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Rh role, almost, as it were, perforce, and established our governmental ascendency.

Good work for India was accomplished at this second stage also. For eight hundred years India's capacity for political development had been limited to tyrannies, and these were now in the dust. She was constitutionally mere treasure - trove. We destroyed no organised governmental institutions, for there were none standing, except the Rajput States and Travancore, which we preserved from imminent submersion in the flood of anarchy. Politically, India is a novice. As has been justly said, "at the end of the eighteenth century, very few indeed of the reigning families in India could boast more than twenty-five years of independent and definite political existence." It was we who made Indian politics.

Besides securing internal order and erecting a government, we have provided India with the novelty of order on her land frontier, nowadays nearly 6000 miles long, and peopled by hundreds of tribes, mostly inured to hereditary rapine, and full of the ferment of religious war. In our own day we have, in the far east, settled Upper Burma from the Gulf of Martaban to the Hukon valley, and from Yunan to the Lushai Hills; in the far west, we have given peace to Beluchistan, from the Arabian Sea to the Registan desert, and from the Persian border to the Suleimans and the Gomal Pass.

Then, too, beyond that frontier, the muffled