Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/212

204 a uniform rate of half an áná, at present equal to a half-penny, for the half tolá. Instead of the old wrangle over every letter as to the payment and delivery, a wrangle in which the rural postman invariably managed to squeeze something for himself out of the native recipient, Lord Dalhousie substituted a simple system of postage stamps. Instead of the Post Office being a chronic drain on the finances, Lord Dalhousie's reform made it self-supporting, and has of late years converted it into a source of actual revenue, so far as its operations in British India are concerned. The social results, however, have proved even more important than the administrative or financial ones. Lord Dalhousie's half-penny post has done more than perhaps his railways, or his telegraphs, and possibly as much as even the great system of the Public Instruction to which I shall presently refer, in revolutionising the old stagnant and self-isolated life of India.

These results are now so familiar to us, that in order to realize what they were felt to be at the time, we must as usual go back to the local Indian literature of (in this case) six and thirty years ago. 'The Post Office Commission alone,' said the Calcutta Review in 1854, 'The Post Office Commission alone, had Lord Dalhousie done nothing else, would suffice to place his name in the list of Anglo-Indian reformers alongside of Cornwallis.'