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448 incorporation of Upper Burma has made a considerable addition to the weight of our political responsibilities. Between the populations of India and of the countries known as Indo-Chinese, there is little or no affinity. Here we have broken fresh ground in Asia, we have come into contact on our advanced position with strange races and languages: we are exploring a region hitherto almost unknown to Europeans, we have to demarcate the outlines and fill in the detail of our ever-widening territorial map. Our policy, on this side as on the Afghan border, is to maintain friendly relations with the Chinese officials, who are very sensitive to our proceedings, and to establish over the barbarous folk in the tracts intervening between the two empires a protectorate sufficient to reclaim them gradually from turbulence, to convert them from plundering borderers into border police, and to exclude foreign influence or encroachments.

Except by the annexation of Burma, the area under the direct and regular administration of the Indian Government has undergone little change since 1856. On the other hand, the external frontier of the empire, if the line is drawn, as it must be, to include the outlying regions that have been brought within the sphere of British influence or superior control, has been very materially widened in the course of the last fifty years. This frontier is now conterminous with the Russian possessions in Central Asia on the northwest, it marches for several thousand miles with the empire of China; and on the southeast it touches the Asiatic colonies of