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 borders of Afghanistan towards the North-West frontier of India, she has shown her hand scarcely less openly in the Persian Gulf itself The Variag, whose visit to Bunder Abbas a few years ago was the first outward and visible sign of Russia's designs upon a 'warm-water port' in the Gulf, was, it is true, sent to the bottom of the sea off Chemulpo within two days of the rupture between Russia and Japan, but her name can still be read blazoned in huge letters of white paint on the sun-scorched cliffs of the Gulf, and the Sheikh of Koweit can still tell the story of how her captain bade him note the Russian colours which she flew—'the colours which,' he boasted, 'will soon rule these seas.' The danger which she portended was never, it may be admitted, very serious, as far as sea-power was involved, and it has, at any rate, been indefinitely postponed by the events of which her own unhappy ending was the prelude. But it is by no means impossible—many of those who are in the best position to study Russian policy hold it to be probable—that if Russia resigns herself to being effectually headed off from the Pacific, she will at no distant date concentrate all her energies on the Middle East in order to fight her way to the Indian Ocean. It therefore behoves us, in the meantime, to make our position in Southern Persia and in the Gulf secure against the attack.

We cannot, moreover, remain blind to the fact that Russia is no longer the only European power that turns covetous eyes towards the Persian Gulf. The German conquest of Asia Minor by railway may for the present claim to mean nothing more than a policy of 'peaceful penetration.' But the methods of German diplomacy at Constantinople itself, and of German Welt-politik in other parts of the world, bid us be careful how we accept German assurances with regard to the Baghdad Railway. In the first place, it must be borne in mind that the