On the Electric Telegraph between England and India. 49 



considerable reduction will be made in the tariff from London to 

 India, it being proposed to charge anly £2 for ten words, and 

 £3 10s. for twenty words, which is a very great reduction on the 

 Indian rates via the Persian Gulf, where, until lately, a minimum 

 charge of £5 Is. has been demanded. 



Before alluding in any way to the proposals for completing the 

 telegraph to Australia, I may perhaps still further illustrate the 

 great difficulties which have presented themselves in working the 

 lines through foreign States, where they have insisted on em- 

 ploying their own operators and clerks, and how the works now 

 under construction will effectually remove these difficulties. 



I will take by way of example the Malta and Alexandria line. 

 "When this line was first laid, many of the messages occupied 

 fourteen days from London to Malta and Alexandria, and when 

 received were perfectly useless. These delays were caused chiefly 

 on the Italian circuits, through the apathy of the operators em- 

 ployed by the Italian Government. A concession was then 

 granted to the late firm of Messrs. Glass, Elliott, and Company, 

 who were lessees of the cable, allowing them to employ English 

 telegraphists for working through the business brought by the 

 Alexandria and Malta line. A great improvement in speed and 

 accuracy was soon evident, and answers were received in Alex- 

 andria from London in forty-eight hours, the revenue at the same 

 time increasing from £200 to nearly £3000 per week. This im- 

 provement, however, lasted but for a comparatively short period 

 — the Italian Government getting jealous of the English clerks, 

 the company had to remove them, when the usual delay and 

 mistakes occurred, and the receipts fell again to £700 weekly. 



The cause for this unsatisfactory state of affairs can only be 

 traced to a bad system of management. Mr. Glass says that on 

 one occasion a message from Sir Charles Wood was sent from 

 Alexandria to Malta in five minutes, but although a message of 

 great importance on business of the State, it took the whole day 

 to send it from Malta to the first Italian station, the only satis- 

 faction that could be obtained was that it must wait as they had 

 their own State messages to dispatch, which, in many cases, may 

 have been some clerk asking another clerk, at another station, 

 some unimportant question. 



Then again the through messages are often delayed a whole 

 day or more, being considered subordinate to local business. 

 With the Turks and Egyptians matters are still worse, as they 

 are known to retard the dispatches entirely through wilfulness or 

 idleness A clerk will perhaps watch the instrument, smoke his 

 cigarette, and say, " Lei them call," if he is not too lazy even to 

 make that remark ; and to show to what extent this is carried in 

 Egypt, the Viceroy, although he has the whole thing in his own 



