THE GATES OF INDIA.
THE speech of Lord Beaconsfield on Friday week, in answer to the Duke of Argyll's masterly exposure of recent policy in Afghanistan, was marked by two noteworthy features. The Premier made no attempt to answer the attack in detail, or to indicate even in the faintest degree what he is now about to do either in Persia or Afghanistan ; but passed silently over all his opponent' a points, to reiterate again and again, four times over, that England, in consequence of his policy, has acquired possession of the "gates of India." That sentence is clearly the cue to the line which he wishes his followers to adopt upon the hustings. They are to treat all allusions to the morality of the invasion, the trickiness of our negotiations with Shore Ali, the anarchy to which we have reduced Afghanistan, and the burdens imposed on us by Afghan hatred, as details of no importance ; to avoid all questions as to the fate of Herat, or Candahar, or Cabul, and to insist that the Government policy has succeeded, and that we have obtained possession of the "gates of India." That pompous phrase will, it is believed, catch the imagination of the crowd, and set them hurrahing for the great man who found the gates of an Empire open, and left them closed. The phrase, addressed as it is to a population which in politics takes both its geography and its history from Ministerial state- ments, will probably serve its purpose ; and then, of course. it will be disused, if not forgotten. The electors are not ex- pected to see that if the grandiloquent phrase is true, it con- demns all recent policy in Afghanistan, or that, as is the fact, it is an archaism, cunningly made use of to disguise a policy adopted for other reasons. If it were true that the Passes were the gates of India, and that, in securing them, we had made the Empire unassailable, which was the cry after the Treaty of Gundamuok, and is Lord Beaconsfield's assertion now, then there was no necessity for an Envoy at Calm], or for all the effort and expense and loss of life which followed his despatch to the Afghan capital. We had possession of the gates without an Envoy, and in insisting upon the reception of Sir Louis Cavagnari, we simply sought the troubles which have followed. We should have garrisoned our gates, and fortified our gates, and connected our gates with the house by easy pathways, and there have left the matter, certain that we had at last assured the frontier necessary to unassailable security. Instead of that, we insisted on a stipulation which every one except the Ministry knew would be fatal, and have only ourselves to thank for all that has ensued. It is not the aoquisition of the Passes which Liberals blame, though they think them, disconnected as they are from each other, to be nearly useless ; but the method of that acquisition, and the demand added to the acquisition, which they hold to have been both impolitic and immoral. &ere Ali would have sold us the Passes for a trifling subsidy, and have held himself well rid of undefined claims to rule wild clans, who, as Lord Northbrook pointed out, never acknowledged his claim either to obedience or to revenue.
In truth, however, all this talk about " gates " rests upon a delusion based upon the ancient history of India. While India was liable to be invaded by Afghans or Persians, and while the Mogul Emperors drew the elite of their armies from the fighting clansmen of the Hills, the Passes of the North- West Frontier were indeed the gates of India. Through them any fresh Pretender, followed by discontented Hillmen or ambitious Persians, might enter the peninsula; while closing them cut its monarchs off from their true base,—the source whence they derived their best supply of soldiers. The fighting- men of the north were notoriously too strong for the fighting-men of the south. But the power of the Hillmen or the Persians for invasion is a thing of the past, and the invasion of India by an Asiatic army from the north has become an impos- sibility. We might as well turn Sikkim into a fortress feet China should pour her armies through that road, or for- tify British Burmah lest the French and the Judo-Chinese should pour in upon us from Saigon. For a century past every invader of India, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and ourselves, have come from the south, and the sea has become the true base of all military operations. So long as we retain the sea-road, so long must our power throughout India remain unassailable, either by war or insurrection. The people have been so bemused by talk about the North-West, that they fail to see that while the Suez Canal is open—and if it is ever shut, it will be the fault of this Ministry, kir allowing a double influence in Egypt—their military position in Asia is most splendid. While any foe from the north, or east, or south-east —for we will include China and France among possible enemies—must waste months in preparations, in gathering transports, or in crossing dreary plateaus, or in the French case, the unexplored morasses between Cochin-China and Burmah, we have an open road always available, and with- in four weeks of the first warning can place the whole strength of the United Kingdom at Kurrachee and Bombay, thence to be distributed by railway and steamer to the points assailed. No transport is required, for there is water or the railway everywhere ; while the enemy must waste months and half his strength in mere marching through territories without supplies. At Peshawur or in Scinde, or below Sikkim or in Tenasseriru, wherever the attack is expected, there can a new British army be placed, supported by the acclimatised Army of India, aided by a hundred thousand trained Indian troops, munitioned from full arsenals in India itself, and fed from the endless supplies of Bengal, or Bombay, or British Bur mah. The stream of reinforcements can be kept flowing week by week or day by day, over a road which, while we retain the command of the sea and the Canal, cannot be interrupted, and which involves to the reinforcements sent neither exposure, nor fatigue, nor losses by death. There never was a base so perfect, or a line of communication more secure. The true " gates " of India are Bombay, Kurrachee, Calcutta, and Rangoon, and not the Passes of the North-Western hills ; and a squadron of hostile ironclads opposite any one of them would be more threatening to our Power than a Russian army in Candahar, which, whether we had the Bolan or not, must debouch in face of the whole strength of the British Empire, with rail- ways, arsenals, and limitless supplies directly behind it, and poured to its support day by day. Scinde is as near to England for all practical purposes as the Crimea ever was, and an army there would be as close to its supplies as an army in Sutherlandshire would be to English resources. We depend upon the sea, and the northern mouths of the Passes would increase our resources as little as the possession of the Orkneys would strengthen the Duke of Cambridge in re- sisting a French invasion. It may be well, as we have them, to hold them, as making the outlook easier ; but to suppose that we can derive strength from them, to parade them as the gates of India, the possession of which justifies a Ministry in an aggressive and tricky policy, is the absurdest bombast. We might, with far more reason, declare Nepaul the gate of India against the Chinese, and spend our energies and re- sources in subduing the Ghoorkas, and garrisoning the high passes into Thibet. When the Sibi Railway reaches the Bolan, Portsmouth will be within four weeks' distance of the southern entrance to the Pass ; while Russia will not be— supposing her march both possible and unopposed—within four months. That is a real source of strength, not the ability to place beyond the Bolan a cantonment which a Russian army, if it were there, would gobble up in a day, leaving our real work of defence to be done, as before, by an army on our own side of the Hills, strength- ened by reinforcements from Great Britain. The Passes by themselves are mere lanes, which we cannot con- nect at all on the northern side, unless we annex Afghanistan, which are commanded by hills occupied by unsubdued and hostile clans, and which, though they can be connected on our side, the Southern, would for that connection involve an expenditure and amount of armed protection which would line the Indus with fortresses as impregnable as the fortresses on the Danube. Just imagine the Russian armies arriving on the Danube, after a march across a thousand miles of desert, to find the river defended by a hundred thousand Englishmen, supported by an empire of 250,000,000 people, organised as India is, as a military monarchy, perpetually ready for war !
All this, we shall be told, and, indeed, are told already, in a dozen journals, does not answer Lord Northbrook's point,— the necessity of the independence of Herat of Russian power. Certainly it does not, but upon that point what guidance or assurance do we derive from Lord Beaconsfield's magniloquence about the gates of India ? He never so much as mentions Herat. We are unable ourselves to see in Lord North- brook's view more than a counsel of perfection, or to acknowledge the necessity of Herat to England, any more than we should acknowledge the necessity of Warsaw to Germany. But we will not discuss that point, in opposition to such authority. Grant that Herat, which is unassailed and unthreatened, must not belong to Russia, and what have we done or are we doing about it ? We have deprived Herat of the protection of the Afghan kingdom, we have not given it our own, and we are talking of handing it over to a weak State, over which Russia exercises, or can exercise, direct terrorism of the most effective kind. If Herat is a "gate," where, in all that has occurred or is occurring, is the protection for that "gate ?" We do not believe one word about gates, holding that our strength lies in the south of the garden ; and that we can always at will protect the northern wall, without stepping beyond it. But, granting the contrary assertion, how are we going to protect Herat Through a re- vived Afghan kingdom ? Then we have only broken the china in order to mend the vase. Through handing it over to Persia ? Then, the first day we are in difficulty, it will be held by a Russian vassal. Through a British garrison? We might almost as well plant a British garrison in Toulouse, and undertake to defend it for all time. We should be forcing ourselves to go outside the house, and the wall, and the park gates, whenever the poachers chose.
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