Sir Richard Temple has not yet made his mark in Parliament, and though Pinch bestows on him the compliment of frequent caricature, reporters hardly understand the estimate of him accepted by Anglo-Indians.
'He has, however, governed great Provinces successfully; he' has laid "down lines of railway faster than any man alive; he has fought with a great famine and beaten it and he is entitled, when he makes a serious Propasels to have it seriously considered.
has made one in the National Review for June, and one so large, not to say gigantic, and at the same time so enticing, that if it were in the least favoured by the Indian Government, half the industrials of the Kingdom, the whole army of exporters, shipowners, engineers, and railway speculators would' be in a fever of excitement. They are positively hungering, striving, and plotting for anew "opening," a field hitherto unworked, upon which they may expend their energies and their capital, and earn something like the old rates of profit, and Sir Richard Temple offers them one of almost boundless extent and richness. He has been accustomed to think ona large-scale, and instead of discussing trumpery markets like Central Asia, with a trade two-thirds of which is absorbed by a single firm, or Tibet, where commerce can only be carried on by caravan, he offers his countrymen a monopoly of the trade of a hundred millions of nearly civilised men, and of huge districts as rich and in parts as populous as Bengal, a trade conveyed throughout on English railways. His project, too, is no dream, but, so far as we can judge, is, one condition granted, not only practicable, but practicable now. Wo shall feel compelled to oppose it before we have done; but the proposal is a grand one, and were it made under the same circumstances to " Continental Power, would instantly become one of the leading objects of the State. understand what lis fallen to then, both Englishmen in general as yet. scarcely
in advantage and in responsibility, through the acquisition of Burma, Sir R' Temple, however, does understand, and he points out to them through the National Review that in addition to their sterile and expensive North-West frontier, which it takes armies to protect and whole services to watch, they have now a North-Eastern or, would prefer to call it, an Eastern stretching in one unbroken lund fine for twa thousand mites, from Tenns-serin to Talifoo, and impinging directly on doth Siam and Western China. It is possible, by building two railways of no great length for Asia, and no great engineering difficulty, to reach both Bangkok and Yiinnan without touching any possession of any European Power, and thus acquire what must be a monopoly of the trade of Siam, of the Shan States, whether Burmese or Siamese, and of Western China. The starting-point of both lines would be Maul-main,—a port hardly known in Europe except as a depdt for rice and teak, but which, lying as it does on a deep and broad estuary of the Bay of Bengal, an iguble for anything, and, supplied as it is by a rich though densely wooded province, will one day be the Liverpool of Indo-China, as it is already her most beautiful city. From thence one railway of five hundred miles would strike southwards to Bangkok, on the Bay of Siam, city of four hundred thousand people, opening up on its way a land of timber and in, full of minerals, and thinly peopled ith a friendly and civilised population. It is believed that the Siamese Court, which has many dangers to face, aid is inclined to nestle for safety under the shadow of the British Empire, would willingly grant the necessary concessions, while it would have no difficulty in securing to the engineers and workmen the nocessary protection. The second line, also starting from Maulmain, would open Eastern Burma, now our own property, and Shan districts dependent on ourselves, till, after a course of eight hundred miles through rich and well-watered territory, it touched the Chinese frontier at a point—Ssu-mao—to which the trade of Western China must converge, and from
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.