secure control of its passes.  The state of Kashmir, guided by a purely local policy, for years tried to conquer the robber tribes on its northwestern frontier, merely to protect its own border provinces.  Then the British authorities of the Indian Empire began the same process, but from a radically different motive.  They saw the Gilgit and Hunza valleys, like the Chitral to the west, as highways through a mountain transit land, whose opposite approaches were held by the Russians.[1376]

Such conquests, whatever be their motive, profit the vanquished in the end more than the victor.  They result in the systematic and intelligent development of the mountain resources, and the maintenance of ampler social and economic relations between highland and lowland through the construction of roads, which must always represent the reach of the governing authority.  The conquest of mountain peoples means always expensive and protracted campaigns.  The invader has always two enemies to fight, Nature and the armed foe.  There is a saying in India that “In Gilgit a small army is annihilated and a large army starves to death.”  Hunger is king in high altitudes, and comes always to the defense of mountain independence.  Moreover, the inaccessibility of such districts, the difficulty of maintaining lines of communication, ignorance of by-paths and trails which forever offer strategic opportunities to the natives or escape at a crisis, all serve to protract the war.  The independent spirit of the mountaineer, his endurance of hardships, his mastery of mountain tactics, and his obstinate resistance after repeated defeat, give always a touch of heroism to highland warfare.  Consequently, history abounds in examples of unconquered mountain peoples, or of long sustained resistance, like that which for sixty years under the heroic leadership of Kadi Mulah and Shamyl used up the treasure and troops of Russia in the impregnable defiles of the Caucasus.  In the end, however, the highland tribes succumb to numbers and the road-making engineer.

[Sidenote:  Political dismemberment of mountain peoples.]

Political dismemberment, lack of cohesion due to the presence of physical barriers impeding intercourse, is the inherent weakness of mountain peoples.  Political consolidation is never voluntary.  It is always forced upon them from without, either by foreign conquest or by the constant menace of such conquest, which compels the mountain clans to combine for common defense of their freedom.  The combination thus made is reluctant, loose, easily broken, generally short-lived.  It becomes close and permanent only under a constant pressure from without, and then assumes a form allowing to the constituent parts the greatest possible measure of independence.  The Swiss canton and commune are the result of a segregating environment; the Swiss Republic is the result of threatened encroachments by the surrounding states.  It owed its first genuine federal constitution to Napoleon.