Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/543

Rh tration of the principle that the true frontier delineates not only the land that is administered, but the lands that are protected. On that side we are not content with fencing ourselves round by a belt of free tribal lands or a row of petty chiefships; we have barricaded the roads leading from Central Asia into India by two huge blocks of independent territory, Afghanistan and Baluchistan. Up to the end of the seventeenth century the kingdom of Persia and the Moghul Empire of India were nominally conterminous; for Kabul and Kandahar were held by the Moghul. But in the great political convulsions of the eighteenth century the highland country interposed between Persia and India was rent away and formed into the separate chief ships which we now uphold as our barriers; they are the boulders or isolated masses that remain to attest the latest period of territorial disruption.

MAJOR-GENERAL SIR HENRY HAVELOCK.

Now, as both Russia and England have been employing the same political tactics in their advance toward each other, throwing forward protectorates, and occupying points of vantage, it has long been certain that Afghanistan, which lies right between the two camps, must fall into one or another of these spheres of influ-