And this because the civilisation of the West is advancing with such steady progress towards the East, that it must sooner or later penetrate to the countries that have hitherto successfully excluded its influence. On the Asiatic continent, at least, its advance is from opposite quarters, at different rates of speed, and of very different characters. The highly organised and intricate system of European civilisation introduced into India, and now being consolidated within the limits of the British Empire there, though not without its advantages, has hardly produced a shadow of effect on the bordering countries lying beyond the region of its control. It stops short at, and with as clear a line of definition as, the natural boundaries of the peninsula. Cross the mountain barrier limiting the plains of India, and you pass at once from civilisation to barbarism, from order to anarchy, from security to danger, from justice to oppression. So much from the side of India. From the opposite quarter advances the growing civilisation of Russia—a civilisation which, notwithstanding its elements of European science and art, is still but little raised in its general character above that of the countries it is so rapidly overspreading, and yet, by consequence, less opposed to the tastes and the requirements of their newly-conquered peoples. The steamer, the telegraph, and the railway add consolidation to the new rule in the annexed countries. Order and security are established within the newly-conquered area by a sharp and decisive though despotic military rule; whilst commercial enterprise is encouraged with the countries lying beyond, and fostered by Government patronage. So much from the side of Russia. The region lying between the Russian conquests in Central Asia and the British Empire in India is now the barrier that separates these two forms of civilisation. It cannot always remain so. It must sooner or later succumb to the one form or the other; and for this reason it is that the region claims from us a more than ordinary interest, and, I may say, sympathy too, by way of reparation for the wrong we inflicted in the Afghan war—a wrong the fruits of which are yet abundant, as anybody who has served on our north-west frontier can testify.