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THE JUNIOR UNITED SERVICE CLUB.

To the Editor of the Oriental Herald.

SIR, I was not at all surprised to find, in your number for this month, an answer to my letter which appeared in your 'Herald' for May, under the head King's and Company's Officers in the United Service Clubs;' but I must confess that I did not anticipate contradiction on a point as notorious as the sun at noon-day; nor was I prepared for the note you have appended to your Correspondent's letter. However I may yield to your better judgment, I cannot but acknowledge, in this case, my inability to discover how the correspondence and documents you allude to, can, by any possibility, remove the impression from my mind, unless they have furnished you with proofs that the officer of the Indian army was rejected on account of something exceptionable in his character as an officer and a gentleman; but, as I believe him hitherto to have stood, as respects these necessary requisites, unimpeached, I cannot, for a moment, imagine you to be instructed to go such lengths. I shall, therefore, content myself by observing, in reply to your note, that my letter and correspondence, as respects the Junior United Service Club, may be contradicted, but cannot be refuted. The correspondence is from a gentleman of undoubted veracity, who attended, and, with others, heard and felt what he states.

Had your Correspondent paid a little more attention to my letter, and less to declamation, he would have seen that his unqualified, decisive contradiction' is gratuitous as applied to me; for, whatever my opinion may have been, my letter no where asserts that such a determination exists. The assertion (as will appear from the correspondence in your number for May) is from a brother member of the Club of which 'your Correspondent signs himself a member. That I have believed, and do believe, the assertions, I am willing to admit; and it will require more than the counterassertion of any one individual to make me disbelieve it.

To your Correspondent's careful examination of the ballot-book, and fallacious announcement that but one solitary instance has occurred of an officer of the Indian army having been rejected,' I have merely to oppose the simple fact of this one solitary instance having occurred to either the second or third officer of the Indian army whose names had appeared as candidates on the ballot-book of the Junior United Service Club; and, further, to state that I am not, at this present moment, aware of any officer having since become a member. (I beg distinctly to be understood as speaking of the Indian army.) That officers of the Company's horse have subsequently been admitted, is within my own knowledge; as well as that, previously to their admission, some of them were rejected,

but on the following Monday again proposed, and then elected. This system of rejection and election is no very uncommon thing in the Junior United Service Club, but with it I have nothing to do, except as it may, on your Correspondent's own showing, furnish some little insight into the chances of admission open to the officers of the Indian army; and, if I may add to this insight, I have only to appeal to the books of the Club, where the officers from the Indian army will be found to bear about the same proportion to those of the King's army as one does to three hundred.

Whatever the fears of your Correspondent may be, or the motives from whence they spring, he may rest satisfied that the two Services know better how to appreciate each other than to allow a question which arises out of any thing connected with the Junior United Service Club, for a moment to disturb that harmony which so happily exists between the officers of his Majesty's Service and those of the Indian army. I beg also to assure your Correspondent that my severe remarks, as he is pleased to term them, were never intended to apply to a majority of the establishment; and I should be sorry if I could for a moment suppose that any liberal mind could so have misconstrued what I have written. My severity, if severe, was directed to those who can wantonly trifle with and wound the feelings of a gentleman. If this applies to your Correspondent, (which I do not believe,) I can only offer him a welcome to the full measure of my severity.

I am,

Sir, your obedient servant,

Cowes, Isle of Wight, June 14th, 1828

A SUBSCRIBER.

LETTER FROM CAPTAIN MAXFIELD.

To the Editor of the Oriental Herald.

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SIR,-A letter addressed to me, signed An Old Proprietor,' which appeared in your Herald' of last month, has but recently been brought to my notice; and, although I do not deem it requisite to reply to every anonymous Correspondent, there are parts of his letter on which I wish to offer a few remarks, In the fourth paragraph of the 'Old Proprietor's' letter, he states, 'Report, however, says, that your opinions on many important points connected with Indian affairs have undergone considerable change, and that you now even consider the preservation of our Indian empire dependent on the preservation of the East India Company. Mere report, however, would have had little weight with me, unless corroborated by some circumstances, which, I confess, have excited my surprise. Had you not been present at the last two Quarterly General Courts held at the India House, I should have found an excuse for you, which I am at present unable to conceive.'

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If the Old Proprietor' has not yet learnt from me personally my

opinion, however unimportant in a subject of such deep importance, and is indebted to mere report, permit me at once to remove all doubt upon the subject, and to state most unequivocally, that, whatever changes or modifications may take place at the close of the present Charter, I trust, and devoutly hope, for the sake of India and its numerous and valuable population, no less than the best interests of Great Britain, that the East India Company's Charter will be renewed, and the Government of India administered through the medium of the East India Company.

As the Old Proprietor' will hardly suspect me of blind partiality to the East India Company's Government, he will, I trust, pardon me, if I am not blind to the advantages such agency offers to the State.

No Government, or human institution, is free from abuses; neither is the Company's Government: but there are redeeming qualities and powerful safeguards presented through such medium, which no other Government under heaven affords. Numerous arguments might be adduced in support of such assertion; but I am not bound to establish a position so easy of demonstration. The declaration I have made is the involuntary tribute of conviction. I have not been slow to disapprove of what I deemed objectionable: shall I be tardy then in declaring what I sincerely and honestly prefer?

The Old Proprietor' then insinuates a charge of inconsistency in my not calling the attention of the Court of Proprietors to the defalcation which lately occurred in the Company's Treasury,' and remarks:

The Company's Treasury then, Sir, may be notoriously plundered, and the delinquents not merely pardoned, but promoted, while a perfect oblivion is produced, and you are studiously silent on the subject. Mr. Gahagan, I think, did advert to the circumstance at the last Quarterly Court, but declared his want of knowledge of the facts to enable him to submit a motion on the subject, while he dwelt on the importance of it. If you could have stated your inability, for want of information, to frame a motion on such an important point, I should have been spared the trouble of addressing you on this occasion; but, if I am not misinformed, you were long ago in possession of all the particulars of the transactions alluded to, as well as the extraordinary conduct of the Court of Directors in such affair. With such information, what a case ought you not to have established-what credit might you not have obtained-and what an opportunity you have lost!'

Hence, then, the 'Old Proprietor' gives me credit for the possession of complete information upon the subject, and considers it a criminal omission that I should have been silent, while his knowledge of my being in possession of such facts fully warrants me in believing

that he must have been as well acquainted with the case referred to as he supposes me to be.

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Why, then, should not the Old Proprietor' himself have framed a motion on a subject of such importance? Did he abstain from so doing only to afford me the opportunity? or was it to enable him the better to evince his zealous support of the Court of Directors, when assailed upon any vulnerable point, that he preferred placing me in the breach to volunteering for the Forlorn Hope himself?

If he really and sincerely admires that fearless independence he so strenuously recommends in the exposure of abuses, let him confirm it by example, and allow me, on this occasion, in his own words, to tell him: With such information as he possessed, what a case ought he not to have established-what credit might he not have obtained and what an opportunity he has lost!'

I remain, Sir, your most obedient humble servant,

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I W. MAXfield.

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To the Editor of the Oriental Herald. ・

Calcutta, January 12, 1828.

Mr. John Trotter, who, in conjunction with John Pascal Larkins, established The John Bull,' having been ordered by the Court of Directors to be suspended from the Service for six months, for writing certain forgotten anonymous letters on the management of the Bank of Bengal, (for which he had already been overpunished by Lord Amherst, by a heavy fine in the shape of reduced salary, and a lacerating letter from the pen of Mr. Holt Mackenzie,) has determined to proceed to England in the Princess Charlotte. This protomartyr of the Civil Service is the same person who projected that reproductive agency, which never attained even to a foetal existence. This little touch of tyranny is a very inadequate retribution for the evil he did in establishing that Journal, which was, from the first, the instigator and apologist of every act of oppression during the administration of Lord Hastings, Mr. Adam, and Lord Amherst, and, under its present Editor, is an organ of sedition, stirring up the Natives to hate and cast out the Europeans as monopolists of the wealth of their country. If Mr. John Trotter had been divested of his whole fortune, banished from India, and even after that immersed in debt, he would only have had a pre-gustation of that violence and robbery with which the Paper, and the party with which he was associated, succeeded in overwhelming others. He can now plead nothing in self-defence, or in arraignment of the injustice with which he has been treated, which may not be answered out of the mouth of his own Bull.

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The present Editor of The Bull,' Dr. Bryce, has been for some time labouring, in co-operation, as he imagines, with Sir John Malcolm, to persuade the Natives, that the effect of the COLONISATION for which the sugar-petitioners pray, would be to deprive them of their lands, and to reduce them to a state of beggary and starvation. He describes to them the massacre and confiscations in Ireland in the 17th century, and the cruelties of the Spaniards in the Ladrone Islands, as specimens of the devastation and misery necessarily included in the colonisation of India. He talks of an inundation of English paupers in India. He talks of British colonists monopolising the wealth and power of the country, and taking possession by force (guburdustee) of the lands and goods of the Natives! He arrays the numerical strength of the Natives against the handful of Europeans who desire that security of person and property, under the inviolable safeguard of the law, should reign throughout the country, without respect of persons, whether Native or European, Hindoo or Christian. The means whereby Sir John Malcolm would resist colonisation are different; but his end is the same, to perpetuate poverty, disunion, weakness, danger, and misgovernment; and he cannot complain if the bad eminence which he occupies as the main teacher of an erroneous doctrine, attracts to his support the lowest and most ignorant coadjutors. It is no less fortunate, however, than singular, that, as discussion opens the eyes of the most intelligent among the Natives, they appreciate the false and hypocritical pretence on which colonisation is refused; they disbelieve the calumnies which are propagated against the future colonists; they see that NOTHING BUT COLONISATION CAN BENEFIT THEIR COUNTRY, by the diffusion of knowledge, industry, and security of person and property, and concur with the friends of that measure in regarding its opponents as the declared enemies of their country.

Dr. Bryce boasts that he has obtained the signatures of forty Native gentlemen to a requisition to the Sheriff, for a meeting at the Town-hall to petition against colonisation. Why has not the requisition yet made its appearance? What prevents him from bringing his people to the scratch? What will become of him, if, a seceder from his own countrymen, he shall find himself deserted by the Natives whom he attempted to mislead?

I refer you to the Hurkaru' for an account of the extraordinary blunder of Sir Charles Grey, touching the meaning of the 87 Geo. III., c. 142, which he represented as restraining him from reducing the fees received by the officers of the Supreme Court, without a requisition from the Court of Directors; whereas the words of the Act relate solely to the reduction of salaries paid to the officers of the Supreme Court by the East India Company. This error could only proceed from his eagerness to find himself restrained from giving to suitors the relief which they sought, and which, if Grand Juries persevere, they will ultimately wrest from the Court.

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