expenses of insurance, stations, apparatus, and maintenance ship, about £1,500,000, or about £220 per knot. Thus the land route is immensely cheaper to construct, besides being about five times as cheap to maintain. Clearly, then, from a purely financial standpoint, a cable to India could be put out of existence by the land-line. Accordingly, between the Eastern Telegraph Company and the Indo-European Company a severe competition arose. The fortunes of the fight were various. In 1875 the cable route was totally interrupted in the Red Sea, and the land-line had won for the time. In 1876-1877 the land-line was totally interrupted, and victory inclined to the cable. But commercial as well as Imperial interests demanded the existence of both lines, and in 1877-1878 what is known as a 'joint purse' arrangement was established between the two routes. According to this agreement the gross receipts of the Indian traffic, whether earned by cable or land-line, less outpayments, are paid into a common purse; the sum thus obtained is then divided. Nearly 60 per cent goes to the cable, and the balance to the Indo-European Company and the Indo-European Telegraph Department of the Indian Government Competition ruinous to the shareholders, which in no short time would have become ruinous also to efficiency, has thus ceased, to the advantage of all parties concerned.
The advantage of the joint purse was that, thus guaranteed, the cable company could live, and Britain could begin to command her own communications. Consequently, between that day and this, a splendid system of cables has been built up between ourselves and India. At first, in 1870, it was a single line, except that it was duplicated between Malta and Alexandria. Serious breaks occurred, and for safety it became necessary to duplicate the line. So cables were laid in 1878 from England to Portugal, and in 1877 from Port Said to Bombay. The line, which had thus been mostly duplicated for safety, had now to be triplicated to cope with the growth of traffic, and not only triplicated, but
