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Rh consolidation kept pace, step by step, with territorial extension. It will be my duty to indicate the series of beneficent measures of peace which his master-mind designed as the complement of his annexations and conquests by war. How he welded province to province by the iron bands of the railway and the telegraph. How he began that process of binding together the Indian races by a common system of education and by a community of interest, mercantile and political, which was altogether unknown in ancient India, and which forms the most significant feature of the India of to-day.

The time has not yet come to pronounce a final judgment on Lord Dalhousie's work. He himself forbad, by a Codicil, the publication of his papers until fifty years after his death. To Lady Connemara, his beloved daughter and devoted companion, who has kindly gone through the biographical portions of this book, I tender my grateful and respectful thanks. To Dr. Grant, the physician and friend of Lord Dalhousie during his Indian career and later life, I am under very special obligations not only for materials and verifications, but for the revision of the entire proof-sheets.

This little volume will, at any rate, correct the misunderstandings and half-knowledge which obscured Lord Dalhousie's administration at the time