Has Russia any serious views, then, on British India? Will she attack the British Lion in his rich possessions? Does her ambition really reach so far, that she would wield her mighty sceptre over the whole continent of Asia, from the icy shores of the Arctic Sea to Cape Comorin? These are questions of needful interest, not to Englishmen only, but to all Europeans. On the bank of the Thames as well as in Calcutta, statesmen have latterly answered them in the negative; for their organs, official and unofficial, regard the utmost danger of the meeting as a neighbourhood of frontiers, and not an aggression; a neighbourhood which, so far from imperilling English interests, will be altogether to their advantage. These gentlemen are sadly at fault, for the spirit of Russia's traditional policy,--her steadfast clinging to the schemes before indicated, the unbounded ambition of the House of Romanoff, the immense accumulation of means at their disposal for the accomplishment of their designs,--place in surer prospect the fulfilment of any aim on which they have once bent their gaze. Russia wants India first of all in order to set so rich a pearl in the splendid diamond of her Asiatic possessions; a pearl, for whose attainment she has so long, at so heavy a cost, been levelling the way through the most barren steppes in the world; next, in order to lend the greatest possible force to her influence over the whole world of Islam (whose greatest and most dangerous foe she has now become), because the masters of India have reached, in Mohamedan eyes, the non-plus-ultra of might and greatness; and lastly, by taming the British Lion on the other side the Hindu-Kush, to work out with greater ease her designs on the Bosphorus, in the Mediterranean, indeed all over Europe; since no one can now doubt that the Eastern question may be solved more easily beyond the Hindu-Kush than on the Bosphorus: for if, at the time of the Crimean war, when Nana Sahib's brother was fêted at Sevastopol, Russia had held her present position on the Yaxartes, the plans of Tzar Nicholas on Constantinople would not have been so easily buried under the ruins of the Malakhoff.