In the interviews of Sir Douglas Forsyth with the Russian Minister of War and the Minister of the Asiatic Department it was agreed that Russia should respect as Afghanistan all the Provinces which Sher Ali then held, that the Oxus should be the boundary line of Sher Ali's dominions on the north, and that both England and Russia should do their best to prevent aggressions by the Asiatic States under their control. Lord Mayo lost no time in securing for Sher Ali the guarantee of a recognised boundary against the Amir's neighbours in Central Asia. In 1871 the Russians, however, raised grave objections to Badakshan being included within the Afghan line. This question was settled by friendly negotiations {130} in 1872. In January, 1873, Count Schouvaloff arrived in London to personally express the Emperor's sanction to the disputed territories being recognised as part of Afghanistan. Subsequent delimitations have given precision to the frontier. But practically it may be said that Afghanistan, as territorially defined by Lord Mayo in 1869, remained substantially the Afghanistan of the following twenty years. Having thus placed the affairs of Afghanistan on a satisfactory footing, Lord Mayo turned his attention to the great territories which stretch southward from it along our Sind Frontier and eastwards to Persia. He found that our relations with these territories, loosely named Baluchistan or Khelat, were perplexed by two distinct sets of complications--one external, the other internal. The first referred to the frontier between Baluchistan and Persia. This had never been settled, and had for generations formed the arena of mutual aggressions and sanguinary raids. The internal complication arose from the ill-defined position of the Khan or Ruler towards his nobility. According to one party in Khelat, the Khan is the Sovereign of the State; according to another, he is the head of a confederacy of Chiefs. The net result was, that what between wars of extermination on the Persian Frontier, and the internecine struggle between the royalist and oligarchic parties within the State, Baluchistan knew no rest, and might at any moment prove a troublesome neighbour. Her internal rebellions and {131} her border feuds rendered it very hard to discover with whom the actual authority rested, or how far it extended, and made it difficult for the British Government to take measures for the consolidation of the titular ruler's power.