During the last sixteen years, nearly the whole of the Indian railways
have been made. When Edmund Burke, in 1783, arraigned the British
Government for their neglect of India in his speech on Mr. Fox’s Bill, he
said: “England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no
navigations, dug out no reservoirs. . . . Were we to be driven out of
India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed,
during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the
ourang-outang or the tiger.”
But that reproach no longer exists. Some of the greatest bridges erected
in modern times—such as those over the Sone near Patna, and over the
Jumna at Allahabad—have been erected in connection with the Indian
railways. More than 5000 miles are now at work, and they have been
constructed at an expenditure of about £88,000,000 of British capital,
guaranteed by the British Government. The Indian railways connect the
capitals of the three Presidencies—uniting Bombay with Madras on the
south, and with Calcutta on the north-east—while a great main line, 2200
miles in extent, passing through the north-western provinces, and
connecting Calcutta with Lucknow, Delhi, Lahore, Moultan, and Kurrachee,
unites the mouths of the Hooghly in the Bay of Bengal with those of the
Indus in the Arabian Sea.
When the first edition of this work appeared, in the beginning of 1857,
the Canadian system of railways was but in its infancy. The Grand Trunk
was only begun, and the Victoria Bridge—the greatest of all railway
structures—was not half erected. The Colony of Canada has now more than
3000 miles in active operation along the great valley of the St.
Lawrence, connecting Rivière du Loup at the mouth of that river, and the
harbour of Portland in the State of Maine, _viâ_ Montreal and Toronto,
with Sarnia on Lake Huron, and with Windsor, opposite Detroit in the
State of Michigan. During the same time the Australian Colonies have
been actively engaged in providing themselves with railways, many of
which are at work, and others are in course of formation. The Cape of
Good Hope has several lines open, and others making. France has
constructed about 400 miles in Algeria; while the Pasha of Egypt is the
proprietor of 360 miles in operation across the Egyptian desert. The
Japanese are also making railroads.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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