In his final minute in March 1856, just on the eve of his departure from India, Lord Dalhousie, while reviewing the last eight years of his administration, describes the railways, electric telegraph and uniform postage which he introduced into India as the ‘three great engines of social improvement’. Posterity certainly knows how correct Dalhousie's description was, but under this prophetic utterance of Dalhousie flows a subtle current of philosophy which few scholars working on the Dalhousie era have been able to detect and interpret. That philosophy was the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and his faithful and able lieutenant, James Mill. In his History of British India, which Mill undertook before 1808 and published in London in 1817, Mill had questioned the values of Indian society and suggested its reform on Benthamite principles. The key to progress in India, Mill also pointed out, lay in the introduction of Western science and knowledge. It is surprising that Daihousie, though a staunch Tory, subscribed to this view of Bentham and Mill about India and as a result ‘the natural alliance of the Scientific Benthamite administrator and the authoritative Tory gentlemen’ which ‘was never fully achieved in England’ was ‘achieved only in India’.