a hard-fighting and intractable people, and on the farther side of these mountains stands the rival European Power whose policy it had been always to retard and obstruct the Russian advance across the Asiatic Continent. We may conjecture that if Afghanistan had been left, as the Caucasus was left after the Crimean War, isolated and obliged to rely on its own resources for defence, the drama of the Caucasian wars would have been repeated. The Russians would have besieged and reduced without great difficulty this second mountain fortress; and after another similar though less protracted struggle the Afghans would have undergone the same fate as the Daghestanis. The Czar's rulership, solidly established in the two natural strongholds that stand on either side of the great central plains, and command, east and west, the exits and entrances, would have been supreme throughout Mohammedan Asia. That the Russian armies were forced to halt on the edge of Afghanistan is thus a point of cardinal importance, and it marks a turning-point in the career of her expansion. It also produced a situation that is the outcome of the different strategy adopted by England and Russia respectively, in circumstances not otherwise very dissimilar. For whereas the Russians had been compelled by imperative political and military exigencies to conquer and occupy the Caucasian highlands, the policy of the British Government has always been not to subjugate Afghanistan, but to preserve its independence and to fortify it as an outwork for the protection of the gates of India. It is due to this fundamental distinction of aim and object that the history of the relations of the British with Afghanistan during the nineteenth century, and of their management of the tribes on the Afghan border, differs widely from Mr. Baddeley's narrative of events and transactions in the Caucasus. Nevertheless in both instances the general situation presented a strong resemblance. The Russians, pushing their dominion down from the north to the Black Sea and the Caspian, were checked and baffled for many years by the woods and precipices that lay across the line of their march into Trans-Caspia. The British, moving up by long strides north-westward across India, came to a halt at the foot of the Afghan hills fifty years ago; and to this day they have scarcely moved farther. Here they were met by races almost identical in character and circumstances with the tribes of Daghestan, fanatically attached to the faith of Islam, profoundly influenced by religious preachers, prizing their liberty above their lives, and looking down from their rugged uplands upon a great military power that had swept away many principalities and subdued all the cities of the plain below. If the British had pressed onward and endeavoured to take possession of Afghanistan [which had indeed been occupied by the Moghul empire in its prime] they would certainly have