part only be carried on buffaloes, camels, and packbullocks, at a cost of from 6d. to 1s. a ton per mile. Grain merchants were then men of enormous wealth, with agents in large towns, and droves upon droves of buffaloes and bullocks.

In Central India many a septuagenarian cornfactor laments the good old times, when he bought at what price he liked, and the humble hard-working cultivator could send his grain nowhere, but must arrange for its sale with the grasping money-lender and corn-merchant at his door, or leave it in underground pits, or in fragile storehouses of wattle and mud, or in earthen jars, exposed to fermentation and the ravages of the weevil. In times of scarcity these receptacles of store grain are sometimes opened, and often when the damp has penetrated and the grain fermented the stench is quite unbearable. The poor, driven by famine to eat this rotten grain, die by scores. The mortality is set down to cholera.

Prices varied from village to village, the weights and measures of one hamlet differed from those of its neighbour. Even now in one large grainproducing province there are some seven different tables of capacity by which grain or sugar or salt is sold, and within the last twenty years villagers of the Balaghat district refused to take copper money for any humble purchases that might be

The cultivator market for his

could find no

grain, and

other evils want of roads.

caused by the

made, but demanded cowries.* In one part of the country, grain was almost valueless; in another place, not a hundred miles off there might be scarcity; whilst still further beyond, but yet not very remote, famine raged.

Wandering gipsy-like tribes, called Brinjaras, followed armies with stores, or carried salt, coarse sugar and grain on buffaloes and pack-bullocks during the open season. In the rains, or from the middle of June to the middle of October, that is for five months in the year, there was no traffic, there were no travellers. Pilgrims to religious shrines, surprised by the approach of the rainy season stopped during the rains in the villages where they happened to be, and for the sake of daily food served as clerks or school-masters, astrologers, or village priests, until after some five months' detention travel again became possible. As the country was destitute of roads, so the rivers were but imperfectly utilised for the transport of goods. There were rude country craft, which, if the wind were fair, sailed slowly up or down the stream, and were rowed and poled wearisomely

*Small shells of the Cypræa moneta, a native of the Pacific and Eastern seas. Many tons weight of this little shell were annually imported into England, and again exported for barter; in 1848, sixty tons of the money cowry were imported into Liverpool.

Government commence to make roads.

against the stream if the wind failed. There was no regular service. A passenger might hope to reach his destination some time or other. Every man's hand was against the merchant, every petty landholder who could collect a score of ruffians exacted transit duties. In the long decay of the Mogul Empire the few roads, and even the canals and irrigation works that once existed, had been suffered to fall into disrepair. It is ever darkest before the dawn. When the English became the paramount The English power in India, road-making was a vital necessity. But it was not till 1836 that a road was commenced from Calcutta to Delhi, which was afterwards prolonged to Peshawar, a distance of 1,420 miles, at a cost of £1,500,000; it was finished when middleaged men who saw it commenced, had grown old. In 1842 a road between Bombay and Calcutta, 1,170 miles, was begun, and completed at a cost of £600,000; and a third road uniting Bombay and Agra, 734 miles, at a cost of £250,000, was made. The total cost of all the roads constructed between 1839 and 1849 was £3,460,000. In 1838 over an area of 30,000 square miles in four of the collectorates adjacent to Bombay there were little more than four hundred miles of roads, of which only one half were passable in the rains. All the towns of the interior were during that season so many isolated points; and however important it might

The creation of the Public Works Department by Lord Dalhousie,

and the commencement of railways

in India when

there were no

them.

be, it would then have been impossible to pass heavy carriages along even the made roads, which had been constructed without care or cost as to their foundations, were generally unbridged, and had but few ferry-boats.*

Though the roadless state of India attracted the attention of successive Governor-Generals, yet it was not until the time of Lord Dalhousie that systematic efforts were made to give India the roads she required. With a view to create them, and to repair and extend irrigation works, he formed roads to feed the Public Works Department. His rule commenced in 1848. Railways had then made some progress in England. In the first quarter of a century after their commencement in 1825, there had been constructed in the United Kingdom 6,621 miles of railroad, being an average rate of 265 miles per annum. England, indeed, by her admirable system of roads, her organized mail-coach and van traffic, was prepared for the introduction of railroads; but in India, before railroads, there were neither roads nor road-makers. The larger rivers were unbridged, and the Hindoos, at least, thought it would be impious to bridge the holy Ganges, or the sacred Narbada. Both roads and rail-roads

* Report on a Proposed Railway in India. By Mr. Vignoles, F.R.S., Past President Inst. C.E., dated 22nd September 1842.

had to be made at the same time; there were neither skilled artizans, nor sturdy navvies, nor surveyors, nor engineers. Works had to be carried on sometimes through pathless jungles, over scarcely trodden hills, through tracts of country rendered uninhabitable by wild beasts and miasma.

A great proportion of the Engineers who commenced the railway works did not live to see them completed; they succumbed to hard work in a climate then often deadly. If the first railways thus constructed cost much, is it surprising? Even now whole tracts of country are roadless. In some districts there may perhaps be one made road, the means of communication between two far distant towns. But off that road neither wheeled carriages nor carts can be used * and there is no system of local traffic that can be utilised to feed a railroad.

;

"Take," says Colonel Medley, R.E., “the case of the best section of the Scinde, Punjab, and

* In 1881, in the cold season, an officer travelling about seventy miles from the nearest railway and ten miles from the chief civil station of a district, had to collect labourers to make a track between two villages passable for two bullock-carts. It took him eight hours to travel some fourteen miles. On another occasion, in another locality, he found it simply impossible to take a cart anywhere off the solitary unbridged road running through the district. He kept to the plains; he attempted no hills; carts were simply not used and unusable,