Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/541

Rh ful neighbour because it was originally the English policy to protect them.

Upon this system of pushing forward protective outworks until the British were ready to march beyond them, the Anglo-Indian dominion advanced across India. But as soon as we had reached the geographical limits of India – the range of mountains which separate it from Central Asia, and which form, perhaps, the strongest natural barriers in the world – one might have thought that the protectorates, which are artificial fortifications of an exposed border, would no longer be needed. On the contrary, they have grown with the expansion and rounding off of Anglo-Indian dominion; and the empire in its plenitude seems to find them more necessary than ever.

We have run our administrative border up to the slopes of the hills that fringe the great Indian plains; but on the northwest we are not content with the guardianship of a mountain wall. We look over and beyond it to the Oxus, and we see Russia advancing across the Central Asian steppes by a process very like our own. She conquers and consolidates, she absorbs and annexes, up to an inner line; and beyond that line, in the direction of India, she maintains a protected state. The Oxus divides Bokhara from Afghanistan, the Russian from the English protectorate. Here is a rival and possible enemy far more formidable than any of those whom we have hitherto discerned on our political horizon; and consequently our protective border has taken a wider cast than ever. Two countries whose broad