better at once to ascertain whether the principles and policy on which
we have hitherto proceeded have not been faulty? Should we not rather
endeavour to reduce our expenditure, to employ cheaper labour, to
increase the means of communication in India, which would enable us to
dispense with a portion of our troops, and to make it a rule that the
Governor-General should have more honour when he came home, for not
having extended by an acre the territory of our Indian possessions, than
if he had added a province or a kingdom to them?

The plan proposed by the President of the Board of Control appears to me
very closely to resemble that which exists at present. The result, so
far as regards the real question, about which the public are most
interested, is this, that the twenty-four gentlemen who are directors of
the East India Company are, by a process of self-immolation, to be
reduced to fifteen. I think this reduction will be one of the most
affecting scenes in the history of the Government of India. As the East
India Company keep a writer to record their history, I hope they also
keep an artist to give us an historical painting of this great event.
There we shall see the hon. Member for Guildford (Mr. Mangles), the hon.
Member for Honiton (Sir J. W. Hogg), one of the hon. Members for the
City of London, and the other directors, meeting together, and looking
much like shipwrecked men in a boat casting lots who should be thrown
overboard. To the fifteen directors who are to remain, three others are
to be added, and the result will be that, instead of having twenty-four
gentlemen sitting in Leadenhall-street, to manage the affairs in India,
there will be eighteen. The present constituency is so bad that nothing
the President of the Board of Control can do can make it worse; but as
that right hon. Gentleman finds it impossible to make it better, he lets
the constituency remain as it was. The right hon. Baronet proposes that
the Crown should appoint six members of the Board who have been at least