We come next to the inquiry as to what this "Scientific Frontier" is, in order to obtain which this act of vandalism was perpetrated. This is a question involved in some obscurity. The _Times_ is the great champion of the "Scientific Frontier," but in its columns, as also in Ministerial speeches, it changes colour like a chameleon. Sometimes it is called the "possession of the three highways leading to India," thereby rendering the Empire "invulnerable." At other times it is recommended to us because it protects the trade through the Bolan Pass, and enables us to threaten Kabul. The fact is that the (so-called) "Scientific Frontier"--meaning thereby the frontier we acquired by the Treaty of Gundamuck--is a make-believe, an imposture. It is not the "Scientific Frontier" in pursuit of which we "hunted the Ameer to death" and reduced his territories to a condition of anarchy. Those who have followed the history of the war with attention will remember that in September of last year the Calcutta correspondent of the _Times_ was smitten with a really marvellous admiration for Lord Lytton. "India," he wrote, "is fortunate in the possession at the present time of a Viceroy specially gifted with broad statesmanlike views, the result partly of most vigilant and profound study, partly of the application of great natural intellectual capacity to the close cultivation of political science and the highest order of statecraft." Here we have the portrait of the lion painted by himself; and it is not surprising that this superb creature should have regarded with considerable scorn the policy of his predecessors who never claimed to be "specially gifted" for the exercise of "the highest order of statecraft." "The present measure," the correspondent went on to say, "for the despatch of a mission to Kabul forms but a single move in an extensive concerted scheme for the protection of India, which is the outcome of a long-devised and elaborately worked-out system of defensive policy." Here we have a fine example of the "puff preliminary." In the issue of the _Times_ for the 10th September this "extensive concerted scheme for the protection of India" is detailed at length, and is there plainly set forth as intended for a barrier against Russia:--