Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/407

Rh it has continued to be almost unremittingly engaged ever since.

Up to the end of the eighteenth century the field of Anglo-Indian politics had been circumscribed within the limits of India, being confined to relations with the Indian states over which England was asserting an easy mastery by the natural and necessary growth of her ascendency. Now she entered for the first time upon that range of diplomatic observation in which all the countries of Western Asia, from Kabul to Constantinople, are surveyed as interposing barriers between Europe and the Anglo-Indian possessions. The independence and integrity of these foreign and comparatively distant states are henceforward essential for the balance of Asiatic power and for the security of the frontiers of British India. Before this epoch the jar and collision of European contests had been felt only in England's dealings with the inland powers of India; she struck down or disarmed every native ruler who attempted to communicate with her European enemies.

But from the beginning of the nineteenth century we have had little or nothing to fear from Indian rivals, and we have gradually taken rank as a first-class Asiatic sovereignty. The vast weight of our Indian interests has ever since weighed decisively in the balance of our relations, not only with all Asia, but with any European state whose views or dispositions might in any degree affect our position in the East. We have thus become intimately concerned in the political vicissitudes of every important state on the Asiatic continent. The