48. BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY IN INDIA. There is no space for even a brief sketch of the marvellous story of the British wooing and winning of the great peninsula, which contains nearly one-fifth of the human race. A glance at the map of India will show that others also wooed, but did not win, and will indicate that all paid their addresses at three important points on the long coast line, so singularly lacking in harbors. Near Bombay on the West, the Portuguese still hold the beautiful land of Goa; near Madras on the East, the French retain Pondicherry, and up the Hooghly river above Calcutta, the tricolor still flies over the little settlement of Chandernagore. Dutch and Danes no longer have settlements in India, but these, too, have left their traces. From Madras, Bombay and Calcutta—isolated and unconscious — strenuous traders generated the force, which was in the course of time to create and consolidate one of the most re markable Empires which the world has ever seen.
We cannot here dwell on the romantic deeds of the great builders of the huge fabric, known as British India.
The map will also show that only three-fifths of the Indian continent are colored red. The remaining two-fifths belong to the Indian princes and are not British territory. If the policy so keenly followed by Lord Dalhousie had not been arrested by the convulsion known as the Indian Mutiny, it is possible that a con siderable portion of the territory now belonging to the Indian Feudatories would have passed by lapse or other causes into British possession. But happily by the wise grant of the right of adoption to the Indian princes the danger of further annexation disappeared. It will be noticed, if reference again be made to the map of India, that the territories of the Indian princes are widely scattered. There are large countries belonging to princes, such as the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Maharaja of Mysore in the South, and there arc vast areas held by groups of chiefs such as the congeries of states known as central India; where the great Mahratta dynasties hold sway— Rajput ana where the Rajput princes rule, and the large tract in the Punjab where the Sikh states lie. It is difficult to define the exact relation of the Indian princes to the Crown, but the King of England and Emperor of India may in a sense be styled a °Ruler of Princes." The ties which bind the Indian
princes to the British Crown have been de scribed by Lord Curzon: are peculiar and significant, and, so far as I know, they have no parallel in any other country of the world. The. political sys tem of India is neither Feudalism nor Federa tion; it is contained in no constitution; it does not always rest on a treaty and it bears no re semblance to a league. It represents a series of relationships that have grown up between the Crown and the Indian Princes under widely differing historical conditions but which in process of time have gradually conformed to a single type. The sovereignty of the Crown is everywhere unchallenged. It has itself laid down the limitations of its own prerogative. Conversely, the duties and the service of the states are implicitly recognized, and as a rule, faithfully discharged.) The conquest of Upper Burmah, carried out by Lord Dufferin, was under the circumstances unavoidable. There have also been changes in Baluchistan of a political rather than a terri torial nature. But with these exceptions, India, from the time when it passed out of the hands of the company of merchants into the keeping of the Crown, has remained content with the frontiers which nature had suggested and Lord Dalhousie had secured. They are good fron tiers, and enable a comparatively small force of some 230,000 men to keep the peace, internal and external, of some 300,000,000 people. India has been likened to a "fortress with the vast moat of the sea on two of her faces and with mountains for her walls on the For the Hindus the °black water,) as they call the ocean, was protection enough until the navies came out of the west, while to the north stood the stupendous mountains of the Him alaya. But to the northwest, the frontier, diffi cult and dangerous though it was, admits of Passage, and through the defiles which occur in the marshes between Peshawar and Quetta the waves of invasion have often found their way. And so long as Great Britain holds com mand of the sea, it is only through the north western frontier that India can be threatened.