cotton,
at four-pence a pound; wants wheat at
two guineas a quarter; wants sugar, rice,
spice, oils, fibres and dyes. Between
English and Indian marts, stand a morass of
forms, an avalanche of paper reports, a
mountain range of old Indian blockhead prejudices,
the flippancy of Sir Chatter Chatterer, the
supercilious ignorance of the Honourable
Wishy Washy, the tax-grinding tradition,
that black fellows ought to pay their rent
and give no trouble to the Court of Directors,
and the general delight of
Government Councils to talk and write, and do
nothing.

O, if in the next parliamentary game of
puss in the corner, the experiment were
tried, of choosing for the autocrat of one
hundred and sixty millions, instead of a lord,
or a lawyer, or a talker, a worker and a
doer! O, how a Stephenson, or Peto, or
Brassey, installed in Cannon Row, would
civilize the Blacks and astonish the Browns!

PETITION EXTRAORDINARY.

Unto the Lords and Gentlemen in the House
of Common-Sense assembled, the Petition
of Hercules Tully, Clerk, humbly sheweth:

THAT your petitioner is six feet high, with
broad shoulders and strong back-bone, sound
in wind and limb, of unfailing appetite at
meal times, and of undoubted personal
courage and pluck; that thereby he might
have been serviceable to his country as heavy
dragoon, grenadier, navvy, or coal-heaver,
but is rendered useless and burdensome to
himself and others by circumstances over
which he has no control:

THAT, at an early age, your petitioner
was placed by his guardians at a
royal public school, and distinguished
himself greatly in the demolition of heavy tarts
and the deglutition of apples and other
fruits—as also in the games of peg-top,
cricket, football, racket, and fives; that in
seven years and a-half he acquired some
knowledge of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Æschylus,
and Terence, with the rules of syntax,
and the composition of hexameters and
pentameters, but remained in profound ignorance
of Chaucer and Pope and Blackstone and
Shakspeare and Hume and Smollett; that by
means of a powerful memory he retained the
dates of Marathon and Pharsalia, the foundation
of Rome, and the consulship of Plancus;
but knew nothing whatever of the Norman
Conquest, the Magna Charta, the battle of
Trafalgar, or the ministry of Lord Chatham.
That he knew the value of sestertia and oboli,
but was ignorant of the multiplication table
and the rule of three; that he knew the
partition of the world among the Triumvirate,
but had never heard of the settlement of
Europe at the Congress of Vienna; that with
those acquirements and qualifications he
proceeded, in his nineteenth year, to the University
of—— with an exhibition from his school
of fifty pounds a-year:

THAT as his reputation had preceded him
to Alma Mater, he fought with, and completely
thrashed, a bargeman (in three rounds) on
the first evening of his going into residence,
and on the following morning was requested
to be "stroke " in the college boat: