Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/398

350 favourite schemes of Asiatic conquest. His envoy to Teheran was instructed that his chief aim should be to form a triple alliance between France, Turkey, and Persia for the purpose of opening out a road to India. He was also directed to ascertain what co-operation might be expected within the country, particularly from the Marathas, if India could be reached by a French army.

Then came, in 1807, the battle of Friedland, when Napoleon used his victory to convert the Russian Emperor from an enemy into an ally of France. The offensive league with Persia was quietly transformed into an offer of mediation between that kingdom and Russia; and Napoleon set about organizing with Alexander I a fresh and much more formidable confederation against the English in India. Russia was already an Asiatic power, with a distinct inclination and momentum eastward. It is, therefore, no wonder that this ominous conjunction of France, at that moment supreme in Western Europe, with the only European state that could further her designs upon India should have aroused and substantiated the alarms of an invasion by land; alarms that have never since ceased to recur periodically, gaining strength in proportion as their fulfilment has become by degrees less manifestly impracticable.

The inevitable effect of this chronic disquietude has been, from the beginning, to fix the attention of the Anglo-Indian governments more and more, in the course of the present century, upon the northwest angle of