protective influence, whether or not they desired it, the native States, or chiefships, or tribes, whose territory has marched with our own boundaries; the reciprocal understanding being that we undertake to safeguard them from foreign aggression on the condition that they shall have no dealings with any foreign power other than England. We surround ourselves, in this manner, with a zone of land, sometimes narrow, sometimes very broad, which is placed under political taboo so far as concerns rival powers whose hostility may be serious; and thus our political influence radiates out beyond the line of our actual possession, spreading its skirts widely and loosely over the adjacent country. The particular point, therefore, that it is intended here to set out distinctly is, that the true frontier of the British dominion in Asia, the line which we are more or less pledged to guard, from which we have warned off trespassers, does not by any means tally with the outer edge of the immense territory over which we exercise administrative jurisdiction, in which all the people are British subjects for whom our governments make laws. The true frontier includes not only this territory, but also large regions over which the English crown has established protectorates of different kinds and grades, varying according to circumstances and specific conditions. This protectorate may involve the maintenance of internal order, or it may amount only to a vague sovereignty, or it may rest on a bare promise to ward off unprovoked foreign aggression. But, whatever may be the particular class to which the protectorate belongs, however faint may be the shadow of authority that we choose to throw over the land, its object is to affirm the right of excluding a rival influence, and the right of exclusion carries with it the duty of defence. The outer limits

of the country which we are prepared to defend is what must be called our frontier.

In order to apply this principle to our Asiatic frontiers, and to explain why they have been so moveable, we must now run rapidly along the line which demarcates them at this moment. Passing over the very complicated case of Egypt, we may begin our Asiatic protectorates with Aden, at the bottom of the Red Sea. From time immemorial the movement of the sea-borne trade between India and Egypt has pivoted, so to speak, upon Aden. Aden. It is now the first stepping-stone across the Asiatic waters towards our Indian Empire; the westernmost point of English occupation on the Asiatic mainland; and it furnishes a good example in miniature of the manner in which protectorates are formed. We have taken and fortified Aden for the command of the water-passage into the Red Sea; but our actual possession is only a projecting rock like Gibraltar, and so we have established all round it a protective border, within which the Arab tribes are bound by engagements to accept our political ascendancy and to admit no other. Not far from Aden lies the protected island of Socotra, a name in which one can barely recognize the old Greek Dioscorides; and from Aden eastward, right round Arabia by Oman to Muscat and the Persian Gulf, the whole coastline is under British protectorate; the police of these waters is done by British vessels, and the Arab chiefships along the seaboard defer to our arbitration in their disputes and acquiesce in our external supremacy.

But these scattered protectorates in western Asia are merely isolated points of vantage or long strips of sea-shore; they depend entirely on our naval superiority in those waters; they are all subordinate

and supplementary to our main position in Asia, by which of course is meant India. It is there that we can study with the greatest diversity of illustration, and on the largest scale, the curious political situations presented by the system of maintaining a double line of frontiers; the inner line marking the limits of British territory, the outer line marking the extent of the foreign territory that we undertake to protect, to the exclusion, at any rate, of foreign aggression.

The long maritime frontiers of India furnish a kind of analogy between the principle upon which a sea shore is defended and the system of protectorates as applied to the defence of a land frontier. In both cases the main object is to keep clear an open space beyond and in front of the actual borderline. We do this for the land frontier by a belt of protected land which we throw forward in front of a weak border; and our assertion of exclusive jurisdiction over the belt of waters immediately surrounding our sea coasts is founded upon the same principle. We English are accustomed to consider ourselves secure under the guardianship of the sea1; although in fact the safety comes not from the broad girdle of blue water but from the strength and skill of the English navy that rides upon it. And for a nation that has not learnt the noble art of seamanship, no frontier is more exposed to attack, or harder to defend, than the sea shore.

The principle of defence, therefore, for both land and sea frontiers, is to stave off an enemy's advance by interposing a protected zone. If a stranger enters that zone he is at once challenged. If he persists, it is a hostile demonstration.

1 'And Ocean mid his uproar wild

Speaks safety to his island child.'—Coleridge.

It would thus be a mistake to suppose that our Asiatic land frontier is conterminous with our Asiatic possessions, with the limits of the territory which we administer, and which is within the range of our Acts of Parliament. It is not, like our Canadian border, or the boundary between France and Germany, a mere geographical line over which an Englishman can step at once out of his own country into the jurisdiction of another sovereign State. The frontier of our Asiatic dominion is the outmost political boundary projected, as one might say, beyond the administrative border; and it must be particularly observed that the outmost boundary is here specified, because British India-the territory under the government of India-has interior as well as exterior boundaries. In such countries as France or Spain, and indeed in almost all modern kingdoms, the government exercises a level and consolidated rulership over a compact national estate, with a frontier surrounding it like a ring fence. But our Indian Empire sweeps within the circle of its dominion a number of native States, which are enclosed and land-locked in the midst of British territory. We have seen that many of these States were built up out of the dilapidated provinces of the Moghul empire by revolted governors or military leaders, who began by pretending to rule as delegates or representatives of the emperor, and ended by openly assuming independence, as soon as the paralysis of central government permitted them. to throw aside the pretext. With the fall of the Moghul empire came the rise of the British dominion, and in the course of a century some of the imperial provinces were again absorbed by conquest or cession into British India; while others were left as self-governing States under our protectorate. There is also an important

group of Rajpút chiefships which have always been independent under the suzerainty of the paramount Power.

In all these States the rulers are debarred from making war and peace; but they make their own laws and levy their own taxes; and we treat their territory as foreign, although the dividing borderline can hardly be called a frontier, because most of these States are entirely surrounded and shut in by British India. Nevertheless, their history-and in fact the general history of the expansion of British dominion from the sea-shore to the Himalayas and far beyond-illustrates at every turn the bearing upon our frontier of this system of protectorates; and what is going on now is chiefly the continuation of what went on from the beginning. It will be found that from the time when the English became a power on the mainland of India, that is, from their acquisition of Bengal in 1765, they have constantly adopted the policy of interposing a border of protected country between their actual possessions and the possessions of formidable neighbours whom they desire to keep at arm's length. In the last century we supported and protected Oudh as a barrier against the Marathas; and early in this century we preserved the Rajpút States in central India for the same reason. The feudatory States on the Sutlej were originally maintained and strengthened by us, before we took the Punjab, as outworks and barricades against the formidable power of the Sikhs. The device has been likened to the invention of buffers; because a buffer is a mechanical contrivance for breaking or graduating the force of impact between two heavy bodies; and in the same way the political buffer checked the violence of political collisions, though it rarely prevented them altogether. It may even be