which affected alike Afghanistan and the British sphere, was that which resulted from the Pamir agreement concluded with Russia in 1895.  Russia agreed to accept the River Oxus as her southern boundary as far east as the Victoria Lake.  Thence to the Chinese frontier a line was fixed by a demarcation commission.  This arrangement involved an interchange of territories lying on the north and south bank of the Oxus respectively between Afghanistan and Bokhara, which was carried out in 1896.  The Ameer of Afghanistan also undertook to conduct the administration of Wakkhan, lying between the new boundary and the Hindu Kush, in return for an increase of his subsidy.

“Under the strong rule of the late ameer the country for the most part enjoyed internal peace, but this was broken by the revolt of the Hazaras in 1892, which was severely suppressed.  In 1895-96 Kafiristan, a region which the delimitation included in the Afghan sphere of influence, was subjugated.  Political relations of the government of India with the late and with the present ameer have been friendly, and were undisturbed by the murder of the British agent at Kabul by one of his servants in 1895, an incident which had no political significance.  In the year 1894-95 His Highness sent his second son, Shahzada Nasrulla Khan, to visit England as the guest of Her Majesty’s government.  The Ameer Abdur Rahman, G. C. B., died in October, 1901, and was peacefully succeeded by his eldest son, Habi Bullah Khan, G. C. M.G.”

There is no doubt as to what Lord Curzon knows and believes concerning the aggressive policy of Russia in Asia, because, shortly before he was appointed viceroy of India, he wrote an article on that subject for a London magazine, which is still what editors call “live matter.”

“The supreme interest,” he said, “ties in the physical fact that it (the northwestern frontier) is the only side upon which India has been or ever can be invaded by land, and in the political fact that it confronts a series of territories inhabited by wild and turbulent, by independent or semi-independent tribes, behind whom looms the grim figure of Russia, daily advancing into clearer outline from the opposite or northwest quarter.  It is to protect the Indian Empire, its peoples, its trades, its laboriously established government and its accumulated wealth from the insecurity and possible danger arising from a further Russian advance across the intervening space that the frontier which I am about to describe has been traced and fortified.  Politicians of all parties have agreed that, while the territorial aggrandizement of Russia is permissible over regions where she replaces barbarism even by a crude civilization, there can be no excuse for allowing her to take up a position in territories acknowledging our sway, where she can directly menace British interests in India, or indirectly impose an excessive strain upon the resources and the armed strength of our eastern dominions.  The guardianship of the frontier is, therefore, an act of defense, not of defiance, and is an elementary and essential obligation of imperial statesmanship.