Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/19

Rh Indian Empire. But perhaps his most permanent claim on the gratitude of his country is that by his far-reaching schemes of railways, roads, canals, and public works, he inaugurated the great revolution which has converted the agricultural India of antiquity into the manufacturing and mercantile India of our own day. Expansion of territory, unification of territory, and the drawing forth of material resources, these were the three labours given to Lord Dalhousie to accomplish in India: and in the three words, conquest, consolidation, and development, his work may be summed up.

Lord Dalhousie found India an isolated country. In the North-west a powerful and warlike people, the Sikhs, lay between us and Central Asia. By the annexation of the Punjab, Lord Dalhousie abolished that intervening military nationality. He advanced the British boundary to the foot of the mountains, and made British officers the wardens of the passes. Since his time the North-western frontier of India has been garrisoned by British armies, alike against the Muhammadan races of Central Asia and against Russia. Our Asiatic relations with Russia, which had previously been fitful, were brought by the conquest of the Punjab, gradually but inevitably, within the normal sphere of European diplomacy. The supreme factors in Indian foreign policy have been transferred from Calcutta and Lahore to London and St. Petersburgh.