roads and bridges are good, and
kept in tolerable repair. There is an arsenal where they manufacture
modern munitions of war. Their soldiers are well disciplined, fairly
well equipped, and form excellent fighting material.

Our policy of annexation, so far as India is concerned, may perhaps be
now considered as finally abandoned. We have no desire to annex
Nepaul, but surely this system of utter isolation, of jealous
exclusion at all hazards of English enterprise and capital, might be
broken down to a mutual community of interest, a full and free
exchange of products, and a reception by Nepaul without fear and
distrust of the benefits our capitalists and pioneers could give the
country by opening out its resources, and establishing the industries
of the West on its fertile slopes and plains. I am no politician, and
know nothing of the secret springs of policy that regulate our
dealings with Nepaul, but it does seem somewhat weak and puerile to
allow the Nepaulese free access to our territories, and an unprotected
market in our towns for all their produce, while the British subject
is rigorously excluded from the country, his productions saddled with
a heavy protective duty, and the representative of our Government
himself, treated more as a prisoner in honourable confinement, than as
the accredited ambassador of a mighty empire.

I may be utterly wrong. There may be weighty reasons of State for this
condition of things, but it is a general feeling among Englishmen in
India that, _we_ have to do all the GIVE and our Oriental neighbours
do all the TAKE. The un-official English mind in India does not see
the necessity for the painfully deferential attitude we invariably
take in our dealings with native states. The time has surely come,
when Oriental mistrust of our intentions should be stoutly battled
with. There is room in Nepaul for hundreds of factories, for
tea-gardens, fruit-groves, spice-plantations, woollen-mills,
saw-mills, and countless other industries. Mineral products are
reported of unusual richness. In the great central valley the climate
approaches that of England. The establishment of productive industries
would be a work of time, but so long as this ridiculous policy of
isolation is maintained, and the exclusion of English tourists,
sportsmen, or observers carried out in all its present strictness, we
can never form an adequate idea of the resources of the country. The
Nepaulese themselves cannot progres