accounts were generally in arrears and thus useless for all purposes of check. He consulted a Bombay firm as to the best method of keeping such accounts. The head of the firm replied, detailing a simple method which was adopted by the officer consulting the firm, but added in his letter on the subject: "We suppose this system will not be sufficiently cumbrous for a Government office." We may say, generally, not only do the workpeople prefer to serve a company to serving the State, but also that the trading classes prefer to have dealings with a company rather than with the State.

The fourth reason for the construction of railways by the State is opposed to all experience. It is notorious that the Government of India are crippled in all their so-called productive public works' expenditure by their want of funds. As remarked by Mr. S. Laing when Financial Member of Council in 1861: "A Government cannot be perpetually raising small loans; and if it can create through the agency of companies a share capital of ten or twenty millions, with five millions paid up, and a certainty of getting the other fifteen

millions by calls just as you want it, whether the state of the money market is good or bad, it is an important advantage, and worth paying for." The sum of £2,500,000 is indeed available out of

the annual income for the construction of new railways; but the Indian Government, instead of setting aside this sum for the payment of interest at 4 per cent. on a capital of £60,000,000, which it might borrow at once, has, as urged by Mr. J. Maclean, "the pedantry to insist on spending its two-and-a-half millions a year as principal, and thus renders itself incapable of making progress except by driblets."

What a splendid opportunity is now afforded to a wise and energetic Viceroy, to men of the stamp of Lord Dalhousie and Sir Bartle Frere, to provide for the needs of British commerce, to re-open closed foundries and looms, to arrest the fall in exchange, and to enrich by one and the same policy both England and India.

"I projected and advocated the Indus Valley line with its branches to the Bolan and the Khyber passes more than twenty years ago.* In 1863, after two peremptory refusals from the Secretary of State for India in Council, I received permission for the Company to send to India a Chief Engineer with a staff of fourteen Engineers and Surveyors

*What is now requisite is an extension from Quetta to Candahar, which place should be strongly fortified and garrisoned thus we should bar the advance of any force to the Bolan, and be able to attack in flank and rear an army proceeding against the Khyber.

to survey the line from Kotree to Mooltan, who examined the country exhaustively on both sides of the river, and furnished the basis, supplemented by subsequent investigation, upon which the choice of the present line was made.

"This Survey was undertaken and supervised by me, with the hope and expectation that the construction of the line would be entrusted to my Company, and that material benefit would accrue to the public at large, and to the Shareholders, whose interest I have always had so much at heart. The line from Hyderabad to Mooltan on the left bank of the river had been selected, also comparative estimates and every preparation made for its speedy construction, when, from a change of view at the India Office, I was obliged to order further proceedings to be suspended, and to dismiss the staff.

"This was hard upon the Company who had planned and for so many years advocated the construction of this line, which they regarded as an integral portion of their undertaking, "the Missing Link" in their system.

"The delay which followed amounted to the abandonment for several years of a work urged on the attention of Government by Sir John Lawrence, Sir Bartle Frere, Sir Henry Durand, Sir Richard Temple, and many other eminent

Indian Statesmen, as a most important portion of that system which I had devised for the development of the resources of the Punjab and NorthWest of India, and the border countries, as well as for political and strategical purposes.

"This system, even in its present state, with the Indus unbridged (at the most important crossing, at Sukkur), and the branches to the passes incomplete, has already justified its construction by its augmenting commercial advantages, while its importance in the late campaigns in Afghanistan has been acknowledged repeatedly by the highest military authorities in India, and very recently by Sir Frederick Roberts, who authorised a message to be sent to me conveying his acknowledgments and thanks for the services rendered to him and his troops.*

* Movement of troops, munitions of war, &c. during the Afghan Campaigns 1879-81 :

Tons.

Tons. Tons.

785 588,864 114,156 15,477 8,646 479 145,625 29,892 63,202

Peshawar.

"In 1870, Lord Salisbury appointed Sir Louis Mallet and Sir Frederick Halliday to meet me to draw up a joint report with the view of securing unity of design and management in the construction and working of the Indus Valley Railway in connection with the Scinde and Punjaub Lines, so as to avoid, if possible, foreign agency being thrust, as it were, into the heart of our system." *

But instead of carrying out these views, a suicidal and most disastrous policy was introduced, a policy of ostensibly cheap railways of the metre gauge (3 ft. 3 in.), a policy which, by its indiscreet application, has in fact dislocated the railway system of India, a policy which has led to the squandering of large sums of money on the Indus Valley Railway (500 miles from Kotree to Mooltan) the Government having made preparations for the narrow gauge which had subsequently to be abandoned, and to the useless expenditure of still larger sums in the metre gauge railway from Lahore to Peshawar (270 miles).

If the metre-gauge policy had been carried out on these lines, the frontier railways in the event

*Letter by the Writer to Juland Danvers, Esq., Government Director of Guaranteed Railways, dated 15th December 1880.