Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/216

208 Dalhousie, but as having been introduced under his rule. The name of Sir Charles Wood, afterwards Lord Halifax, must always be the name chiefly associated with this great work. The lesser, but by no means unimportant, functions of Lord Dalhousie were to supply in part the materials which guided Sir Charles Wood, and to strenuously carry out Sir Charles Wood's views. Nor must it be forgotten that the scheme of Public Instruction, thus initiated by Sir Charles Wood, practically introduced into India by Lord Dalhousie, and strictly developed on the lines then laid down, has received from later Governors-General an expansion which Lord Dalhousie would scarcely have ventured to anticipate. For side by side with the Government Schools and Colleges, and incorporated with them into the system of official inspection, a great body of aided institutions is now maintained and conducted by private enterprise.

The India of the railway, the telegraph, the half-penny post, and the State-inspected school, that is to say, the India created by Lord Dalhousie, is the India of to-day. We know of no other India. But to the Englishmen who stood by and witnessed the construction of that India, it seemed as if an entirely new Empire was being called into existence. The immediate visible result of Dalhousie's rule was, as I have said, a unification of territory. Yet to close observers it was evident from the first, as it