10. It would not be easy to overrate the importance of railways in this vast country, in the interests both of Britain and India. They form so many iron bands to unite the scattered provinces under British rule, and to enable our military forces to be sent speedily to any threatened quarter. They also serve to bring supplies to districts suffering from famine, whereas in former times it often happened that people in one part of India were dying for want of the food that was stored up in rich abundance in some distant part. The advantages that the railways offer to trade are still more important. "Great tracts," wrote Dalhousie, "are teeming with produce they cannot dispose of. Others are scantily bearing what they would carry in abundance, if only it could be conveyed whither it is needed.... Ships from every part of the world crowd our ports in search of produce which we have, or could obtain in the interior, but which at present we cannot profitably fetch to them." So great an impulse was given to trade in the course of the seven years of Lord Dalhousie's rule, that the export of raw cotton was doubled and that of grain increased threefold, whilst the total annual exports rose from thirteen millions to twenty-three. 11. The great viceroy also, meanwhile, set in action a scheme for binding all India together by a network of telegraph wires. In the last two years of his rule, no less than 4000 miles of electric telegraph were put in working order. The difficulties to be overcome were very great. The wires had to be carried on bamboo poles, or on pillars of stone and iron, over broad swamps and rocky wastes, through dense and deadly jungles, up wild mountain steeps, across deep gorges, and seventy large rivers. And all this had to be done in spite of the depredations of white ants, wild beasts, and half-civilised men. A famous writer thus describes the difficulties the engineers had to contend with: 12. "His posts had to pass through jungles, where wild beasts used them for scratching-stations, and savages stole them for firewood and rafters for huts. Inquisitive monkeys spoiled the work by dragging the wires into festoons, or dangling an ill-conducting tail from wire to wire. Crows, kites, and fishing-eagles made roosting-places of the wires in numbers so great as to bring them to the ground; though once or twice a flash of lightning, striking a wet wire, would strew the ground with the carcases of the feathered trespassers by dozens. The white ant nibbled galleries in the posts, and the porcupine burrowed under them."