Raneegunge, a flourishing Seat of Trade.

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in all native towns. The shops are unsightly hovels, crowded together in higgledy-piggledy. Buildings deserving of the name there are none excepting those of the Railway Company. The population consists of petty shopkeepers, coolies, and other labourers. No decent folk lives here-no permanent settler. wives and daughters of the Santhals are seen hither from the neighbouring villages to buy salt, clothing, and trinkets. The rural dealers open a bazar under the trees. But after all, the change has been immense from a jungly-waste-from the haunt of bears and leopards into a flourishing seat of trade, yielding annually a quarter of a million. Raneegunge, making rapid advances under the auspices of the Railway, is destined in its progress to rival, if not outstrip, Newcastle. At present it is the only town in India which supplies the nation with mineral wealth-which sends out coals that propel steamers on the Ganges and on the Indian Ocean. Many such towns will rise hereafter to adorn the face of the country, and throw a lustre of opulence over the land. True, agriculture is India's legitimate source of wealth. But her vast mineral resources, once brought to notice, are not likely to be again neglected. Our forefathers were at one time not only the first agricultural, but also the first manufacturing and commercial nation in the world. In the same manner that Manchester now clothes the modern nations, did India clothe the ancient nations with its silks, muslin, and chintz-exciting the alarm of the Roman politicians to drain their empire of its wealth. Steel is

mentioned in the Periplus to have been an article of Indian export. But scarcely is any iron now smelted in the country, and our very nails, and fishing-hooks, and padlocks are imported from England. Ten miles to the north-west of Burdwan, the village of Bonepass was long famous for its excellent cutlery. But the families of its blacksmiths have either died off, or emigrated, or merged into husbandmen. This passing off of the manufactures of our country into foreign hands, is the natural result of unsuccessful competition with superior intelligence and economy. India was the

garden and granary of the world, when three-fourths of the globe were a waste and jungle, unutilized as is the interior of Africa. Her relative position has considerably altered, since vast continents have been discovered rivalling her in fertility, and forests have disappeared and gardens spread in every part of the two hemispheres. The nations of the world have abated in their demand for her produce, when America is producing better cotton, Mauritius and Brazil growing cheaper sugar, Russia supplying richer oil-seeds and stronger fibres, Italy and France producing finer silks, Persia growing opium, and Scotland attempting the manufacture of artificial saltpetre. How great is the contrast between the times, when sugar could be procured in England only for medicine, and when her supplies of that article from various ports are now so vast, that she can do without a single pound from India. There was a time, when a pair of silk-stockings, now so commonly used by all classes, constituted a rarity

1

Decline of Indian Manufacture.

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in the dress of King Henry VIII. Not two hundred years ago did a member of the House of Commons remark, that ‘the high wages paid in this country made it impossible for the English textures to maintain a competition with the produce of the Indian looms.' How in the interval has the state of things been reversed, and the Indian weavers have been thrown out of the market. Day by day is the dominion of mind extending over matter, and the secrets of nature are brought to light to evolve the powers of the soil, and make nations depend upon their own resources. present native cannot but choose to dress himself in Manchester calico, and use Birmingham hardware. But it is to be hoped that our sons and grandsons will emulate our ancestors to have every dhooty, every shirt, and every pugree made from the fabrics of Indian cotton manufactured by Indian mill-owners. present Hindoo is a mere tiller of the soil, because he has no more capital, and no more intelligence, than to grow paddy, oil seeds, and jute. But the increased knowledge, energy, and wealth of the Indians of the twentieth or twenty-first century, would enable them to follow both agriculture and manufactures, to develop the subterranean resources, to open mines and set up mills, to launch ships upon the ocean, and carry goods to the doors of the consumers in England and America.

The

The collieries at Raneegunge afford quite a novel sight-seeing. The Hindoos of old knew of a great many things in heaven and earth,-but they had never dreamt of any such thing as geology in their philosophy.

The science has not even a name in the great tome and encyclopædia of their shasters. The tree of knowledge had not then grown to a majestic size. Now it has put forth a thousand branches, and daughter stems have grown about the parent trunk. More than sixteen hundred people work at the Raneegunge coal-mines. These have been excavated to a depth of one hundred and thirty feet-nearly double the height of the Ochterlony monument. The mines extend under the bed of the Damooder, and a traveller can proceed three miles, by torch-light, through them. The coal beds are 300 feet in thickness.*

The idea haunting the public mind about the Damooder, is that it is a stream of gigantic velocity, which throws down embankments, inundates regions for several miles, and carries away hundreds of towns and villages in the teeth of its current,-for all which it is distin

* The coals are so near the surface, as to be observed in all the the deep nullahs, and sometimes on the surface of the plains. The natives knew that they burnt, although they made no use of them. The first mine at Raneegunge was opened by Government in conjunction with Mr Jones, 1812. Only a few shafts were sunk then. After twenty thousand rupees had been expended on it, without any return, the property was given away to Mr Jones, who conducted it in a small but profitable way, till his death in 1821 or 1822. It was then purchased by Captain James Stewart, who, with the assistance of Messrs Alexander and Co., got up a steam-engine to keep the mine clear of water. On the failure of that firm, the mine passed into the hands of our enterprising countryman, Baboo Dwarkanauth Tagore. It is now the property of the Bengal Coal Company. As the coal trade began to be lucrative, many people took up the speculation, and many were the forays between the different coal proprietors. The quantity of coals brought down in 1840 was about 15 lacs of maunds. In 1850 it was nearly its double, and in 1860 it has become its quadruple. Raneegunge is so called from the Ranee of Burdwan, who had the proprietary rights vested in her name.

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guished as a Nud or masculine river, and justifies its name of the Insatiate Devourer. But up here at Raneegunge it is stripped of all such terrors, and flows a quiet and gentle stream-a 'babbling brook,' with scarcely audible murmurs, awakening a train of the softest associations, as one takes a walk along its lonely and steepy banks.

Made inquiries in vain for two carriages from the dawk-wallahs to depart on the morrow, so many folks were out this season on a holiday tour like ourselves. There are altogether four companies of them,—two European, one Hindoostanee, and one Bengalee, all of whom keep more gharries than horses. To ensure ourselves against disappointment and delay, it was arranged to have a gharry each from two of the companies. The dawk-wallahs should make hay while the sun shines, -their game is near its end. From post-runners first started by the Persian monarch Darius, to the postriders introduced by the Mussulman emperors of India, it was a great step to improvement. The same step was made from travelling in horrible boxes ycleped palkees,' to that by horse-dawk conveyances. In its day, people talked of this species of locomotion as a 'decided improvement.' But before long, the days of all'slow coaches' are to be numbered in the past. Two or three years hence, the tide of men, now flowing through this channel, will have to be diverted to the grand pathway that is forming to connect the ends of the empire. The annual exodus of the Calcutta Baboos would then increase to a hundred-fold degree. People