If Kandahar were to be concerned with any railway at all it should be through an extension from New Chaman. Without such provision our defensive strategy in Southern Afghanistan must needs recoil upon itself. Indeed, no practical value whatever attaches to our power of offence on the Afghan-Baluch border unless it contains the means of counteracting Russia’s schemes of aggression on the Afghan-Perso border. At present our position in Southern Afghanistan is _en l’air_; but our interests demand that it should be brought to earth and linked up with the steel rails of the military system of strategic lines on the Indian frontier. Just now the position of Russia in Persia is in the making, yet the challenge to our situation in Southern Afghanistan is none the less apparent. It will become quite definite when she occupies Seistan. Russia has the advantage of us in the Middle East in the matter of railway construction and she will build first where she is in no manner liable to be disturbed. If, in the interval, we do not measure our activity by her own, we shall find that we have delayed the extension of the rails to Kandahar until she herself is prepared to abide by the result of a single issue--the projection of the metals to Herat. It would seem that the present moment were sufficiently propitious for the Government of India to press such an undertaking upon the Amir. At the time of the Dane Mission great attention was paid by the Afghans of Kandahar to the subject of railways between India and Afghanistan. The late Governor, Sirdar Ahmed Khan, now retired in disgrace, receiving orders to ascertain public feeling on a proposal to extend the Indian railway system to Kandahar and to inquire whether the people would object if the request of the British Government were conceded, read out the Amir’s instructions at a special Durbar where all shades of local opinion were represented. The question was debated by the nobles and the people at great length. In the end the view was returned that, while the railway itself would be beneficial, it would facilitate pretexts for dangerous aggressions and the conquest of the country. At a later occasion the Amir sought the opinions of the principal officers of the army who, not only unanimously in favour of the introduction of such a system of communication, warmly advocated its further projection to Herat. The provision of a railway between India and Kandahar, quite a different affair to a trans-Afghan system, would indubitably facilitate commerce, since the scheme would have to go hand in hand with a radical revision of the prohibitory tariffs now imposed along the Afghan border. The moral effect throughout the Kandahar region, too, would be no less significant than that originally caused upon the frontier by the railway to New Chaman, for without that extension from Quetta the proceeds of the Kandahar fruit-gardens would never reach the Indian markets.