Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/201

Rh expended in securing the introduction at this time of a large amount of English capital and English energy, so as to encourage, by the successful issue which I contemplate for these railway undertakings, a more extensive employment of similar capital and similar efforts hereafter in connection with the products and trade of India.'

This was Lord Dalhousie's masterly idea. Not only would he consolidate the newly-annexed territories of India by his railways, and immensely increase the striking power of his military forces at every point of the Empire, but he would use a railway construction as a bait to bring British capital and private enterprise to India on a scale which had never entered the imagination of any previous Governor-General. He succeeded to an extent which even his daring foresight would not have ventured to predict. By 1879, over 98,000,000 sterling of private capital had been attracted to the construction of Indian Railways, under the system of guarantee planned and initiated by Lord Dalhousie.

In all these arrangements Lord Dalhousie had from the outset a vigilant eye to the mercantile aspects of his railway routes. 'The commercial and social advantages,' he wrote in his masterly Minute on Railways, 'which India would derive from their establishment are, I truly believe, beyond all present calculation. Great tracts are