Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/531

Rh since this remarkable change of situation must be ascribed largely to the consistent operation of the policy of protectorates, some account of the origin and effects of that policy may serve to explain the expansion of the British dominion in Asia.

The system of protectorates has been practised from time immemorial as a method whereby the great conquering and commercial peoples have masked, so to speak, their irresistible advance, and have regulated the centripetal attraction of greater over lesser masses of territory. It was much used by the Romans, whose earlier relations with Asia and Africa were not unlike the British attitude, in that they acknowledged no frontier power with equal rights. The motives have been different, sometimes political, sometimes military, sometimes commercial; the consequences have been invariably the same. It is used politically as a convenient method of extending various degrees of power and of appropriating certain attributes of sovereignty without affirming full jurisdiction. It has become the particular device whereby one powerful state forestalls another in the occupation of some position, or scientific frontier line, or intermediate tract that has a strategical and particularly a defensive value. It is employed to secure command of routes, coaling stations, or trading posts whenever one nation desires to be beforehand with an enterprising competitor. Under this system, applied in these various manners, the extra-territorial liabilities of England all over the world are rapidly increasing, and our frontiers are rapidly expanding.