Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/550

488 outposts of English exploration from Burma and of French pioneers from Tonkin are almost within hail. When all these boundaries are finally determined and ratified by the conventions of civilized diplomacy, the ground-plan of the future political settlement of Asia will have been laid out; and it is hardly too much to say that the whole of the Asiatic continent, outside the Chinese Empire, may eventually be either in the possession or under the protectorate of some European state.

It has been thought possible that this brief account of the manner in which the Anglo-Indian Empire has spread and been shaped out might be made interesting, because no process of the kind is now observable in Western Europe, although the same principles, with the same practical result, are plainly discernible in the gradual growth of the Roman Empire, and especially in the formation of that power's political and military frontier. The European continent has long ago been parcelled out into compact nationalities which afford no room for the system of intermediate protectorates, so that here the political and administrative frontiers always coincide. And where, as in the case of Belgium or Switzerland, a small country holds an important position on the political chess-board because it covers the vulnerable frontier of powerful neighbouring states, such a country is kept clear of intruders, not by a protectorate, but by neutralization.

With regard to the future of the British protectorates in Asia, one thing seems to be abundantly clear,