Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/23

Rh shall, after honestly stating the facts, leave the reader to judge.

The territories which Lord Dalhousie conquered or annexed, he firmly bound together. His vast extension of roads, canals, steamer-routes, and public undertakings of many kinds, created facilities for, commerce, and an effective surplus of the staples of commerce, such as had never before existed in India. But under his rule, also, four new engines of consolidation were set at work: railways, telegraphs, a half-penny post, and a great centralising system of education on a Western basis. I shall speak of each of these hereafter. For the moment let me quote the words of the earliest biographer of Lord Dalhousie concerning a single one of them. 'Railways,' wrote Sir Edwin Arnold in 1865, when they were still a new thing in India, 'railways may do for India what dynasties have never done — what the genius of Akbar the Magnificent could not effect by government, nor the cruelty of Tipú Sáhib by violence — they may make India a nation .'

It is to the consolidating influences thus put in motion by Lord Dalhousie that we owe the India of to-day, with its new mercantile era, its new intellectual activity, its new political awakening. His geographical unification of Indian territories is