If we look back upon the half-century after the Mutiny and before the Partition of Bengal, which may be regarded as closing that long period of paternal but autocratic government, it was one of internal peace and of material progress which the large annual output of eloquent statistics may be left to demonstrate. In 1857 there were not 200 miles of railways in India, in 1905 there was a network of railways amounting to over 28,000 miles, and the telegraph system expanded during the same period from 4500 to 60,000 miles. The development of a great system of irrigation canals added large new tracts of hitherto barren wastes to the cultivable area of the country, and an elaborate machinery of precautionary measures and relief works was created to mitigate the hardships of periodical famines unavoidable in regions where a predominantly agricultural population is largely dependent for existence on the varying abundance or shortage of the seasonal rainfalls. The incidence and methods of collection of the land-tax, the backbone of Indian revenue, were carefully corrected and perfected, and the burden of taxation readjusted and on the whole lightened. Those were the days of _laisser-faire_, _laisser-aller_ at home, and it was not deemed to be part of the duties of government to give any special protection to Indian commerce, whilst the operation of free trade principles in India checked the industrial development of the country. Nevertheless the internal and external trade of India expanded continually, and the cotton mills in Western India, and the jute mills in Calcutta, as well as the opening up of coal mines in Bengal and of gold mines in Southern India showed how great were the natural resources of the peninsula still awaiting development; and under Lord Curzon's administration, which reached during the first years of the present century the high-water mark of efficiency, a department was created to deal specially with commerce and industry. In spite of several famines of unusual intensity and of the appearance in India in 1896 of a new scourge in the shape of the bubonic plague, which has carried off since then over eight million people, the population increased by leaps and bounds, and the census of 1901 showed it to have reached in our Indian Empire the huge figure of nearly 300,000,000--which it has since then exceeded by another 20,000,000--or about a fifth of the estimated population of the whole globe. It had risen since the first census officially recorded in 1871 by nearly 30 per cent--no mean evidence that fifty years of peaceful and efficient administration had produced an increased sense of welfare and confidence.