Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/217

Rh was clear to Lord Dalhousie himself, that this unification of Indian territory was only the first stage in a still more splendid, if more perilous, work of unification — the unification of the Indian races. Let me once more quote from a writer of a quarter of a century ago, when 'the conception which Lord Dalhousie cherished of a consolidated Empire,' was still fresh in men's minds. 'We are making,' wrote Sir Edwin Arnold in 1865, when summing up the results of Lord Dalhousie's rule, 'We are making a people in India, where hitherto there have been a hundred tribes, but no people .'

It is very easy to over-estimate the progress which has since been effected, it would be most foolish to exaggerate the degree of solidarity which has yet been attained. What I have endeavoured to do is to enable Englishmen to calmly gauge the strength of the movement now at work in India, by a careful exposition of the forces from which the movement derived its impulse.

In the midst of his great measures of conquest and consolidation, Lord Dalhousie kept a firm although liberal hand upon the public expenditure of India. Changes in the system of account render it difficult to bring out the facts of Lord Dalhousie's finance with exactitude, except by going into a mass of detail unsuitable for the present book. The