For nearly a century the inventions of Hargreaves, of Crompton, of Cartwright, and of Watt, enabled Lancashire to supply Bombay and Calcutta with fabrics, as, in the seventeenth century, Surat and Calicut had supplied London, and this superiority appeared assured until Orientals should acquire the momentum necessary for machinery. One effect in Europe was the rapid increase of a population congregated in towns, and bearing a marked resemblance to the “humiliores” of Rome in their disinclination for war. True to their instincts, the adventurers ever quickened their movements, ever extended the sphere of their enterprises, and, finally, just as the Second Empire verged upon its fall, they opened the Suez Canal in 1869. The consequences of this great engineering triumph have probably equalled in gravity the establishment of the gold standard, but the two phenomena had this marked difference. The producers saw their danger and resisted to the utmost the contraction of the currency, whereas the Canal was a case of suicide. Thenceforward grain, raised by the most enduring labour of the world, could be thrown without limit on the European market, and, agricultural competition once established, industrial could only be a question of time. The Canal made the importation and the reparation of machinery cheap throughout Asia. From a period, perhaps, as remote as Clive’s victories, the Hindoos had experienced a certain impulsion from contact with the British, but it was not until the building of railroads, under Lord Dalhousie, that the severer phases of competition opened among the inhabitants of India. Lord Dalhousie became Governor General in 1848, and, that the acceleration of the next nine years culminated in a catastrophe seems certain, for nothing can be plainer than that the Mutiny of 1857 was an outbreak of a martial Mohammedan population crushed under an intolerable pressure. The locality of the disturbance alone is enough to demonstrate the accuracy of this inference. Dalhousie’s last act was the annexation of the Kingdom of Oude. Of this province Lucknow is the capital, and while Lucknow was one focus of the insurrection, Delhi, the capital of the ancient Mogul empire, was the other. Once subdued by the British, and reduced to an economic equality with subtler races, the old Moslem gentry rapidly disappeared. Since 1857 these families, which had maintained themselves for six or seven hundred years, have rapidly fallen into ruin, and their estates have been bought by their creditors, the rising usurer class.