Read it through once

To make a Royal tour of the vast British possessions in Hindostan was an inspiring idea. To constitute the Crown a tangible evidence of Imperial power and a living object and centre of Eastern loyalty and respect was a policy worthy of Mr. Disraeli and of the statecraft in which he had once declared imagination to be an essential ingredient. To precede this action by the purchase of the Suez Canal shares in order to safe-guard the pathway to the Indian Empire and to succeed it with such an impressive appeal to Oriental individualism and personal loyalty as the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India were strokes of statesmanship such as no other Englishman of that time was capable of initiating.