Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/213

Rh The regular post within India now runs over 70,000 miles, and over a large proportion of this distance it runs several times each day. It distributes 300 millions of letters annually, collected at over 17,000 Post Offices and letter-boxes. But the growth of Indian correspondence under Lord Dalhousie's system may, perhaps, be best indicated by the figures for three single years. The year previous to the introduction of his half-penny post in 1854, barely 19 millions of letters were posted in all India, and a very large proportion of them were official letters. In 1860, six years after Dalhousie's postal reform, the number had increased to 47 millions. It now amounts, as I have said, to 300 millions, and the increase has been chiefly derived from private, as distinguished from official, correspondence. Lord Dalhousie, in fact, created letter-writing on a great scale among the natives of India.

In the same year that Lord Dalhousie introduced the cheap post and created the modern postal system of India, the foundations of a national system of education in India were also laid. During his first five years of office, Lord Dalhousie had carefully studied the various experimental methods of Public Instruction at work. In 1853, during the lull between his conquest of Lower Burma and the annexation of the Nagpur terri-