Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/536

474 But these scattered protectorates in Western Asia are merely isolated points of vantage or long strips of seashore; they depend entirely on Britain's naval superiority in those waters; they are all subordinate and supplementary to her main position in Asia, by which, of course, India is meant. It is there that we can study with the greatest diversity of illustration, and on the largest scale, the curious political situations presented by the system of maintaining a double line of frontiers; the inner line marking the limits of British territory, the outer line marking the extent of the foreign territory that the English undertake to protect, to the exclusion, at any rate, of foreign aggression.

VIEW OF MUSCAT FROM THE HOUSETOPS. From Edwin Lord Weeks's Through Persia and India. (Copyright, 1895, by Harper and Brothers.)

The long maritime frontiers of India furnish a kind of analogy between the principle upon which a seashore