frontier was not absolutely inaccessible to invasion from Europe by land. His imagination was fired by the recollection that Asia had more than once been traversed by conquering armies.

That Napoleon should seriously have contemplated marching across Europe and half Asia to invade the territory of an island within twenty miles of the French coast, that he should have thought it on the whole less impracticable to send a force from the Danube or Constantinople to Delhi than to transport his troops from Calais to Dover, is certainly a remarkable illustration of the impregnability of effective naval defence. But his proposals obtained very half-hearted encouragement from the Russians, who had some useful acquaintance with the difficulties of Asiatic campaigning, and a wholesome distrust of the associate in whose company they were invited to set out. They were by no means eager to embark on distant Eastern adventures, or to lock up their troops in the heart of Asia, upon the advice and for the advantage of the restless and powerful autocrat whose armies still hovered about their western frontier. They stipulated for a partition of the Turkish Empire as a preliminary dividend upon the joint-stock enterprise and as a strategic base for any further advance eastward. To this condition, however, Napoleon refused his assent, alleging, reasonably enough, that it would be playing into the hands of England, since if the Russians were to take Constantinople, the English would at once retaliate by seizing Egypt. An imposing French mission was, nevertheless, sent to Persia, and

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the Anglo-Indian governments were much startled by the activity of the French agents at Teheran and other Asiatic courts.

It is from this period that we must date the embarcation of Anglo-Indian diplomacy upon a much wider sphere of action than heretofore. The English min

isters soon discovered Napoleon's plan of an Asiatic campaign, and all his secret negotiations were thoroughly known to them. For the purpose of counteracting the French demonstrations and of throwing up barrier after barrier against the threatened expedition from the Black Sea and the Caspian, the Indian Governor-General, Lord Minto, sent missions to all the rulers of states on and beyond his northwestern border -to Ranjit Singh at Lahore, to the Afghan Amir, to

Sind, and to the Shah of Persia, who was just then overawed by the combined preponderance of France and Russia.

Now that Napoleon had become Alexander's intimate friend and ally, the Persian king knew what to expect from French mediation, so he turned for protection to the English. At Teheran a treaty was settled, after much dispute and various misunderstandings (for the English envoy from Calcutta was superseded by another envoy from London), engaging England to subsidize Persia in the event of unprovoked aggression upon her. From Lahore the mission withdrew when, after some negotiations, it was discovered that Ranjit Singh claimed recognition of his sovereignty over territory south of the Sutlaj River. At Peshawar Mountstuart Elphinstone, the envoy to Afghanistan, found the whole country distracted by civil war. The Afghan king, Shah Shuja', was barely holding on to the skirts of his kingdom; the Durrani monarchy, attacked on the west by Persia and hard pushed on the east by the Sikhs, was already breaking up again into separate chiefships. Elphinstone's negotiations were cut short by the defeat of Shah Shuja', who fled into exile, to be restored thirty years later by an ill-fated expedition that eventually cost the English an army and the king his life.

But all these schemes for establishing close alliances and barrier treaties with Afghanistan, the Panjab, and Sind were dropped or postponed as the tide of events again began to turn westward. The Spanish insurrec