In the British Empire there is but one land frontier on which warlike preparation must ever be ready. It is the Northwest Frontier of India. True that there is another boundary, even longer, drawn across the American Continent, but there, fortunately, only customs houses are necessary and an occasional police guard. The Northwest Frontier of India, on the other hand, lies through a region whose inhabitants have been recruited throughout the ages by invading warlike races. Except for the Gurkha mountaineers of Nepal, the best soldiers of the Indian Army are derived from the northwest, from the Rajputs, the Sikhs, the Punjabi Musulmans, the Dogra mountaineers north of the Punjab, and the Pathan mountaineers west of the Punjab. The provinces along the frontier, and the Afghan land immediately beyond it, are the one region in all India from which, under some ambitious lead, the attempt might be made to establish a fresh imperial rule by the overthrow of the British Raj. It would not be the freedom of India which would ensue, but an oriental despotism and race domination from the northwest. Such is the teaching of history, and such the obvious fate of the less warlike peoples of India, should the power of Britain be broken either by warfare on the spot, or by the defeat of our navy. Beyond the northwest frontier, moreover, at a greater or less distance are the continental Powers of Europe. [Sidenote: 1. Political Map of Northwest India.] The Indian army and the Indian strategical railways are therefore organized with special reference to the belt of territory, extending from northeast to southwest, which lies beyond the Indian desert and is traversed from end to end by the Indus River. This frontier belt divides naturally into two parts. Inland we have the Punjab, where the rivers, emerging from their mountain valleys, gradually close together through the plain to form the single stream of the lower Indus; seaward we have Sind, where the Indus divides into distributaries forming a delta. Sind, as already stated, is a part of the Bombay Province, with which it is connected by sea from the Port of Karachi. Of late a railway has been constructed from Ahmadabad in the main territory of Bombay, across the southern end of the Desert, to Hyderabad at the head of the Indus delta. The Punjab is a separate Province with its own Lieutenant-Governor resident at Lahore. It was conquered from the Sikhs by a British army based on Delhi, and therefore ultimately on Calcutta.