It was no mere question of a “buffer” state. It formed a weighty part of his great and pacific project for safeguarding the “gates” of our Indian Empire. Of the three main approaches then open to Russia--entitled in her own interests to use them, as he always admitted--the south-eastern limits of Afghanistan command the long high-road which leads to the distant north-western borders and the “gate” of Herat. Moreover, they dominate one of the important trade routes to Northern India. The remote side of the Indus can thus be used as a protection against the remoter side of the Oxus. At the same time, Disraeli subsidised the Afghans, and when their Ameer, under Russian influence, insulted our envoy, treated them at first “like spoiled children.” His aim was--as always in his whole policy--a compact independence. “_Both in the East and West_,” he observed, “_our object is to have prosperous, happy, and contented neighbours_. But these are things which cannot be done in a day. You cannot settle them as you would pay a morning visit.” He was building the foundations for a lasting peace. At any rate, the rectified frontier, which as he pointed out could be held by five thousand men, while a “haphazard” frontier demanded twenty times that number, is unimpugned. Nor should those who speak of a smoothed Ameer and an unruffled Cabul, after Kandahar was evacuated, forget that, since Merv has become Russian, the old dynastic intrigues and tribe feuds may, one day, readily recur at Cabul, fresh opportunities encourage Russia, and a reoccupation of this cancelled coign of vantage become imperative. “The science of politics,” as Macaulay well says, “is an experimental science.” Disraeli excelled most statesmen in his intuitive grasp of Indian affairs. Peel himself, shortly before his death, prophesied that Disraeli, “when his hour struck,” would be “Governor-General of India.” The same principles, as will appear, prompted the masterly and masterful Treaty of Berlin. The same, caused him to exclaim of Russia, whose designs he had thwarted in India and foiled at Constantinople, in memorable language, that in Asia there was “room enough” for her and for us; yet that, though in the face of possible conflict, she was entitled to equip her expedition of courtesy to “cool the hoofs of its horses in the waters of the Oxus,” she must be induced to withdraw it by our own counter-preventions. But what I wish here particularly to illustrate is, the psychological point of respect for and reckoning with the habits, wants, and traditions of other or alien civilisations. It rested on an idea familiar to his youth, and which he thus expressed in a soliloquy of _Alroy_: “Universal empire must not be founded on sectarian principles and exclusive rights.... Something must be done to bind the conquered to our conquering fortunes.”