The Sun.
London, England, 1845-10-06 00:00:00

4 birnitig '.lllt

LONDON, MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1845.

The last advices from India tend to confirm, in their
fullest extent, the most sanguine anticipations we have
ever formed of the speedy diffusion, throughout that
magnificent country, of railroads. The most anxious
and profound attention of the enlightened Governor-
General—a man whose career in developing the arts
and realising the blessings of peace seems destined to
eclipse even that of his military renown—is constantly
devoted to extending and multiplying the application of
steam power to facilitate the communication between all
the "countries, nations, names, and languages" which
compose our continental empire in Asia. We need
not dwell for a moment on the physical, geographical,
and political accidents of surface, extent, and institu-
tions, which are so many reasons why India requires
nothing so much as a well digested and substantially con-
structed scheme of railways in order to eliminate her
resources in new and multiplied channels, and to an
extent not yet witnessed even in the palmiest periods of
her eventful history. Such a scheme we need not doubt
that the administrative genius of Sir HENRY RAE.
DIRGE will successfully superintend, and usher into exe.
cution. Without this marvellous application of modern
science, on a grand scale, the almost innumerable diffi.
culties interposed by natural or artificial obstacles scat-
tered over an area of enormous territorial extent, and
the still more formidable impediments established by
the force of habits consecrated by the lapse of from two
to three thousand years—by the power of prejudices to
which superstition has ascribed a character of sacred
and unimpeachable permanency—those difficulties would
have operated, for ages to come, to the same bad results
which they have produced for ages past. Differencesofcaste'
of usages, of popular feeling—the extreme remoteness
of even the most wealthy and enlightened districts from
won
ae n
t of another—theallunityopfearciltsioonf
nh et
eo journey
sources
vgerranvma teendt bayndbad
ethtesheig have
roads,
ehdeesn and
am byong
theth
protection and
peLfe otwieienntetrnheaml gagoe--
main causes which have hitherto effected a
fmore :
s
com-
plete isolation of one province of Hind°
tan
ther than that which separates Hindest n from anhe
o
Andamans. Of the ore hundred millions a from the
Andamans.
ofpeople
who
sojourn over the vast countries comprised
enderth
e vagued
designation of India, at least one-fourth are ill
supplied
with salt, and occasionally great sufferers from thea want
of it. Yet there is no country under heaven whichwprot
pro-
duces that great necessary of life with more facility,
or might be made to raise it in larger quantity. Not,
to mention its salt lakes, its salt desert even,
(the " Runn," extending over a square of about
240 miles in the Goojerat), or the plains
of salt that occur north and west of the north
shores of the Indus, the prodigious extent of the Malabar
and Coromandel coasts is dotted with natural reservoirs
of salt, crystallised by the intense heat of the sun, and
with artificial " pans" and works, in which the manu-
facturing and purifying processes are carried on by
native industry and capita/. Enormous quantities of
salt are annually made, again, in the huge alluvial tract
called the " Sunderbunds "—sand islands forming the
Delta of the Ganges, at the north-easternmost extremity
of the Indian Peninsula. Now it is not enough to ac-
count for the scarcity of this invaluable condiment to
say that it is occasioned by the Government monopoly
of salt—by that duty which, together with the " Land "
and " Sayer"—the " Ayeen" and " Akbarry" revenues—
have, during so many years, formed so large an item in
the financial resources of the East India Company. In
some of 00 tributary Spates, which are among the great