inadequate, form, when taken together, so formidable an array of objections, that it is hardly an exaggeration to sum up the position in one word as indefensible; that is to say, when Russia, by a continuous persistence in her present course of aggression, shall, unopposed by England, have made good her advance and occupation of the countries contiguous to Afghanistan up to the frontier of that state; when farther, by the exercise of her well-known power of intrigue, backed by her immense military strength, she has succeeded in rendering Afghanistan a willing instrument to her purpose, and in making of the Afghans, born marauders and fanatics as they are, a vast swarm of skirmishers athirst for the plunder of India; when at the back of this vanguard she has had time to array and marshal her regular armies in the order of march for the invasion of India, then, we again emphatically repeat, the military position we shall occupy will be an untenable one.

CHAPTER IV.

THE MENACE FROM WITHOUT.

THERE are certain propositions, the truth of which men acknowledge in the abstract, and yet which they invariably contest or ignore in the concrete. We all admit, for example, as a philosophic axiom, that there is no permanence in any earthly condition, no perfect rest in any form of matter. Whether we regard the surfaces of continents or examine the arrangement of particles in the minutest substances, we observe in everything alike ceaseless movement. A piece of wrought iron has its atoms in constant motion, so that in time its state changes quite irrespectively of outward influences from the fibrous to the crystalline structure, and the properties of a metal which is our proverbial type of stability bocome wholly altered. The shore line of all countries varies its direction under the action of great forces which are producing here upheaval, there depression. Throughout the universe, the same great law of unrest seems to prevail; whole systems of stars being known to be in motion,

shifting their relative positions with great rapidity, while none can be perceived to be stationary.

We recognise the law, we admit its action, and we see and feel its effects. But in matters affecting most materially our most vital interests we are ever theorising, and acting on hypotheses which can have no foundation while the law of unrest exists. We are constantly imagining permanence and stability where they do not and cannot dwell.

If the physical surface of this world of ours is itself changing with time, if the shores of oceans shift their crumbling edges with the hours which they mark and we forget, what shall we say of those imaginary lines of demarcation which men profess to trace out between nation and nation, state and state, and call frontiers, fencing them in with treaties more perishable in their obligations than the frail materials on which they are recorded, marking with pigmy symbols the world which we map out and part between us to-day, which yesterday was otherwise mapped out, and which shall to-morrow be re-mapped and re-parted? Shall we make these our types of the immutable? Some of our modern British statesmen bid us do so. We are gravely assured by our guides, philosophers, and friends of this order, in direct opposition to every lesson of the past, that our boundaries for the future are and must be fixed, inviolable, and never more liable

to change. We are told that the configuration of the Peninsula itself defines and decides the limits of our Indian empire, and that we cannot overstep them without committing the gravest blunder from the political, military, and moral point of view.'

To demonstrate the truth of this remarkable assertion we have two instances of the limits of empire thus determined offered to our observation, in the frontiers of Great Britain and Russia in Asia. We examine the map of this continent, and we trace upon it the political changes on its surface within a very recent historical period.

All countries display in their history a complete similarity of origin, the rudimentary state of each being a group of independent tribes derived, as we have pointed out, from individual families.

This nearly primitive condition may be seen at the present day among the Afreedies and cognate tribes on the north-west border; it exists on a great scale in Africa, and generally in those parts of the world where progress has been slow. The different stages of the process by which amalgamation is reached, up to the formation of great and powerful states having one national life, one language, and one common political interest, are invariably and distinctly marked by war. Even when the point is reached at which Europe now stands, and powers co-exist capable awhile of maintain

ing independence, there is every reason to suppose from analogy that it is not final. A lull takes place from time to time in the progress of war and conquest, when the various powers are tolerably evenly balanced; but very little suffices to disturb the equilibrium, and from time to time the collapse of some weaker state shows the external pressure and the continuous action of the same forces which have been at work from the commencement of human history. But while the balance of power is for a while maintained at home, abroad the faculty of expansion, the inherent attribute of every healthy organisation-growth in fact, which is as visible in the life of a nation as in that of a manmust find an outlet, and it does so, according to a wellknown law, in the direction of the weakest resistance. So the more advanced states force their way into the remoter and less compacted kingdoms of the earth.

First the scientific explorer pushes his way, then follows the missionary, next the trader, and close on their heels the soldier, and with war commences the process which we call civilisation.

It is this faculty of expansion, this growth which from the little centre of the British Isles has filled up with its exuberance the whole of North America; which is extending over an island as vast as a continent in Australia; which has spread over great tracts of Africa; and which, last but not least, has occupied an