Read Ebook: India and Indian Engineering. Three lectures delivered at the Royal Engineer Institute Chatham in July 1872 by Medley J G Julius George

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He climbs gradually to a still higher position; perhaps becomes lieutenant-governor of a province as large as Germany, with 40 millions of inhabitants; retires at last from the service to spend the rest of his life in his native land, and finds his name and his services utterly unknown, not merely to the English public, but often to the very Government of which he had thought himself all this time the trusted servant.

It is this ignorance, and neglect of all services that are not done at home, except in very rare cases, which are the cause of so much irritation both in India and the colonies; a fourth-rate politician in England, a man who has no power or virtue whatever, save the vulgar "gift of the gab," is better known and more thought of than the ablest servants of the State 5000 miles away. I have often thought how much good might be done by those in power, if instead of philosophising so much on the exact relations between England and her colonies, and demonstrating so clearly that as they pay no taxes to the Imperial exchequer, they have no right to be defended by the Imperial armies, care was taken to show that the colonies were really considered to be an integral part of the empire, and that good service done there was to be rewarded as if done at home; if a few more royal visits were paid, and a few more ribbons and stars occasionally bestowed; and if some means were found, either by life peerages or otherwise, for the State to avail itself of the experience of those who had grown grey in its service in distant lands, and for those men to feel that their talents and knowledge were valued at home in the great council of the nation. And if you say that you English at home are not interested in this matter, I beg leave to differ, and ask you fairly if every time you look at a map of the world, and see the red colour all over the globe which marks the extent of the British empire, and the great dependencies which have been conquered and colonized by that little island in the north-west corner of Europe, you do not feel a glow of honest pride in the thought that you too are a citizen of that empire on which the sun never sets, and whether that feeling is to be valued in pounds, shillings and pence, or rather, whether you are not willing to pay many pounds in exchange for the right to that feeling.

It is that abominable material philosophy of a certain school of the present day, which recognises nothing as really valuable that does not touch the grosser part of our nature, which sneers at patriotism and sentiment of any kind, and makes a god of selfishness, that sometimes frightens those who watch the enormous increase of our national wealth, and the decrease of regard for national duty, and makes them tremble lest we should one day have a rude awakening to the fact that a selfish and exclusive policy is as bad for nations as for individuals.

To return to our subject from this digression.

To those who cannot look upon their Indian life from the standpoint I have mentioned, a career in India is, it must be owned, but a dreary exile; the time for making fortunes, at any rate in the Government service, is gone; those who retire have seldom much beyond their very moderate pensions, and while the cost of living has steadily increased for many years past, salaries have remained stationary, or even diminished, and work has very much increased.

Thus, there can be no doubt that an Indian career has fewer attractions than formerly, and this has been the case ever since the Mutiny--that great landmark in Indian history whose significance is not even yet recognised. That great struggle, remember, was in no sense an uprising of the people against our rule, for, if it had been, we could not have held India for an hour. But though it was, primarily, a military revolt, caused and aggravated by overweening confidence and bad management, it was secondarily, a struggle of conservatism against the further progress of western innovations; it was a protest by caste and tradition against railways, telegraphs, and national education. Attacked under every possible disadvantage, outnumbered in every direction, with our arsenals in the enemy's hands, and having to fight at the worst season of the year, that handful of the great Anglo-Saxon race turned fiercely to bay, supplied every deficiency by dauntless courage, wise policy, and heroic endurance, and broke the neck of the rebellion under the walls of Delhi, and in the residency of Lucknow, before a single fresh soldier had arrived from England.

Since the suppression of the Mutiny, our hold on the empire has been firmer than ever, but it owes less to prestige and more to actual strength. We have been less careful of respecting native opinion than before, more resolute to push on improvements, and the progress made in the last fifteen years in the material development of the country has been undoubtedly greater than in the previous fifty years. But much of the kindly feeling between the conquerors and conquered has gone, and will not soon be restored; the traditions and organizations of the Government services were destroyed, and have not yet been re-settled, and there is no longer that attachment to the country that was seen in the days of old John Company, kindest and best of masters. The remedy for this is not, I think, a return to the old state of things, which is indeed impossible, but more close and intimate relations between India and England, until our native subjects feel that they are really regarded as part of the British empire. The more they visit England, and the more we visit India, the more will each understand and appreciate the other. We have no enemy now in India, except popular ignorance, and that we are doing our best to remove by the most complete system of State education that has yet been devised in any country.

And now I must touch on a subject on which many of you will, perhaps, expect some information. How about the progress of Christianity in India? Well, I fear it must be owned that it is extremely slow. I dare say I might be contradicted by many missionaries, but then I am not a missionary. I have the highest respect for them as a body; many I have known personally, and know to be able men; but undoubtedly their success, if judged by the number of converts, is very small, in Upper India at least; and though doubtless they do much good by keeping up the schools that are attached to every mission, that good has very little to do with the progress of Christianity. As translators of the Bible into the various Indian languages, they have been more successful, and many of them are amongst the most accomplished linguists of the East.

I am inclined to think that much of this ill-success is owing to the forgetfulness of how universal and comprehensive Christianity is. The best proof of that is that, having originated in the East, it has yet so completely conquered the West. But in that conquest it has in some respects assumed a Western garb, and I fear our missionaries often forget that this Western garb is not essential, and that so long as the life and doctrine of the Great Master are followed and understood, the peculiar form to be taken by the latter is a matter of little importance. This is not the place to enter fully into a discussion of this sort, though it was impossible for me to avoid it altogether. But I believe I am only echoing the opinions of many thoughtful and earnest Christians, like the late excellent Bishop Cotton, of Calcutta, in saying that our efforts should be rather directed to create a native Indian Church, than to reproduce the Church of England in India; and that controversial epistles addressed to Western Churches, and dealing with questions arising out of the doctrines of Western philosophy, are puzzling rather than edifying to a convert in India.

Of the state of the Arts and Manufactures in India, all of you can form some judgment yourselves by an inspection of the beautiful specimens collected in the Indian annexe of the International Exhibition.

Some of the once famous Indian manufactures have almost disappeared in modern times, such as the Dacca muslin, of which it was said that a full-sized dress piece could be drawn through a finger ring. Native architecture too of the present day is tawdry and meretricious. But Cashmere is still famous for its wonderful shawls, in which we know not which to admire most, the beauty of the fabric, or the exquisite patterns and harmonious contrast of colours; Agra still executes that beautiful inlaid stone-work, which is yet only one of the wonders of the Taj Mehal; Delhi and Benares send gorgeous embroideries, heavy with gold and rich in colouring; Cuttack furnishes its exquisite silver filagree work; Sealkote, its steel inlaid with gold in arabesque patterns; Bombay, its massive and curiously-carved ebony furniture. But Art can never attain to its highest development in the absence of a healthy national life, and it is to former ages we must turn for structures like some of the Hindoo Temples, or the great mosque at Delhi, or "the Dream in Marble" at Agra , and even the artistic manufactures I have named are legacies from the past, that are apt to degenerate at the present day into a grotesque copying of European designs.

Yet there is an indwelling spirit of artistic grace in the East that will not easily die, which you see in the instinctive choice of colours in the clothes of the very poorest on a holiday festival,--in the shape of the commonest earthenware utensils,--in the very salutation that you get from the poorest peasant in the fields.

Mahomedanism is certainly no friend to sculpture or painting, for it takes in a very literal sense the prohibition of the Jewish decalogue to "make no likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth." No good Mussulman will even have his portrait taken, and geometric forms or the flowing Arabic sentences from the Koran are the proper ornaments of the orthodox mosque. But the prohibition has been relaxed at least in the case of flowers, and the exquisite carving and inlaid work of the Taj are almost unapproachable in excellence, while the fretted marble screens at Jyepore and elsewhere are more like lace than stone.

And now I should like to tell you something more of Indian life in its English aspect, and make you congratulate yourselves or regret that your lot has not been cast in India.

The man has returned and says we are to go in; so we enter and find the lady , seated in the drawing-room, the punkah swinging violently, for it is the hot weather. You see the room is a good-sized one, at least 20 feet high, with six or eight doors in it, all indispensable for ventilation; the floor covered with China matting which is cooler than a carpet; not too much furniture in it, for that would make it look hot, but a piano, books, and flowers at least, and a few pictures on the wall. The master of the house is not visible; he is either at his office, working in a room crowded with natives and the thermometer at 96?, or taking it easy in his own room, in his shirt-sleeves and slippers, smoking, and reading or writing. We sit down and talk to the lady about the dreadful heat of the weather, the chance of her going to the hills, the good looks of the last arrived young lady in the station, the dinner party at the Brigadier's the night before, and the chances of getting up private theatricals next cold weather.

As to your own mode of life, if you are a sensible man, you will always rise early in the hot weather, say at five o'clock, and get a walk or ride in the cool of the morning, coming home before seven to what is called "little breakfast," where you drink tea and eat fruit if there is any, or iced mangoe fool; after which, you had better read or write till it is time for regular breakfast, and then go away to your office. Men holding official positions get a pretty good spell of desk-work every day; they are far better off than those who are not forced to work hard, for the heat is so enervating that it is very difficult to work as an amateur.

If you can get a month's holiday, of course you run up to the hills, where at an elevation of 7000 feet above the sea level, you find yourself in a charming climate and beautiful scenery. The Governor-General and all the heads of departments go up now regularly for six months out of the twelve, like sensible men, for which they get well abused by the press, the editors being obliged to stay in the hot plains. Men who can afford it send their wives and children up every hot weather, and run up there when they can get short leave. It is expensive work, but if you want to keep your children alive, there is no resource but the hills or England; they wither and die in the plains like plucked flowers.

No one, as I have said, makes fortunes in India now, the time has gone by; salaries are higher than in England, of course, but the expenses are enormous. The nabob of the old novels, with a yellow face like a baboon and a dried-up liver, passionate in temper, telling impossible tiger stories, and suddenly turning up in England with a hookah, two or three black servants, and several lakhs of rupees for the hero and heroine--is a thing of the past. His successor was dear old Colonel Newcome in fiction, or better still, Henry and John Lawrence, James Outram, Herbert Edwardes, John Nicholson, Henry Durand, and men of that stamp, in reality, wise in council, resolute in action, God-fearing always, with duty ever present before them as the one motive of their lives; strong men to whom both their countrymen and native subjects looked up, as worthy to rule and to be obeyed.

While I am on the subject of society, let me disabuse you of the notion still prevailing in the minds of many respectable people, as well as second-rate novelists, that ladies in India are different from their English sisters, and that, when young, they are shipped over to the East like figs, to the market of Hymen. Such fables belong only to the time when every Indian was a nabob, with no liver to speak of, and the complexion of a China orange. Young ladies now go to India, I assure you, for the same reason that other young ladies stay in England,-- because their fathers and mothers are there; and stray females, bent on an independent matrimonial cruise, are, alas! things of the past. On the other hand, while the one terrible drawback of Anglo-Indian life is the continual separation of husband and wife, parents and children, I am bold enough to say that those social relations--the former, at any rate--are stronger even than in England, if only on this account, that each is less independent of the other than at home. If Damon and Phyllis have had a quarrel, Damon can't go to his club, nor Phyllis run to her mamma, to make matters worse; and when each has cooled or sulked a little, Damon remembers the terrible time when they said good-bye to their little ones at Southampton, and Phyllis recalls the intense pleasure of again meeting her husband, after that cruel illness which sent her home when he could not go with her; so they kiss and make friends, and resolve to keep their tempers in better check in future.

I have often been asked how we travel in India? Well, where there are no railways, and you have a good metalled road, you travel by horse-d?k, as it is termed;--that is, you hire a carriage, which is a four-wheeled cab slightly altered, and engage relays of horses at every five or six miles; and by travelling all night to escape the heat, you manage to accomplish 60 or 70 miles between dinner and breakfast-time pretty comfortably, at a cost of about a shilling per mile.

The horses are an abominable set of brutes, and generally begin by obstinately refusing to stir a step, or, perhaps, lying down in the shafts. Then the native coachman, after patiently undoing the rotten harness and getting the animal once more on his legs, addresses him by all manner of endearing epithets. "Go on, my brother," ; "go on, my son, my brave, my hero," ; a cut with the whip, followed by a vicious kick from the horse. Coachee changes his language--"Go on, you scoundrel--you villain;" a shower of blows, a volley of abuse from the passenger inside, more kicks and plunges from the horse, and finally, by the aid of the whole stable establishment, who push behind, whack the horse, and simultaneously yell like fiends, off you go at the rate of ten miles an hour, the horse never stopping until he gets to the end of his stage.

If there is no road, as happens very often, you must be content with the old-fashioned palanquin or doolie, a species of coffin with doors at the sides, in which you are carried on men's shoulders at an average rate of three miles per hour, the bearers being changed every ten miles. When I first landed in India, I travelled from Calcutta to Allahabad, a distance of 500 miles, in this way, taking twelve days on the road; the journey being now accomplished by rail in about twenty hours.

And now my watch warns me that I have tried your patience long enough. I have endeavoured to give you some idea of the nature of Anglo-Indian life, and of that country which has so often been described as the brightest jewel in the British Crown. But, after all, the only way to know much of a country is to see it; and I often wonder that more Englishmen do not pay a flying visit to India now that it is so accessible. Many certainly do go there now-a-days for a short time, and are, I am sure, well rewarded for their pains; but they are very, very few in proportion to those who might go, if they only knew how to set about it, and perhaps I cannot conclude my lecture better than by taking you all a journey there on paper, just as if I were Mr. Cook, and you were a party of tourists.

We start from the Waterloo Station and run down to Southampton, going on board one of the fine steamers of the P. & O., as it is always called, which I need not say is short for the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. The mails are on board, the last good-byes have been said, and we are steaming down Channel and across the Bay of Biscay, until, on the fifth day, we cast anchor off the Rock of Gibraltar. A few hours' delay for coaling, and we run on to Malta, and find ourselves in Valetta Harbour, wandering about the quaint old town, eating oranges, buying lace, or examining the old church of St. John, with its relics and monuments that carry us back to the middle ages. Another three days' run and we are landed at Alexandria, and getting our first peep at the East from the top of a donkey. But the train is ready, and we speed through the flat, fertile country watered by the Nile, cross that muddy and venerable stream which has puzzled all the geographers from Herodotus to Livingstone, get a glimpse of the Pyramids in the distance, and cross that terrible desert which is still what it was when Moses led the Israelites through it more than 3000 years ago; and in twelve hours from the time of leaving the Mediterranean, are on board the other mail steamer in the Red Sea. Six days' run takes us to its mouth, and we are anchored off Aden, a strong military post built on a barren rock, where we stay a few hours for coaling, and then enter on the last stage of our voyage. Five days' run across the Indian Ocean and we sight the magnificent harbour of Bombay; and then a little steamer carries us all off to the shore, and we are driving to Pallonjee's Hotel under a fierce sun, tempered only by the sea-breeze, and through streets thronged by motley crowds of natives, in which the few white men are altogether lost.

From Bombay, the Great Indian Peninsular Railway will take you 600 miles in about twenty-five hours to Jubbulpore, up the steep inclines of the Western Ghat mountains, and through the dense jungles and undulating hills of Central India.

All these great cities are well worth a visit, containing, as they do, many interesting ruins and architectural remains of the old Hindoo and Mahomedan rulers of the country. Beyond Lahore, where the railway at present terminates, a fine road 260 miles long, will take the traveller across the classic streams of the Punjab, famous for Alexander the Great's campaigns, up to Peshawur, on the extreme north-west boundary of the empire, where a force of 8000 men keeps watch over the fierce and turbulent races of the neighbouring mountains.

From Umballa, on the Punjab Railway, if the traveller strikes to the east, a good road of 40 miles will take him to the foot of the Himalayahs, whence he can ascend to Simla, situated amongst its groves of pines and rhododendrons, 8000 feet above the sea; and thence through some of the finest mountain scenery in the world, to Cashmere or Thibet, or the frontier of China.

You may vary the homeward route by visiting Calcutta, Madras, and Ceylon, or by going down the Indus to Kurrachee, and thence back to Bombay.

And over all these distances, and through this vast country, the traveller may journey as safely as in any part of Europe, in a healthy, enjoyable climate, if he chooses the proper time, and with his mind expanded by the contemplation of scenery differing widely from anything in the West, and of a state of social and national life which the most superficial glance will assure him is utterly foreign to all his previous experiences.

That, I think, is the chief good of all travel. The experience it brings lifts us out of our old grooves of thought, widens our narrow ideas, teaches us that as God has not made us all with the same coloured skins, so he has given us varieties of national character, which are admirable from their very diversity, and do not make us the less members of one common family, in which He is the great Father of us all.

For purposes of administration and government India is divided as follows:--The Viceroy and Governor-General of course rules over all, making his head-quarters at Calcutta in the cold weather, and at Simla in the summer. Under him are the Governors of Madras and Bombay, the Lieutenant-Governors of Bengal, the North-west Provinces and the Punjab, with their seats of government at Calcutta, Allahabad, and Lahore respectively; the Chief Commissioners of Oudh, the Central Provinces, Central India, and British Burmah, residing at Lucknow, Nagpore, Indore, and Rangoon; and the Commissioners of Mysore, Hyderabad, and Scinde. Some idea of the extent and importance of these provincial commands may be formed if we consider that Bengal proper, for example, is as large as Germany, and numbers 60 millions of inhabitants.

With regard to the Public Works of the country, their control and direction are confided to a separate department of the State, known as the Public Works Department, at the head of which is a Secretary, styled the Secretary to the Government of India in the P. W. D., and who is, in effect, the consulting engineer and professional adviser to the Viceroy and his council. He is assisted by Deputy-Secretaries for the separate branches of Irrigation, Railways, and Military Buildings.

To the head-quarters of each local government is similarly attached a Secretary, who is at once the mouthpiece and professional adviser of the Lieutenant-Governor or Chief Commissioner, and who, as Chief Engineer, is also head of the whole public works establishment of his province.

Subordinate to him are the Superintending Engineers, who may either have general charge of all the public works of a large district, or, as is more generally the case, are in special charge of some large work, such as a Canal or a Railway. Under the superintending engineers are the Executive Engineers, who are, in effect, the working units of the system. An executive engineer may have a range of new Barracks to build, a line of Road 80 to 100 miles long to keep in repair, or 30 or 40 miles of Canal or Railway to lay out and construct, and for the actual execution of this work he is primarily the responsible man. If the work is a new one, he has to prepare the detailed designs and working drawings under the advice and guidance of his superintendent, to frame the estimates, and to write the reports. When sanctioned, he has to lay out the work, and to find the workmen or contractors to execute it, to control the expenditure, to submit monthly accounts and progress reports, and to conduct a tolerably large correspondence. He will probably have two or three Assistant-engineers, five or six European Overseers, and eight or ten native Sub-Overseers, besides an Office establishment of clerks and accountants.

All the above officials, from the grade of Chief Engineer down to that of Assistant-Engineer, inclusive, are indifferently drawn from officers of the Royal Engineers; Artillery or Line Officers trained at Roorkee; Civil Engineers sent out from England; civilians trained at Roorkee. The promotion from one grade to another is partly by merit and partly by seniority, and has nothing whatever to do with military rank; but care has generally been taken not to have a Royal Engineer officer serving departmentally under his junior.

It may interest some of you if I trace the probable career of a young Royal Engineer, sent to India, say, to what is still called the Bengal Presidency. On landing at Bombay, and reporting himself to the military authorities, he will be directed to proceed to Roorkee, where he will have to do duty with the Bengal Sappers and Miners for a year. This is the order at present, the idea being that in the interval he will acquire some knowledge of the language and of the customs of the country, and, if he is wise, he will make good use of his time; for until he can speak Hindustani pretty fluently, he will find himself very helpless, and all but useless. Roorkee is the head-quarters of the Bengal Sappers, and virtually the head-quarters of the Royal Engineers in the Bengal Presidency. The college over which I have, for some years, had the honour of presiding is at the same station, but is in no way connected with the Sappers, being a public works institution under the civil government, while the Sappers are of course under the Commander-in-Chief.

The Thomason College has been founded about twenty-five years, and now contains about 250 students. There is an engineer class, consisting of a few Artillery and Line officers, and some thirty civilians, who undergo a two years' training to fit them for the posts of Assistant-Engineers in the P. W. Dept.; another class of officers, who stay only seven months, and are trained for the Quartermaster-General's Department; a class of soldiers who are trained as Overseers; and a large native class, who are educated as Sub-Overseers, Sub-Surveyors, Estimators, and Draftsmen. Besides the Principal, there are two Royal Engineer Assistants on the staff, two civil Professors of Mathematics and Experimental Science, and two sets of subordinate Masters for the lower classes. There are also a library, model room, and museums in the college, and an excellent press, whence a good many useful works have issued, chiefly relating to Indian engineering.

The Bengal Sappers and Miners are a fine body of men, consisting of twelve companies of native soldiers, recruited from the best and most warlike tribes in Upper India, who have done excellent service wherever they have been employed. Besides their own native officers, English non-commissioned officers are attached to the companies. There is a Commandant, Adjutant, Superintendent of Instruction, and Superintendent of the Park and Field Train, and four doing-duty officers, who are all Royal Engineers, besides the new arrivals attached temporarily to the corps. About half the men are at head-quarters, the remainder in detached companies at Peshawur and elsewhere on the frontier. There is a very fair park and pontoon train attached; also workshops and schools. The men are skilful and intelligent, excellent workmen and good soldiers.

Roorkee also possesses a Foundry and Workshops belonging to Government, which are interesting as having been the first of the kind erected in India, twenty-four years ago, before the introduction of railways. The workmen are all natives, and some of them are remarkably clever and intelligent. They will make anything for anybody, from an iron bridge or a steam engine, down to a railway key; and they turn out excellent spirit levels, prismatic compasses, and so forth. Near Roorkee are also all the greatest works of the Ganges Canal.

Roorkee is a pleasant and healthy station, and many of the young officers stay voluntarily with the Sappers for more than the regular year, as their departmental promotion counts all the same. But generally speaking, before the year is out, the young officer will read in the Gazette of India one fine morning that his services have been placed at the disposal of the P.W. Dept.; and in the next Gazette that he is posted to such or such a province; then a week later, in the local Gazette of that province, he will be posted to a particular circle, and the superintending engineer of that circle will desire him to report himself to some particular executive engineer. The day after his arrival he will find himself employed according to the nature of the work, either surveying and levelling, or drawing plans and making calculations, or in a tent in the middle of the jungles superintending the building of a bridge, with not a soul that can speak a word of English within 30 miles of him. For the next four or five years he will probably be changed about a good deal from one work to another; and if he has proved himself efficient, will then find himself an executive engineer of the fourth grade, and in charge of a division; while, after running through the four executive grades, another ten years or so may carry him on to the higher grade of a superintending engineer.

Generally speaking, a new arrival can select his own line of departmental service, which will depend on his tastes and circumstances. If he has been weak enough to get married before going out, or if he is fond of society, he will select the Military Buildings' branch, so that he may live in a station; and if he has a speciality for architecture, I should strongly recommend him to do this, for there is a great want of men in that line in India. If, however, he is fond of hard work and knocking about in the jungles, and doesn't mind a solitary life, he will prefer the Irrigation or Railway branch, and I do not think he will regret his choice, for no man fond of his profession could desire more interesting work, and in the construction of a new line of Canal or Railroad he will every day find scope for his talent or ingenuity or readiness of resource.

It may be asked, what are the relations of a Royal Engineer officer, in a department so miscellaneously constituted, to the Civil Engineers and Line officers, with whom he has to work? I think they are generally very friendly and agreeable, and though, of course, it is pleasanter to serve under one's own brother officers, yet the various members of the department work harmoniously together, and the promotions are generally very fairly made, energetic and clever men being pushed on well.

You will observe that I have said nothing about military engineering works except barracks; in fact, there is very little work of that kind in India. Like the Romans of old, we encamp our troops in open cantonments instead of shutting them up in forts, and what forts there are in the country, for the magazines and arsenals, are almost all old native forts. Of harbour defence works we have scarcely any, for the simple reason that there are scarcely any harbours, except at Bombay, where the subject has recently had much attention directed to it. Whatever military engineering work is required is therefore done as a civil work by the Public Works Department, and all Royal Engineer officers virtually work as civilians, except in the event of war, when those required are at once ordered off to join the army; and though doubtless an officer's knowledge of military details may be considerably weakened by his long absence from military duty in civil employment, yet the very nature of that employment engenders a quickness and fertility of resource and a sense of responsibility which go far to compensate for that deficiency, and the men who blew in the Cashmere Gate at Delhi, and laid out the defences of the Lucknow Residency, at any rate found their knowledge of military engineering sufficient for the purpose.

What I have already said as to the importance of the work entrusted to every young Government civilian in India applies almost as much to the young Engineer. He will find himself almost immediately entrusted with responsibility, and, before long, in charge of work that he could not expect to have confided to him in England until many years of service had rolled over his head. But with work and responsibility of this nature, he will find great interest and no small anxiety; he will have to look after or do nearly everything himself, without the aid of clever contractors, skilled clerks of the works, and intelligent foremen; he will probably have to train his own subordinates, to work with very inefficient plant, and to trust to his own resources every day, and under circumstances calculated to try his mother-wit, his common sense, and clear-headedness, above all, his patience and temper, in a way he never calculated on. No sort of knowledge will come amiss to him; he may even have to be his own doctor, and to physic his whole establishment, or to commence work by turning wholesale provision merchant in order to supply his workmen in some barren district.

Indeed, the work of an Engineer officer in India, as in England, is of a very miscellaneous description, and I think it is no light subject of pride to the whole corps that there is such a variety of talent amongst our brother officers. In India, when I left the country, besides Lord Napier, whose reputation belongs to the empire, we had the ablest Lieutenant Governor in the late Sir H. Durand, who began his career by blowing in the gates of Ghuznee. One of our officers is Director of Indian Telegraphs another superintends the Great Trigonometrical Survey, perhaps the greatest and most scientific survey ever yet achieved; another is head of the Calcutta Mint; others were amongst the ablest civil commissioners of the country; the astronomical observations of another in connection with the last two eclipses have been of the highest value to science; another has just received the founder's gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society for his works on antiquarian geography; another has perished a martyr to science amongst the deserts of Thibet; another has established a reputation as the best accountant in India, and has since written the most famous pamphlet of the age.

To complete my account of the Public Work agency, I must very briefly refer to some of the financial aspects of the Department, which concern the engineer. How is the money found for the various works of the country? In this way:--

Every work is estimated for previous to sanction by the executive engineer, and the estimate, after being checked by the superintending engineer, is forwarded to his chief for sanction, who, if he approve the design and estimate, recommends it for sanction by the local government, or, in case of a large work, forwards it on to the supreme government with his own remarks. If not satisfied with it, he may return it for revision or explanation.

The European Overseers are nearly all non-commissioned officers or privates who have volunteered from the various regiments in India for the Public Works Department, and have been trained at the Roorkee College. They are allowed to wear plain clothes, and are of course struck off all military duty. As a rule, they are hard-working, intelligent men, and many of them are most valuable subordinates, but they are generally deficient in practical knowledge, are not very conversant with the language, and are but too often given to drink.

The native Sub-Overseers have also been trained at Roorkee, and are generally good draftsmen, surveyors, and estimators, but they are drawn from the trading instead of the working classes, have no practical experience, and lack physical stamina.

The Mistrees, or native head-masons and carpenters, are generally intelligent and good men, quick to learn and easily managed, but few have any theoretical knowledge.

The native labourer is patient, docile, and lazy, never drinks, and is easily managed by anyone who understands him. Perhaps this is a good place to say a word or two about the natives generally, and their treatment by their English masters. Those who have any inherent antipathy to black or brown skins had better not go to India, and those who do go, and are anxious to find faults in the natives, will have no difficulty in satisfying themselves on that score. But, as I have already said, those Englishmen who live most amongst them, and have most to do with them, get to like them most, with scarcely an exception, and I can honestly say, after twenty years' experience, that I am no exception to the rule. Learn their language well, spend a little time in studying their habits, prejudices, and modes of thought, and I am sure you will find the trouble repaid. If they are not very truthful, are indolent, and sometimes troublesome or even exasperating, it is no light thing that they are singularly temperate, wonderfully patient and good-tempered, very susceptible to kind treatment and good management, and that strikes, drunken brawls, and grumbling discontent are simply unknown.

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