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Rh that the system of protectorates – the practice of throwing out a line of frontier round a wide tract of unsettled country in order to exclude rivals – which was mainly invented in modern times by England for the building up of her Asiatic empire, is no longer her monopoly. So long as the English, like their predecessors the Romans, had the continent of Asia before them and had come into contact with no other substantial rivals, the expansion of their dominion went on as steadily and easily as the Asiatic extension of the Roman Empire, which was rapidly pushed eastward until it met the Parthians, by whom it was fiercely resisted and finally driven back. Britain's great naval superiority enabled her to beat off rivals in the distant seas, and on land she had only ill-organized native states to deal with. But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and particularly during the last twenty years of unbroken peace in Western Europe, there has sprung up a keen competition for territory and trade in Asia and in Africa, which has led to the wholesale imitation of the English system of protectorates, either direct or through chartered companies.

Under the pressure and competition of France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, protectorates are rapidly multiplying in all the outlying quarters of the old world – over Tunis, Egypt, Abyssinia, Zanzibar, and countless tribes and chief ships in the interior of the African continent; and in Asia over Cochin China, the Annamite kingdom, Tonkin, and various half-explored borderlands.