JC
A 502950
DUPL
323
C98
1908


ARTES
1837
SCIENTIA
LIBRARY
VERITAS
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
PLURIBUS UNDO.
TUEBOR
S-QUAERIS PENINSULAM AMOENAMU
CIRCUMSPICE

ཅམ་
JC
له مرمر
323
698
1908
THE ROMANES LECTURE
1907
Frontiers

BY
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
LORD CURZON OF KEDLESTON
D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.
ALL SOULS COLLEGE, CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY
DELIVERED
IN THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE, OXFORD
NOVEMBER 2, 1907
SECOND EDITION
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1908
HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH
NEW YORK AND TORONTO
:
I
*
FRONTIERS
WHEN, at the end of December, 1905, the then Vice-
Chancellor asked me to be the Romanes Lecturer in
the following year, just after my return from India, I
felt that the honour was one which it was impossible
for me, as a devoted son of this ancient and illustrious
University, to decline. But when he informed me that
the entire field of Science, Literature, and Art was at my
disposal for the choice of a subject, and that among my
predecessors were to be found the great names of Glad-
stone, Huxley, and John Morley, I was more appalled
at my temerity in venturing to tread in their footsteps
than I was gratified at the almost illimitable range that
was opened to my ambition. In these circumstances,
I concluded that my best course would be to select some
topic of which I had personal experience, and upon
which I could, without presumption, address even this
famous and learned University. I chose the subject of
Frontiers. It happened that a large part of my younger
days had been spent in travel upon the boundaries of
the British Empire in Asia, which had always exercised
upon me a peculiar fascination. A little later, at the
India Office and at the Foreign Office, I had had official
cognizance of a period of great anxiety, when the main
sources of diplomatic preoccupation, and sometimes of
international danger, had been the determination of
the Frontiers of the Empire in Central Asia, in every
A 2
4
Frontiers
part of Africa, and in South America. Further, I had just
returned from a continent where I had been responsible
for the security and defence of a Land Frontier 5,700
miles in length, certainly the most diversified, the most
important, and the most delicately poised in the world;
and I had there, as Viceroy, been called upon to
organize, and to conduct the proceedings of, as many
as five Boundary Commissions.
I was the more tempted to undertake this task be-
cause I had never been able to discover, much less to
study, its literature. It is a remarkable fact that,
although Frontiers are the chief anxiety of nearly every
Foreign Office in the civilized world, and are the sub-
ject of four out of every five political treaties or conven-
tions that are now concluded, though as a branch of the
science of government Frontier policy is of the first
practical importance, and has a more profound effect.
upon the peace or warfare of nations than any other
factor, political or economic, there is yet no work or
treatise in any language which, so far as I know, affects.
to treat of the subject as a whole. Modern works on
geography realize with increasing seriousness the signi-
ficance of political geography; and here in this Univer-
sity, so responsive to the spirit of the age, where I
rejoice to think that a School of Geography has
recently been founded, it is not likely to escape attention.
A few pages are sometimes devoted to Frontiers in
compilations on International Law, and here and there
a Frontier officer relates his experience before learned
societies or in the pages of a magazine. But with these
exceptions there is a practical void. You may ransack
the catalogues of libraries, you may search the indexes
of celebrated historical works, you may study the writings
c
Frontiers
5
of scholars, and you will find the subject almost wholly
ignored. Its formulae are hidden in the arcana of diplo-
matic chancelleries; its documents are embedded in
vast and forbidding collections of treaties; its incidents.
and what I may describe as its incomparable drama are
the possession of a few silent men, who may be found in
the clubs of London, or Paris, or Berlin, when they are
not engaged in tracing lines upon the unknown areas
of the earth.
Frontiers in History.
And yet I would invite you to pause and consider
what Frontiers mean, and what part they play in the
life of nations. I will not for the moment go further
back than a century. It was the adoption of a mistaken
Frontier policy that brought the colossal ambitions of the
great Napoleon with a crash to the ground. The allied
armies might never have entered Paris had the Emperor
not held out for an impossible Frontier for France.
The majority of the most important wars of the century
have been Frontier wars. Wars of religion, of alliances,
of rebellion, of aggrandisement, of dynastic intrigue or
ambition-wars in which the personal element was often
the predominant factor-tend to be replaced by Frontier
wars, i. e. wars arising out of the expansion of states
and kingdoms, carried to a point, as the habitable globe
shrinks, at which the interests or ambitions of one state
come into sharp and irreconcilable collision with those
of another.
To take the experience of the past half-century alone.
The Franco-German War was a war for a Frontier, and
it was the inevitable sequel of the Austro-Prussian
campaign of 1866, which, by destroying the belt of
6
Frontiers
independent States between Prussia and her Rhenish
provinces, had brought her up to the doors of France.
The campaign of 1866 was itself the direct consequence
of the war of 1864 for the recovery by Germany of the
Frontier Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. The Russo-
Turkish War originated in a revolt of the Frontier
States, and every Greek war is waged for the recovery
of a national Frontier. We were ourselves at war with
Afghanistan in 1839, and again in 1878, we were on the
verge of war with Russia in 1878, and again in 1885, over
Frontier incidents in Asia. The most arduous struggle
in which we have been engaged in India in modern.
times was waged with Frontier tribes. Had the Tibetans
respected our Frontiers, we should never have marched
three years ago to Lhasa. Think, indeed, of what the
Indian Frontier Problem, as it is commonly called, has
meant and means; the controversies it has provoked,
the passions it has aroused; the reputations that have
flashed or faded within its sinister shadow. Japan
came to blows with China over the Frontier-state of
Korea; she found herself gripped in a life-and-death
struggle with Russia because of the attempt of the
latter to include Manchuria within the Frontiers of her
political influence. Great Britain was on the brink of
a collision with France over the Frontier incident of
Fashoda; she advanced to Khartoum not to avenge
Gordon, but to defend an imperilled and to recover
a lost Frontier. Only the other day the Algeciras
Conference was sitting to determine the degree to
which the possession of a contiguous Frontier gave
France the right to exercise a predominant influence in
Morocco. But perhaps a more striking illustration still
is that of Great Britain and America. The two occa-
Frontiers
7
sions on which in recent times (and there are earlier
examples ¹) the relations between these two allied and
fraternal peoples-conflict between whom would be
a hideous crime-have been most perilously affected,
have both been concerned with Frontier disputes-the
Venezuelan and the Alaskan Boundary.
The most urgent work of Foreign Ministers and
Ambassadors, the foundation or the outcome of every
entente cordiale, is now the conclusion of Frontier Con-
ventions in which sources of discord are removed by
the adjustment of rival interests or ambitions at points
where the territorial borders adjoin. Frontiers are
indeed the razor's edge on which hang suspended the
modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to
nations. Nor is this surprising. Just as the protection
of the home is the most vital care of the private citizen,
so the integrity of her borders is the condition of
existence of the State. But with the rapid growth of
population and the economic need for fresh outlets,
expansion has, in the case of the Great Powers, become
an even more pressing necessity. As the vacant spaces
of the earth are filled up, the competition for the residue
is temporarily more keen. Fortunately, the process is
drawing towards a natural termination. When all the
voids are filled up, and every Frontier is defined, the
problem will assume a different form. The older and
more powerful nations will still dispute about their
Frontiers with each other; they will still encroach upon
¹ For instance the question of the San Juan Islands in the Straits
of Georgia between the mainland and Vancouver's Island, which
was decided by the German Emperor in 1872 in favour of the
United States; and the earlier controversies about the boundaries
of Oregon and Maine.
8
Frontiers
R
:
and annex the territories of their weaker neighbours;
Frontier wars will not, in the nature of things, dis-
appear. But the scramble for new lands, or for the
heritage of decaying States, will become less acute as
there is less territory to be absorbed and less chance of
doing it with impunity, or as the feebler units are either
neutralized, or divided, or fall within the undisputed
Protectorate of a stronger Power. We are at present
passing through a transitional phase, of which less dis-
turbed conditions should be the sequel, falling more and
more within the ordered domain of International Law.
The illustrations which I have given, and which
might easily be multiplied, will be sufficient to indicate
the overwhelming influence of Frontiers in the history
of the modern world. Reference to the past will tell
a not substantially different tale. In our own country
how much has turned upon the border conflict between
England and Scotland and between England and Wales,
In Ireland the ceaseless struggle between those within
and those outside the Pale has left an ineffaceable mark
on the history and character of the people. Half the
warfare of the European continent has raged round the
great Frontier barriers of the Alps and Pyrenees, the
Danube and the Rhine. The Roman Empire, nowhere
so like to our own as in its Frontier policy and ex-
perience,—a subject to which I shall have frequent
occasion to revert,-finally broke up and perished be-
cause it could not maintain its Frontiers intact against
the barbarians.
I wonder, indeed, if my hearers at all appreciate the
part that Frontiers are playing in the everyday history
and policy of the British Empire. Time was when
England had no Frontier but the ocean. We have now
Frontiers
9
by far the greatest extent of territorial Frontier of any
dominion in the globe. In North America we have
a Land Frontier of more than 3,000 miles with the United
States. In India we have Frontiers nearly 6,000 miles
long with Persia, Russia, Afghanistan, Tibet, China,
Siam, and France. In Africa we have Frontiers con-
siderably over 12,000 miles in length with France,
Germany, Italy, Portugal, and the Congo State, not
to mention our Frontiers with native states and tribes.
These Frontiers have to be settled, demarcated, and
then maintained. We commonly speak of Great
Britain as the greatest sea-power, forgetting that she
is also the greatest land-power in the Universe. Not
much is heard of this astonishing development in
Parliament; I suspect that even in our Universities
it is but dimly apprehended. Nevertheless, it is the
daily and hourly preoccupation of our Foreign Office,
our India Office, and our Colonial Office; it is the
vital concern of the greatest of our colonies and de-
pendencies; and it provides laborious and incessant
employment for the keenest intellects and the most
virile energies of the Anglo-Saxon race.
My main difficulty is not how to deal with such
a topic adequately, but how to deal with it in the
compass of an academic lecture. As my investigations
have progressed, I have seen the horizon expand before
me, until it has appeared to embrace all history, the
greater part of geography, and a good deal of juris-
prudence. I have alternately seen my Essay swell into
a volume, and have contemplated reducing that volume
into a tabloid for passing consumption in this theatre.
It is obviously impossible for me to treat of Frontiers
in the space of an hour or of many hours; on the other
Uor M
IO
Frontiers
hand I have found neither the leisure nor the health to
write the volume which at one time I had in view. The
result must be a compromise. Large portions of my
subject, and indeed of my manuscript, must be ignored
to-day. Before my Essay assumes a final form, I hope
that it may acquire a character more in consonance with
the magnitude and the unity of the theme.
I will not pause to dilate upon the obvious truisms
that lie at the threshold of my subject. The influence
of region upon race, and the correlative influence of race
upon region, are speculations belonging to the wider
subject of which Frontiers are only a part. That a
country with easily recognized natural boundaries is
more capable of defence and is more assured of a
national existence than a country which does not possess
those advantages; that a country with a sea Frontier, such
as the British Isles, particularly if she also possesses
sea-power, is in a stronger position than a country
which only has land Frontiers and requires a powerful
army to defend them; that a mountain-girt country is the
most secure of internal States-these are the common-
places of political geography. More pertinent is it
to say in passing that in the study of such a subject as
ours, we must be very careful not to generalize too
hastily as to the influence of physical agencies, either
upon character or action: for the same causes are apt
to produce very different results in different places or
at different times. There is a passage, for instance, in
an English poet which typifies what I mean. Cowper
wrote in The Task (Book II)—
Lands intersected by a narrow forth
Abhor each other. Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations who had else
Like kindred drops been mingled into one.
MU
Frontiers
II
Many instances can doubtless be found in which both
these propositions are true. The intervention of a
narrow forth has certainly been one of the main causes
of the inveterate estrangement of the English and the
Irish it has been largely responsible for the conven-
tional hostility between England and France. But quite
as many instances can be found in which the peoples
on two sides of a strait or narrow sea have been on
friendly terms. The generalization about mountains is
equally unscientific. Nor is the inverse in either case any
truer, viz. that States which are not separated from each
other, either by narrow seas or by mountains, are there-
fore naturally friends. The fact is that in all such cases
a great many causes are at work, of which geographical
position or environment is but one. A safer procedure
is that of deduction only from established facts.
Macaulay, in his Frederick the Great, wrote in his
pictorial manner, but with incontrovertible truth:
Some states have been enabled by their geographical position
to defend themselves with advantage against immense forces.
The sea has repeatedly protected England against the fury of the
whole Continent. The Venetian Government, driven from its
possessions on the land, could still bid defiance to the Confederacy
of Cambray from the arsenal amid the lagoons. More than one
great and well appointed army, which regarded the shepherds of
Switzerland as an easy prey, has perished in the passes of the
Alps.
Here the philosophy of Frontiers is demonstrated by
concrete facts.
Origin of Frontiers.
If we start with the dawn of history, at least in Europe,
it is not difficult to trace the conditions under which the
first Frontiers came into being. The existing peoples of
12
Frontiers
Europe are with rare exceptions, of whose origin we
have no certain knowledge, the deposit of successive
waves of human immigration from Asia. These nomads
would, in each case, pursue what may be described as
the groove principle of advance. Entering Europe, for
the most part, through the gap between the southern
end of the Urals and the Caspian, they found a continent
largely overspread, particularly in its northern parts, with
forests, morasses, and swamps, intersected everywhere
by great rivers, and in its central and southern portions
split up by mountainous masses or long projecting
spurs. Between, or amid, these obstacles they would
naturally follow-as they did follow-the easiest and
most accessible grooves, everywhere taking advantage of
natural barriers, and settling down in areas of which
the limits had been provided for them. Rivers were
not a natural Frontier in those primitive days. More
often they were a means of access to a country than
a line of division between races: indeed, both banks
were not unlikely to be occupied by the same race.
Only as time passed and artificial boundaries were
required to supplement those of nature did rivers,
though natural in origin, begin to play a part in the
scheme of territorial subdivision. Mountains constituted
the earliest and most obvious barriers. Then as forests
were cut down and swamps were drained, the peoples
pushed their way over the more level areas, until, little
by little, the empty places were occupied. To what
extent natural features were responsible for the earliest.
form of organized state may be seen from the city
communities and republics of the Greek and Latin
races. The limits of each were determined by its
mountain barriers, and there was but little communi-
Frontiers
13
1
cation or power of common action between State and
State. It was in the more open countries that larger
kingdoms and empires tended to be formed. Then,
as population increased, and commerce and industry
grew, as naval and military forces developed, arid as
larger political aggregations began to supersede the
smaller units, natural boundaries were found no longer
to suffice. It became necessary to supplement or to
replace them by artificial Frontiers, finding their origin
in the complex operations of race, language, trade,
religion, and war.
Natural Frontiers.
Here, however, I must pause to define the factors
and to indicate with greater precision the various classes.
of Frontiers with which we are called upon to deal.
I have already accepted the broad distinction between
Natural and Artificial Frortiers, both as generally
recognized, and as scientifically the most exact. Of
all Natural Frontiers ine sea is the most uncompro-
mising, the least alterable, and the most effective. The
defensive attributes of the sea receive the poet's
testimony in iis description of England as
compassed by the inviolate sea;
its exclusive qualities are celebrated in a not less
familiar phrase :
the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.
It is true that in one aspect the sea may be regarded
as a connecting link by the artificial aid of navigation,
¹ Hence the failure of the attempt to defend Thessaly against
the armies of Xerxes in 480 and the small number of troops
collected to defend Thermopylae.
14
Frontiers
much in the same way as a land Frontier may be
crossed by a railroad or pierced by a tunnel. The sea
yas such a link in the case of Greece and her city
colonies, enabling her (no hostile power having com-
mana of the Mediterranean) to maintain connexion
with her foreign colonies, in spite of the fissiparous
influence of her physical configuration on the mainland.
Similarly, the Mediterranean was a connecting link
between Rome and her outlying possessions, just as it
is at the present day between France and her North
African colonies. Indeed the Mediterranean has never
in civilized times been the southern Frontier of Europe;
the latter has in reality been supplied by the Atlas
Mountains and the great Desert of Sahara. The
Persian Gulf is another illustration of a sea that has
shown itself to be not a barrier but a link: the Arabs
who were skilled and courageous mariners from early
times (witness the story of Sinbad the Sailor) having
occupied both shores with their settlements. The sea
may also act as a vehicle of invasion. It brought the
Jutes and Saxons, the Norsemen and Danes to England,
just as it had brought the Romans before them.
Nevertheless, the opposite or separating quality of
the sea is undoubtedly the more striking and familiar
aspect. I have already alluded to its influence upon
the relations of Great Britain and France, and of Great
Britain and Ireland. Only when England ceased to
be a Continental power did the national spirit blossom
into any fullness. The project of a Channel Tunnel
between the coast of England and France has twice
perished because of the invincible and legitimate re-
pugnance of the Englishman to sacrifice his maritime
Frontier for no tangible return. It was because of the
1
15
Frontiers
interposition of the sea that England lost America; that
the Dutch and Portuguese lost the greater part of their
Indian Empires; that Napoleon, equally with Rome,
experienced so many difficulties in Egypt; that the
Mexican adventure of France and Austria ended in
fiasco; that Spain was robbed almost in a day of her
possessions in Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines.
In these circumstances the continued connexion of the
parent State with her transmarine possessions—which
might seem to be an impossible aspiration-is only
maintained in modern times by the grant of some
form of self-government with a view to attaching the
inhabitants of the colony or possession to the seat of
imperial authority.
Second in the list of Natural Frontiers may be placed
deserts, until modern times a barrier even more im-
passable than the sea. Asia and Africa afford the best
known instances of this phenomenon. For centuries
China has been protected by the great Gobi Desert
on her north-west border; Samarkand and Bokhara
were shielded by the sandhills of the Kara Kum; the
Indus valley was severed from the rest of India in
its southerly portions by the Sind Desert, while Belu-
chistan is still safeguarded by the waste that stretches.
from Nushki to Seistan. Syria found a natural Frontier
on the east in the desert that bears her name. Indeed,
the whole of western Asia, that part, in fact, which was
exposed to Hellenic influences, was for centuries cut off
from India by the broad wastes of Persia and Turkestan.
Egypt, protected on the west by the impassable barrier
of the Libyan Desert, and on the east by the desert of
the Sinaitic peninsula, has retained a physical identity
almost unequalled in history. It was of her eastern
16
Frontiers
:
desert Frontier that the greatest captain of modern
times, who had himself crossed it at the head of an army,
wrote as follows in his Commentaries:
Generals who have marched from Egypt to Syria or from Syria
to Egypt have in all periods of history considered this desert the
greater obstacle the larger the number of horses they took with
them. The ancient historians declare that when Cambyses wished
to penetrate into Egypt he made an alliance with an Arab king,
who caused a canal to flow with water in the desert, which
evidently means that he covered it with camels bearing water.
Alexander sought to please the Jews so that they might help him
in the passage of the desert. This obstacle, however, was not so
great in ancient times as it is to-day, since towns and villages
existed, and the industry of man contended with success against
the difficulties. To-day scarcely anything remains between
Salihiyeh and Gaza. An army must, therefore, cross the desert
successively by forming establishments and magazines at Sali-
hiyeh, Katieh, and El Arish. If this army starts from Syria it
must first of all form a large magazine at El Arish, and then carry
it forward to Katieh. But these operations are slow, and they
give an enemy time to make his preparations for defence. . . . An
army defending Egypt can either assemble at El Arish to oppose
the investment of this place, or at Katieh to raise the siege of
El Arish, or at Salihiyeh: all these alternatives offer advantages.
Of all obstacles which may cover the frontiers of empires, a desert like
this is incontestably the greatest. Mountains like the Alps take second
rank, and rivers the third. If there is so much difficulty in carrying
the food of an army that complete success is rarely obtained, this
difficulty becomes twenty times greater when it is necessary to
carry water, forage, and fuel, three things which are weighty,
difficult to carry, and usually found by armies upon the ground
they occupy.
Finally, Africa furnishes the crowning illustration
of the Great Sahara, which for centuries not only cut
off the Mediterranean belt from the rest of Africa, but
cut off the entire remainder of Africa from the civilized
world. It was not till the voyages of Prince Henry
the Navigator that this long period of isolation came
to an end.
Frontiers
17
In quite recent days, however, deserts as Frontiers
have lost the greater part both of their terror and their
strength. Like the loftiest mountains, like the stormiest
oceans, they have yielded to the all-conquering in-
fluence of steam. When Skobeleff advanced to the
extirpation of the Tekke Turkomans at Geok Tepe in
1881, he laid a light railway behind him. As the
English troops moved up the Nile to the recovery of
Khartoum in 1898, the steel rails kept pace with their
advance. It was to the desert line, and not to the actual
collision at Omdurman, that the Khalifa owed his
destruction. The Turkish railways to Syria, if pro-
tracted, would soon deprive Egypt of the security on
her eastern border which Napoleon described. Given
a level desert with a sound foundation, a railroad be-
comes the easiest of constructions, and built by com-
petent engineers, can be pushed forward in war time
at the rate of three miles a day.¹ Similarly it is the aid
of railways that has enabled the United States of
America to make so light of the great deserts that
stretch eastwards from the Rocky Mountains. There
are few desert Frontiers in the world that now remain
intact. If occasion arose, the doom of the survivors
would probably be sealed. It is a question, not of
mechanics, but of water and fuel. On the other hand,
a ghost of the idea may be said to survive in the still
existing preference of uninhabited or thinly peopled
tracts as Frontiers over areas of crowded occupation.
I turn to the consideration of the third type of
Natural Frontier, namely, mountains. We have already
seen that mountains were the earliest of the barriers
¹ In the Soudan campaign of 1898, 5,300 yards of railway were
surveyed, embanked, and laid in a single day.
B
18
Frontiers
1
accepted by wandering man. Prima facie, also, they
are the most durable and the most imposing. They
are liable to little change (except such as may be in-
directly effected by human agency in the shape of
roads, railroads, and tunnels), and they are capable.
of instant and easy recognition. Such has been the
position, and the decisive influence of the great moun-
tain barriers of the world-of the Hindu Kush and
Himalayas in Asia,¹ of the immense and serried ridges
that separate Burma from China, of the Caucasus
between Asia and Europe, of the Taurus in Asia Minor,
of the Alps and Pyrenees (and in a lesser degree the
Balkans and Carpathians) in Europe. From the military
point of view the labour in crossing a mountain range is
commonly great, particularly for armies, and is exposed to
many dangers. What it was in ancient times, a century
ago, and in more modern days, may be compared in
the crossing of the Alps by Hannibal, and again by
Napoleon, and in the experience of the Russians in
the Balkans. We have yet to see a campaign in which
the appliances of modern science in respect of railroads,
tunnels, and telegraphs, are seized by one party so as
practically to annihilate the mountain barrier upon which
the other relies for protection, although the Germans
seized and utilized the French tunnel through the Vosges
at the commencement of the Franco-German War, and
the Boers possessed themselves of the Drakensberg
range and the Laing's Nek tunnel in order to facilitate
their descent upon Natal.
On the other hand the theoretical superiority of a
1 Backed as they are by the huge and lofty plateau of Tibet, the
Himalayas are beyond doubt the most formidable natural Frontier
in the world.
Frontiers
19
1
mountain Frontier may be qualified by a number of con-
siderations arising from its physical structure. Of course
a range or ridge with a sharply defined crest is the best
of all. But sometimes the mountain-barrier may be, not
a ridge or even a range, but a tumbled mass of peaks
and gorges, covering a zone many miles in width (for
instance, the breadth of the Himalayas north of Kashmir
is little short of 200 miles), and within this area the
inhabitants may be independent or hostile. Such has
been the case with a large portion of the Pathan
Frontier of India, where the physical conformation of
the border lends an immense advantage to the holders
of the mountains against the occupants of the plains.
The desire to counteract this advantage and to transfer
it to the Cis-border Power has led to the pursuit of what
is known as the Scientific Frontier, i. e. a Frontier which
unites natural and strategical strength, and by placing
both the entrance and the exit of the passes in the hands
of the defending Power, compels the enemy to conquer.
the approach before he can use the passage. It is this
policy that has carried the Indian outposts to Lundi
Khana, to Quetta, and to Chaman, all of them beyond
the passes, whose outer extremities they guard.
In every mountain border, where the entire moun-
tainous belt does not fall under the control of a single
Power, the crest or water-divide is the best and fairest
line of division; for it is not exposed to physical change,
it is always capable of identification, and no instruments
are required to fix it. But it is not without its possible
drawbacks, of which the most familiar is the well-known
geographical fact that in the greatest mountain systems
of the world, for instance, the Himalayas and the Andes,
the water-divide is not identical with the highest crest,
UorM
B 2
20
Frontiers
but is beyond it and at a lower elevation. Another
parent of much controversy is the ambiguous phrase
'foot of the hills', the different interpretations of which
in fixing the Indian Frontier almost produced a rup-
ture between the Indian Government and the late Amir
of Afghanistan.
We now come to the important category of Rivers.
As the creation of nature, in contradistinction to the
creation of man, no Frontiers are more natural. But in
another sense, namely, that which is in accord with the
natural habits of man, rivers are not natural divisions,
because people of the same race are apt to reside
on both banks. Thus the Germans are found living
on both banks of the Upper Danube, and the Slavs
on both banks of the Lower Danube; the Turks or
Tartars live on both banks of the Oxus, though to
the north they are in Russian (i. e. Bokharan) territory
and to the south under Afghanistan; the Indus was
not a natural frontier to the Punjab, because Indian
peoples, as distinct from Pathans or border men,
inhabit the further as well as the nearer bank of the
river. So many of the peoples of Laos lived astride
the Mekong that the French soon found it to be an
impracticable Frontier. The long contest between
America, France, and Great Britain over the Mississippi
valley, arising out of the French policy of shutting in
the United States behind the Alleghanies, and using
the Indians as a barrier between the mountains and
the river, abundantly illustrated the futility of a river
as a permanent boundary. As soon as the Americans
broke through the Alleghanies with railroads there
was no stopping them by the Mississippi or any other
natural Frontier until they reached the sea. In fact the
}
*
Frontiers
21
..
teaching of history is that rivers connect rather than
separate. Strategical reasons have almost invariably
been responsible for their conversion into Frontiers.
As States developed and considerable armies were
required for their defence, the military value of rivers,
in delaying an enemy, and in concentrating defensive
action at certain bridges, or fords, or posts, became
apparent, and in the demarcation of larger kingdoms
and States, they provided a convenient line of division,
everywhere recognizable, and easily capable of defence.
It was for this reason that Augustus selected rivers
-the Rhine and the Danube-as the Frontiers of the
Roman Empire, though strategical considerations soon
tempted the Romans beyond, as the English have been
tempted across the Indus, and the French by other
causes across the Mekong.
Accordingly, the advantages and disadvantages of
rivers as Frontiers may be thus stated. The position
of the river is unmistakable, no survey is required to
identify or describe it, and the crossing-places frequently
admit of fortification. Rivers are lines of division as
a rule very familiar to both parties, and are easily
transferred to a treaty or traced on a map. On the other
hand, they may be attended by serious drawbacks, con-
fronting diplomatists and jurists with intricate problems.
Rivers are liable to shift their courses, particularly in
tropical countries. The vagaries of the Helmund in
Seistan, where it is the boundary between Persia and
Afghanistan, have led to two Boundary Commissions in
thirty years. The precise channel which contains the
Frontier line, the division of islands, very likely new
accretions, in the river-bed, the determination of drinking-
rights or of water-rights in cases where cultivation is only
י
22
Frontiers
effected by means of irrigation from the Frontier river,
the exact identity of the source of a river, if this be
mentioned in a Treaty or Convention, or of its main
affluent, or, in a deltaic region, of its mouth, the provision
required for navigation, police, and fiscal control-all of
these suggest possible difficulties in the acceptance of
a river boundary, particularly in new or tropical countries,
which cannot be ignored. In ancient and civilized
States the procedure to be followed in many of these
cases is regulated by international agreement or by the
Law of Nations. The general principles regarding the
navigation of rivers traversing different States were
indeed embodied in Articles 108-116 of the Final Act
of the Congress of Vienna,¹ and have been applied
by subsequent Agreements to some of the principal
rivers of Europe, Africa, and America.
The last Natural Frontier to which I need here refer
is the wellnigh obsolete barrier created by forests and
marshes and swamps. The various Saxon kingdoms
of England were, for the most part, thus severed from
each other. When Caesar first landed in Britain, the
head quarters of Cassivelaunus, the British leader, were
placed at Verulamium, near St. Albans, which was
surrounded by forests and swamps. Arminius gained
his famous victory over the Roman legions by en-
tangling them in the forests and morasses of West-
phalia, and there is no more poignant picture in history
than the description of Tacitus of those mournful
scenes.² Venice was many times saved from absorption
both by foreign invaders, such as Goths and Huns, and
by jealous neighbours by her cincture of lagoons.
1 Vide Sir E. Hertslet's Map of Europe by Treaty, vol. i. p. 269.
2 Ann. i. 60–71.
Frontiers
23
These, however, as cultivation, settlement, and drainage
have advanced, are disappearing types of Frontier, of
which no more need now be said.
Artificial Frontiers.
From Natural Frontiers I pass to the category of
Artificial Frontiers, by which are meant those boundary
lines which, not being dependent upon natural features
of the earth's surface for their selection, have been
artificially or arbitrarily created by man. These may
be classified as ancient and modern, the distinction
between them-which is one of method only and not of
principle-roughly reflecting the difference between the
requirements of primitive and of civilized peoples.
Primitive society, where not assisted by natural features
in the determination of its limits of occupation or con-
quest, but being nevertheless desirous to protect its
boundaries from external aggression, commonly either
erected a barrier or created a gap. Under one or other
of these headings will be found to fall all the Artificial
Frontiers of the ancient and mediaeval world.
The commonest type of the barrier-frontier was a
palisade or mound or rampart or wall; elsewhere use
might be made of an existing road or canal or ditch. Of
the latter class a familiar illustration is the great Roman
road of Watling Street, in this country, which, by the
Treaty between Alfred and Guthrum, was made the
boundary between the English territories and the Danes.
An early English example of the other type was Offa's
Dyke, the huge earthwork constructed by the Mercian
king of that name (about 780 A.D.) from the mouth
of the Wye to the mouth of the Dee as a Frontier
24
Frontiers
against the Welsh. Palisades have been found as far
apart as the borders of China and Manchuria and of
Manchuria and Korea, and the outskirts of the Roman
dominions beyond the Danube and the Rhine.
Spartianus, in his Life of Hadrian,¹ describes the
palisade erected by that Emperor in the trans-Danubian
section of the Roman Frontier, and the researches
of the German explorers, who in recent years have laid
bare the traces of that remarkable barricade from end
to end, have revealed the existence of split oak trunks,
nine feet high, driven into a deep ditch, and held
together by stout transverse beams.
The palisade or rampart or wall of ancient history
was, however, the commonest illustration of a type of
Frontier that was concerned less with delimitation than
with defence. When the Chinese built the Great Wall
of China, when Hadrian and Antoninus Pius and Severus
raised the double line of fortification between the
Firths of Clyde and Forth, and between the Solway and
the mouth of the Tyne, when the Flavian Emperors
built the Pfahlgraben and other ramparts or walls
between the Rhine and the Danube, when the successors
of Alexander raised a similar barrier in the country to
the east of the Caspian-one and all were not thinking
so much of rounding off the territories of conquests
of the Empire as they were of protecting its Frontiers in
the best manner against the terrible and ever-swelling
menace of the barbarians. Consequently the wall or
barrier was sometimes erected upon the administrative
Frontier, and sometimes far in advance of it. Though
Hadrian's wall was for centuries the effective Frontier of
the Roman dominion in Britain, the Romans yet to some
1 Vit. Hadriani, 12.
Frontiers
25
extent occupied the ground between it and the second
or northern wall, and even beyond the latter. Similarly
the Roman limes in what is now Germany and Austria
advanced or receded, not so much as indicating a
fluctuating movement of the real boundaries of the
Empire, as following the best line of military defence
that was suggested by the exigencies of the time.
Trajan's conquest of Dacia was of course a positive,
though only a temporary, extension of the Empire.
Rudimentary in conception though these structural
barriers may be thought to have been, they were effective.
in the age and against the foes for whom they were
devised. There can be no greater mistake than to
ridicule them as monuments of misdirected effort or of
human vanity. The Great Wall of China, commenced
before the Christian Era and continued at intervals
for 1,700 years, was a genuine palladium to the heart
of the Chinese Empire. Though occasionally circum-
vented and more than once pierced by the nomad
hordes, for centuries it held back the Mongolian Tartars
from Peking, acting as a fiscal barrier for the prevention
of smuggling and the levying of dues, as a police barrier
for the examination of passports and the arrest of
criminals or suspects, and as a military barrier against
hostile invasions or raids. It was even more a line of
trespass than a Frontier. Much the same might be
said of the Roman walls, whether directed against the
Picts and Scots, or against the Marcomanni and
Teutonic tribes. Guarded by fortified posts or forts at
intervals, with watch-towers between, garrisoned in the
early days of the Roman Empire by veterans of the
army, in later times by native auxiliaries, with the great
legionary camps in the rear, they kept the front of the
26
Frontiers
Empire until the ever-mounting crest of the barbarian
torrent burst through defences, which there were no
longer the men or the military spirit to defend. Walls
and ramparts have now passed away as Frontiers of
dominions, just as they are becoming obsolete as
defences of cities. Occasionally in some remote corner
to which the tides of human movement have not pene-
trated, their survivals are found. The Tibetans thought
that they could bar their mountain plateaux to the Indian
army by a stone wall built across a valley. A more
practical and modern analogy has been traced in the
Customs Hedge or Frontier made of thorny bushes
and trees, which until a few years ago was stretched
for 2,500 miles round the territories of British India
to keep out contraband salt from the Native States.¹
But a commoner and more widely diffused type of
ancient Frontier was that of the intermediary or Neutral
Zone. This may be described as a Frontier of separation
in place of contact, a line whose distinguishing feature is
that it possesses breadth as well as length. Sometimes
it was a razed or depopulated or devastated tract of
country; at others a debatable strip between the terri-
tories of rival powers: or, again, a border territory subject
to and defended by one party, though exposed to the
ravages of the other. Between Korea and China there
existed, till beyond the middle of the last century, a broad
uncultivated and uninhabited tract over 5,000 square
¹ Such devices are not unknown in Europe. A few years ago
the smuggling of tobacco, sugar, and salt across the Swiss Frontier
into Italy, where heavy duties are imposed, was so incessant that
the Italian Government fenced off a large portion of the Frontier
with wire netting, the gates of which were fitted with alarm-bells,
and planted along it a cordon of Customs House officers armed
with rifles.
Frontiers
27
miles in extent in which neither people were permitted
to settle under penalty of death (though latterly it began
to be encroached upon by colonists from both sides), and
which became an Alsatia for roving banditti. A more
innocent reproduction of the same idea may still be seen
in the Neutral Ground between the British and Spanish
Lines at Gibraltar. Travellers have reported the exist
ence of the same device for keeping apart the lands of
tribal communities in Central Africa, in the interior
regions of the Soudan, the Congo, and the Niger.
In mediaeval times we see a more developed form of
the same expedient in the Marks or Marches-a part of
the settled policy of Charlemagne and Otto, and generally
of the Frankish and German kings. From these Marks,
intended to safeguard the Frontiers of the Empire from
Slavonic or alien contact, and ruled by Markgrafs or
Margraves, sprang nearly all the kingdoms and States
which afterwards obtained an independent national exist-
ence, until they became either the seats of empires
themselves, as in the case of the Mark of Brandenburg,
or autonomous members of the German Federation. The
same word (already familiar in the Marcomanni or
Marchmen of the days of Antoninus), and in slightly
different forms the same practice, reappear in the
West Saxon kingdom of Mercia, or the March-land,
in the Marches between England and Wales, for five
centuries the scene of bloody conflicts between the
Marcher Lords or delegates of the English kings, and
the Welsh inhabitants; in the title Marquis, springing
from that office; in the Wardens of the Marches, three
on the English and three on the Scottish border, who
watched each other from both sides of the Tweed and
the Cheviots, and interwove a woof of chivalry and high
28
Frontiers
romance into a warp of merciless rapine and savage
deeds; and, finally, in the title of the Merse given to the
Lowland counties on the Scottish side of the border.
I would that I had the time to say something here about
that typical illustration of Frontier character and Frontier
civilization, whose history is written in the battered
castles and peels of the Border, and enshrined in a
literature of inimitable charm.
More pertinent is it to notice that from this ancient
and mediaeval conception of a neutral strip or belt of
severance has sprung the modern idea of a deliberately
neutralized territory, or state, or zone. The object in
both cases is the same, viz. to keep apart two Powers
whose contact might provoke collision: but the modus
operandi is different. Where primitive communities
began by creating a desert in order to prevent occupa-
tion, and then provided for occupation by authorities and
forces specially deputed for the purpose, modern States
construct their buffer by diplomatic conventions, and
seek the accommodating sanction of International Law.
At one end of these devices we are but little removed
from primitive practice. I allude to the arbitrary and
often anomalous creation by modern powers of small
neutral zones, ostensibly with a view of avoiding con-
tact, quite as frequently in order to evade some diplo-
matic difficulty or to furnish material for future claims.
Of such a character was the 25-kilomètre strip on the
right bank of the Mekong created by the Franco-Siamese
Treaty of 1893, nominally owned but not policed by
Siam, containing both authorities and inhabitants whose
connexion lay with the opposite or French bank. Such
a diplomatic fiction could only be a temporary expe-
dient preluding a more effective solution. Similar in
Frontiers
29
character and result were the neutral zone established
by Great Britain and Germany in the Hinterland of the
Gold Coast in 1888, and the petty buffer State which
Lord Rosebery sought to erect in 1893-5 between the
borders of India and of France on the Upper Mekong.
The abortive Agreements of 1894 with King Leopold
and the Congo State were similarly intended to set up
a buffer between the Central African territories of Great
Britain and her European rivals. A yet further illus-
tration would be the Cis-Sutlej strip of territory, into
which, though it belonged to the Sikh rulers, they were
not permitted by treaty to enter with armed force,
and their violation of which led to the Sikh wars. Of
these artificial expedients it may be laid down that they
have no durability, unless they are based upon some
intelligible principle of construction or defined by a
defensible line, and are administered by an authority
capable of preserving order.¹
The history of British, and subsequently of American,
expansion in America affords a significant illustration
of the futility of an artificial buffer. When the British
had conquered Canada and all the territories east of
the Mississippi, George III issued a Proclamation
(Oct., 1763) forbidding settlements beyond the sources
of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic (this was known
as the 'fall line'), reserving the lands beyond the
1 Such a buffer zone still exists in the shape of Wakhan, a
narrow strip of territory only a few miles in width containing the
upper waters of the Oxus as far as its source, which was inter-
posed by the Convention of 1895 between the Pamir Frontier of
Russia and the Hindu Kush Frontier of the Indian Empire. It
can only last so long as the Amir of Afghanistan, to whom it was
handed over, with a special subsidy from Great Britain, fulfils his
undertaking to maintain order.
30
Frontiers
Alleghanies for the Indians, and forbidding settlers to
enter them. At the same time an effort was made
to construct a buffer along the Indian border by the
purchase of Indian lands and the settlement of European
colonists upon them. But the Alleghanies were crossed
almost before the ink on the Proclamation was dry;
and, these once passed, no other physical barrier inter-
vened until the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains,
which retarded, but did not finally impede, the American
advance to the Pacific.¹ The Americans inherited
the British policy, and as they pushed forward kept
steadily thrusting the Indian Frontier backwards by
a series of removals or deportations, the object being
in each case to separate them from contact with the
white man. But the progress of the latter was so rapid
that these artificial Frontiers were continually being
caught up and overlapped, the Indian territories finding
themselves enveloped in the advancing tide. This led
to the 'reservation' system, which continues to this
day, and under which the national existence of the
Indians is only, and that with difficulty, preserved by
the creation of 'enclaves' with arbitrary Frontiers.
Much more is to be said for the buffer State as
commonly understood, i. e. the country possessing a
¹ A curious analogy to the experience of Great Britain in the
East Indies may be observed in the nomenclature of the Frontier.
The old American North West or Frontier of a century ago (Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) is now the middle
region and heart of the United States. Just so in British India,
what were the North-West Provinces seventy years ago have
been swallowed up in the interior, and the title has passed, with
the geographical fact which it represents, to the new North-West
Frontier Province, beyond the Indus, which I was responsible for
creating in 1901.
Frontiers
31
national existence of its own, which is fortified by the
territorial and political guarantee, either of the two
Powers between whose dominions it lies and by whom
it would otherwise inevitably be crushed, or of a number
of great Powers interested in the preservation of the
status quo. The valley of the Menam, which is the
central portion of Siam, has been thus guaranteed by
Great Britain and France; Abyssinia has been guaran-
teed by these two Powers and Italy: in the Agreement
just concluded between Great Britain and Russia about
Central Asia the integrity and independence of Persia
are once more guaranteed by the two great contracting
parties-thereby constituting that country a true buffer
State between their respective dominions: but a new
provision is introduced in which, while rival spheres
of interest, Russian and British, are created on the
north and east respectively, a zone is left between
them of equal opportunity to both Powers. This is
an arrangement wanting both in expediency and per-
manence, the more so as the so-called neutral zone is
carved exclusively out of the regions in which British
interests have hitherto been and ought to remain
supreme. The same Agreement contains a further
novelty in international diplomacy, in the shape of a
neutralizing pledge about Tibet made by two Powers,
one of which is contiguous while the other has no
territorial contact whatever with that country. Tibet
is not a buffer State between Great Britain and Russia;
the sequel of the recent expedition has merely been
to make it again what it had latterly ceased to be,
namely, a Mark or Frontier Protectorate of the Chinese
Empire. There is a second type of buffer State lying
between two great Powers in which the predominant
Uor M
32
Frontiers
political influence is acknowledged to belong to one
of the two and not to the other. Korea, which has
passed under the unchallenged influence of Japan, is
such a buffer State between Japan and China. Afghan-
istan is in the same position between Great Britain and
Russia. Here we have a close analogy to the Mark
system of the Frankish Emperors and to the practice of
the Roman Empire, which sought to protect its Frontiers
by a fringe of dependent kingdoms, or client-states.
In all these cases the buffer State is an expedient
more or less artificial, according to the degree of
stability which its government and institutions may
enjoy, constructed in order to keep apart the Frontiers
of converging Powers. That such an experiment must
necessarily fail is certainly not the teaching of European
history, where it is the marchlands of Empire, Castile,
France, Prussia, that have often fought their way to
greatness and fame. A quite abnormal type of a buffer
State existed in Europe, with slight breaks, for over
1,100 years, in the shape of the Papal Dominions. Its
boundaries were perpetually shifting, and they made no
pretence to represent natural or geographical lines of
division. But they approximately severed the con-
tinental and peninsular portions of Italy, those parts
which have always looked to the West, and those parts
which have constantly been exposed to Hellenic or
Eastern influences.
In Europe, however, buffer States have not as a general
rule been situated between the territories of Powers
possessing superior force and a higher civilization. In
Asia, where the experiment is now more commonly tried,
and where the conditions are less favourable, the degree
of vitality to be expected is less. There the buffer con-
Frontiers
33
ditions are apt to foster intrigue outside, apathy and often
anarchy within; and either partition follows or the
stronger and least scrupulous of the bordering Powers
absorbs the whole. It is unlikely that Korea will per-
manently retain even her present figment of indepen-
dence. The future of Siam, Persia, and Afghanistan
constitutes one of those problems on which speculation
on an occasion like the present would be at once
improper and unwise.
1
Lastly, there are the States, situated entirely in
Europe, which are protected by an International Guaran-
tee. These are, Switzerland neutralized by eight Powers
in 1815, Belgium neutralized by five Powers in 1831,
and Luxemburg neutralized by five Powers in 1867,
the object in each case having been to create a buffer
State between Germany and France.¹ Neutraliza-
tion does not absolutely protect, and has in practice
not protected, these countries from violation: but
it renders aggression less likely by making it an
international issue. The desire to extend a Frontier
at the expense of a neutralized State can, therefore, only
be gratified at a rather expensive price. Whether
Holland, and the Scandinavian kingdoms, can perma-
nently retain their independence without the safeguard
of some such form of guarantee is problematical. The
former has to some extent protected itself by constitut
ing the Hague the seat of an International Tribunal,
which claims to be interested in the preservation of
¹ Greece, which was guaranteed by three Powers, viz. Great
Britain, France, and Russia in 1830, is in a different position. It
is not a buffer State, and the political and territorial guarantee of
the three Powers does not prevent hostilities with any other
Power.
C
34
Frontiers
peace: the latter are temporarily safeguarded by
dynastic alliances. But in both groups lie critical
Frontier issues of the future.
I now proceed to the examination of the commoner
forms of Artificial Frontiers in use among modern States.
These are three in number: (1) what may be described
as the pure astronomical Frontier, following a parallel
of latitude or a meridian of longitude; (2) a mathematical
line connecting two points, the astronomical coordinates.
of which are specified; and (3) a Frontier defined by
reference to some existing and, as a rule, artificial
feature or condition. Their common characteristic is
that they are, as a rule, adopted for purposes of political
convenience, that they are indifferent to physical or
ethnological features, and that they are applied in new
countries where the rights of communities or tribes
have not been stereotyped, and where it is possible to
deal in a rough and ready manner with unexplored and
often uninhabited tracks. They are rarely found in
Europe, or even in Asia, where either long settlement
or conflict has, as a rule, resulted in boundaries of
another type.
(1) The best known illustration of the astronomical.
line is the Frontier between Canada and the United
States, which from the Lake of the Woods follows
the 49th parallel of latitude to the Pacific coast, a dis-
tance of 1,800 miles. This line well illustrates both
the strength and the weakness of the system. As a con-
ventional line through unknown territories it has
answered its purpose. But its demarcation on the spot
was so laborious and protracted that, fifty years after the
conclusion of the Treaty which created it, the joint sur-
veyors were still at work, clearing a strip 100 yards wide
Frontiers
35
through the primaeval forest, and ornamenting it with
iron pillars and cairns, at a cost to both countries which
was enormous. Similar lines have been employed to
define the boundaries of Canada and Alaska, to separate
many of the Australian Colonies from each other, to de-
termine European Spheres of Influence or Protectorates
in Africa, and, quite recently, to define the Russian and
Japanese shares of the island of Saghalin. Such lines are
very tempting to diplomatists, who in the happy irrespon-
sibility of their office-chairs think nothing of intersecting
rivers, lakes, and mountains, or of severing communities
and tribes. But even in the most favourable circum-
stances they require an arduous triangulation on the
spot, and until surveyed, located, and marked out, have
no local or topographical value.
(2) The straight line from point to point is also
a method very popular in America, where it has been
employed in laying down the internal Frontiers of
States, and is in keeping with the mathematical pre-
cision commonly applied to the laying out of cities and
streets. Like the Frontiers of latitude or longitude
this type of boundary is a useful and sometimes an
indispensable expedient; but it possesses no elasticity,
and it is apt to produce absurd and irrational results.
It is said in America that many men reside in one
State and do their business in another, and there is
no reason why so artificial a device should not have
even more inconvenient consequences. The internal
administrative or county boundaries of Great Britain
have been constructed on the opposite principle, and
represent a combination of historical, geographical, and
occasionally ethnological conditions.
(3) Frontiers by reference, i. e. Frontiers defined as
C 2
36
Frontiers
running in a specified direction or for a certain distance,
or as the arc of a circle, or as the tangent to a circle, are
very familiar features in African treaties, where use has
to be made of visible features or landmarks. But they
are a fruitful source of error or misunderstanding, both in
terminology and topography. For instance, the Alaskan
dispute between Canada and the United States turned
upon the meaning of the ambiguous words 'a line
parallel to the windings of the coast which shall never
exceed the distance of ten marine leagues therefrom'.
What was the coast referred to, and what was the
practicability or meaning of a line that scaled inaccessible
peaks and was lost amid ice and eternal snow?
I have now passed in review the various forms of
Frontiers either furnished by nature or created by man,
and have endeavoured to indicate their degrees of
strength or weakness. In practice the tendency of
mankind has been to ignore or override nature, and
in the case of older States to adopt racial or linguistic
or purely political lines of division, in the case of the
partition of new countries to adopt the temporary
or conditional expedients which have been described.
In North America few of the internal boundaries cor-
respond to any natural feature. In South America
where, owing to the configuration and history of the
country, natural boundaries are commoner, there is
scarcely an undisputed Frontier. In Europe, apart
from certain ranges of mountains, (but few rivers),
which being genuine barriers have exercised a per-
manent influence upon the formation of States and the
distribution of men, the boundaries of the majority
of States are purely political, and find their origin in
the events of history; although geographical conditions,
Frontiers
37
>
such as the eligibility of elevated, or sterile, or sparsely
peopled tracts for Frontier purposes, have not been
without influence in their selection. Of political or
historical Frontiers I may mention as illustrations the
Frontiers of Spain and Portugal, of Germany and
Holland, of Germany and Austria, of Russia and
Germany, of France and Germany (except the Vosges),
of France and Belgium, of Belgium and Holland,
of Turkey and Greece. Here and there exists a State
like Switzerland, which accords with no one principle of
national distribution, or Belgium, which infringes them
all. Both are the creations of expediency or of fear.
In Asiatic Frontier delineations tribal boundaries, except
where overridden by political considerations, are apt to
be observed.
Modern Expedients.
In the last quarter of a century, largely owing to
the international scramble for the ownerless or unde-
fended territories of Africa and Asia, fresh develop-
ments have occurred in the expansion of Frontiers, of
which notice must here be taken. The result may be
much the same as in the ruder days of Alexander or
Trajan or Justinian, when there was no sanction beyond
that of might; modern usage, however, evolves with
convenient rapidity a Law of Nations that is held to
justify these more recent manifestations of the centri-
petal tendency of international borders. All the ex-
pedients to which I am about to refer are variations in
differing stages of the doctrine of Protectorates which
has existed from the remotest days of Empire.
Á Protectorate is a plan adopted for extending the
political or strategical as distinct from the administrative
38
Frontiers
Frontier of a country over regions which the protecting
Power is, for whatever reason, unable or unwilling to
seize and hold itself, and, while falling short of the full
rights of property or sovereignty, it carries with it a con-
siderable degree of control over the policy and inter-
national relations of the protected State. It involves
the obligation to defend the latter from external attack,
and to secure the proper treatment of foreign subjects
and property inside it. To what extent it justifies
interference in the internal administration of the State
is a question admitting of no law.
The Roman Empire is the classical illustration of
this policy, though in a somewhat inchoate form,
in the ancient world. In the Western Empire Pro-
tectorates, strictly so called, were not required because
the enemy with whom contact was to be avoided
was the barbarian, formidable not from his organiza-
tion, but from his numbers; and against this danger
purely military barriers, whether in Britain, Gaul,
Germany, or Africa, required to be employed. But
in the East, where the ambitions of Rome for the
first time encountered a rival and civilized Power of
almost equal strength with itself, namely, the Parthian
or Persian Kingdom, the perils of actual contact were
for long delayed by a barrier of protected States, the
majority under the political suzerainty of Rome, some
of them oscillating from one allegiance to another,
according to the degree of pressure applied; the most
important of all, by reason of its physical features
and geographical position, namely, Armenia, having a
career which in its stormy vicissitudes has recalled to
many writers the chequered and fateful experience,
between the rival Powers of Great Britain and Russia,
Frontiers
39
of the buffer kingdom of Afghanistan. The Ottoman
Empire in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, when its fortunes began to decline from their
zenith, adopted an analogous policy of client-states
in the Christian territories of Transylvania, Moldavia,
Wallachia, and Ragusa.
It has been by a policy of Protectorates that the
Indian Empire has for more than a century pursued,
and is still pursuing, its as yet unexhausted advance.
First it surrounded its acquisitions with a belt of Native
States with whom alliances were concluded and treaties
made. The enemy to be feared a century ago was the
Maratha host, and against this danger the Rajput
States and Oude were maintained as a buffer. On the
North-west Frontier, Sind and the Punjab, then under
independent rulers, warded off contact or collision with
Beluchistan and Afghanistan, while the Sutlej States
warded off contact with the Punjab. Gradually, one
after another, these barriers disappeared as the forward
movement began: some were annexed, others were
engulfed in the advancing tide, remaining embedded
like stumps of trees in an avalanche, or left with their
heads above water like islands in a flood. When the
annexation of the Punjab had brought the British
power to the Indus, and of Sind, to the confines of
Beluchistan; when the sale of Kashmir to a protected
chief carried the strategical Frontier into the heart of
the Himalayas; when the successive absorption of
different portions of Burma opened the way to Man-
dalay, a new Frontier problem faced the Indian Govern-
ment, and a new ring of Protectorates was formed.
The culminating point of this policy on the western
side was the signature of the Durand Agreement at
40
Frontiers
Kabul in 1893, by which a line was drawn between the
tribes under British and those under Afghan influence
for the entire distance from Chitral to Seistan, and the
Indian Empire acquired what, as long as Afghanistan
retains an independent existence, is likely to remain
its Frontier of active responsibility. Over many of these
tribes we exercise no jurisdiction, and only the minimum
of control; into the territories of some we have so far
not even penetrated; but they are on the British side of
the dividing line, and cannot be tampered with by any
external Power. My own policy in India was to respect
the internal independence of these tribes, and to find in
their self-interest and employment as Frontier Militia a
guarantee both for the security of our inner or admini-
strative border, and also for the tranquillity of the border
zone itself.
Further to the east and north the chain
of Protectorates is continued in Nepal, Sikkim, and
Bhutan on the extreme north-east the annexation of
Upper Burma has brought to us the heritage of a fringe
of protected States known as the Upper Shan States.
At both extremities of the line the Indian Empire,
now vaster and more populous than has ever before
acknowledged the sway of an Asiatic sovereign, is only
separated from the spheres of two other great European
Powers, Russia and France-the former by the buffer
States of Persia and Afghanistan and the buffer strip of
Wakhan; the latter by the buffer State of Siam, and
the buffer Protectorates of the Shan States. The
anxiety of the three Powers still to keep their Frontiers
apart, in spite of national rapprochements or diplomatic
ententes, is testified by the scrupulous care with which
the integrity of the still intervening States is assured,
and, in the case of this country, by the enormous sums
Frontiers
41
that have been spent by us in fortifying the inde
pendence of Afghanistan. The result in the case of the
Indian Empire is probably without precedent, for it gives
to Great Britain not a single or double but a threefold
Frontier, (1) the administrative border of British India,
(2) the Durand Line, or Frontier of active protection,
(3) the Afghan border, which is the outer or advanced
strategical Frontier.
It may be observed that the policy of Protectorates
which I have described is by no means peculiar even in
modern times to Great Britain, although Great Britain,
owing to the huge and vulnerable bulk of her Empire,
supplies the most impressive modern illustration. The
policy has been equally adopted by Russia and by
France. The Russian scheme of Protectorates includes
Khiva and Bokhara : it aims at Mongolia: it broke down
from the attempt to incorporate Manchuria and Korea.
The French Protectorates in Africa embrace Tunis and
would fain embrace Morocco; in Asia they veil with the
thinnest of disguises the practical absorption of Cambodia
and Annam. Protectorates are also a familiar expedient
in the partition of Africa by European Powers, although
the phrase more commonly applied in those regions is
the less precise definition of a 'sphere of influence'.
With what varied objects these different Protectorates
have been established, sometimes political, sometimes
commercial, sometimes strategic, sometimes a combina-
tion of all these, I have not time here to deal. But three
curious and exceptional cases may be mentioned: that
of the British Somaliland Protectorate, acquired in
order to safeguard the food-supply of Aden (just as the
Roman Protectorate was extended over Egypt, in order
to ensure the corn-supply of Rome), and the British
42
Frontiers
Protectorate of the petty Arab chiefships on the
southern shore of the Persian Gulf, established in order
to prevent slave-raiding on the adjoining seas. The
third case is the anomalous and unprecedented form of
Protectorate declared by the United States of America
in the extreme assertion of the Monroe doctrine over the
Latin States of Central and Southern America. This
Protectorate appears to involve a territorial guarantee
of the States in question against any European Power;
but what measure of internal control or interference it
may be held to justify, no man can say.
Protectorates shade away by imperceptible degrees into
the diplomatic concept now popularly known as Spheres
of Influence. When first this phrase was employed in
the language of diplomacy I do not know, but I doubt
if a more momentous early use of it can be traced than
that in the assurance first given by Count Gortchakoff
to Lord Clarendon in 1869, and often since repeated, that
Afghanistan lay 'completely outside the sphere within
which Russia might be called upon to exercise her
influence'. Since those days Spheres of Influence have
become, notably in Africa, though scarcely less in Asia,
one of the recognized means of extending a Frontier or
of pegging out a potential claim. A Sphere of Influence
is a less developed form than a Protectorate, but it is
more developed than a Sphere of Interest. It implies
a stage at which no exterior Power but one may assert
itself in the territory so described, but in which the
degree of responsibility assumed by the latter may vary
greatly with the needs or temptations of the case. The
native Government is as a rule left undisturbed; indeed
its unabated sovereignty is sometimes specifically re-
affirmed; but commercial exploitation and political
#
Frontiers
43
influence are regarded as the peculiar right of the
interested Power. No body of rules can, however, be
laid down for it is obvious that a Sphere of Influence in
a still independent kingdom like Persia, must be a very
different thing from a Sphere of Influence among the
semi-barbarous tribes of the Bahr-el-Ghazel or the Niger.
Some of the most anxious moments of modern history
have arisen from the vague and grandiose interpretation
given to this claim by modern Powers.¹ Sometimes the
advance has been so rapid that even the inner Frontiers.
of the Sphere of Influence are unknown,2 at others the
claim itself is so vast that it can be supported neither by
reasoning nor by force. At the same time, in an epoch
when the rate of advance has so frequently been in
inverse proportion to the means for effective occupation
or the capacity of military defence, it is probable that on
the whole a pacific influence has been exercised by the
diplomatic recognition of these somewhat anomalous
types, which usually present one very remarkable and
highly characteristic feature-that they are constructed
by European statesmen with the minimum of reference
or deference to the parties prima facie most interested,
namely, the occupants of the sphere itself.
The theory of Hinterland is another modern applica-
tion of the doctrine of Spheres of Influence, resting the
¹ In this connexion may be recalled the arrest of Colonel Young-
husband by a Russian detachment under Colonel Yonoff in 1891
at Bozai Gumbaz on the Upper Oxus, on the ground that he was
trespassing upon the then unknown and undefined Russian Sphere
of Influence in the Pamirs.
2 In 1893 an unfortunate collision, in which European lives were
lost, occurred at Waima in the Hinterland of Sierra Leone between
English and French forces, as to which neither side could state
with certainty in whose sphere the scene of the disaster lay.
44
Frontiers
case for an advance of Frontier on the ground of
territorial continuity. In one sense the doctrine is as
old as humanity itself. Every occupation or conquest
on a coast may be said to carry with it the presumption
to a further inland claim. The Power that occupied
Cairo, or built Calcutta, was thereby committed to an
advance that could not stop at the deltaic region. The
famous controversies between the United States and
Spain as to the boundaries of Louisiana, after the
cession of the latter to America by France in 1803, and
between the United States and Great Britain over the
Oregon Territory, revolved round the question of the
rights conferred by discovery or settlement. At the
Berlin Congress, Bosnia and Herzegovina, though
inhabited by a Slav people, were handed over to Austria
because she already possessed Dalmatia.
But it is, again, for the most part, in Africa, arising out
of the emulous descent upon its coasts of the principal
European Powers, that the doctrine of Hinterland in its
modern aspect has taken formal shape. A double
question arises in the case of such occupations, namely,
how far they may be supposed to extend laterally, and
how far inland. The latter is the Hinterland problem.
It is often held that the inland Frontier should extend
to the water-divide of the rivers debouching within the
line of coast occupation. But any such principle must.
be open to many exceptions: and the actual extent
of Hinterland that is held to belong to any Power
depends, in the main, upon the degree to which it
succeeds in rendering its authority effective in the
interval before it is fixed by international agreement.
A forward step in the regularization of coast occupation
in Africa was taken by the Agreement of the leading
Frontiers
45
Powers in the Berlin Conference of 1885, requiring the
notification of any such action in the future to the
Signatory Powers, in order to enable them to sub-
stantiate any counterclaim of their own, and stipulating
for the effective exercise of authority in the region
concerned. This Agreement only applied to Africa,
nor even there did it cover the interior extension of
Frontiers. But it has not been without influence in
imparting some measure of propriety to proceedings
not everywhere over-imbued with scruple. The most
recent instances in which the Hinterland doctrine has
been before the public have been the dispute between
Great Britain and Venezuela as to the inland boundary;
the provisions by which the Great Powers, when leasing
naval bases on the coast of China, acquired at the same
time an interior zone; and the steps taken a short while
ago to define, by means of an Anglo-Turkish Boundary
Commission, the Hinterland of Aden, where Turkish
troops from the Yemen were constantly encroaching
upon the tribes within the British Protectorate.
The reference to China invites attention to yet
another form of Frontier extension that has found
favour in recent times. This is the grant of Leases, in
order to veil an occupation not as a rule intended to be
temporary. Great Britain has sometimes made use of this
expedient in Native States in India, Quetta, and after-
wards Nushki, having been taken from the Khan of Kelat
on a quit rent in perpetuity. I also, while Viceroy,
negotiated the perpetual Lease of the interior province
of Berar by the Nizam of Hyderabad, though this
was an act exclusively of administrative and financial
convenience, and had nothing to do with exterior
Frontiers. Some of the territories of the Sultan of
46
Frontiers
Zanzibar were leased, first for a term of years and after-
wards in perpetuity, to Great Britain and Germany.
Port Arthur, Wei-Hai-Wei, Kiao Chau, and Kowloon
are cases in which the fiction of a Lease has been
employed to cover what might otherwise appear to have
been a violation of the territorial integrity of China,
Sometimes Leases are granted for commercial purposes.
or as part of a diplomatic bargain. Such has been the
case with the so-called Enclaves, leased by Great Britain.
to King Leopold on the Nile and to France on the
Niger. Experience, though not as yet very old, shows
that the tendency of Leases is, from being temporary
to become permanent, and, in fact, to constitute a
rudimentary form of ulterior possession.
Of these modern expedients the last to be noticed
represents the most shadowy form of the Sphere of
Influence that has yet been devised by the ingenuity of
modern diplomacy. I refer to the promise made by a
weaker Power to a stronger not to alienate by lease,
mortgage, or cession a specified portion of its territories
to any other Power. This does not necessarily, though
it may sometimes, imply the exercise of a Protectorate
by the stronger of the two contracting parties,' but it
tacitly recognizes some sort of reversionary claim on
the part of the latter. At the weakest, it is a sort of
diplomatic manifesto to other Powers of a special degree
of interest entertained by one. Great Britain's desire
to earmark as a potential Sphere of Influence the valley
¹ Undoubtedly in the Persian Gulf the conclusion of such Agree-
ments by the Indian Government with the Trucial Chiefs and with
the Sheikh of Koweit, was tantamount to an assertion of Pro-
tectorate, although in the latter case, by a strange anomaly, the
Protectorate of Turkey was never formally denied.
Frontiers
47
A
of the Yangtsze in China did not proceed beyond this
somewhat impalpable assertion, which was promptly
challenged by Germany. A peculiar feature of these
arrangements is that the ruler or State who gives
the self-denying pledge very often does so under the
minimum of pressure, and sometimes with ill-concealed
delight. The perils or chances of future deprivation
appear to be remote: in the interim his own title to
ownership has been reaffirmed by a great Power, and in
this fact a useful protection may be sought against the
designs or encroachments of other interested parties.
Of all the diplomatic forms or fictions which have
latterly been described, it may be observed that the
uniform tendency is for the weaker to crystallize into
the harder shape. Spheres of Interest tend to become.
Spheres of Influence; temporary Leases to become
perpetual; Spheres of Influence to develop into Pro-
tectorates; Protectorates to be the forerunners of
complete incorporation. The process is not so immoral
as it might at first sight appear; it is in reality an
endeavour, sanctioned by general usage, to introduce
formality and decorum into proceedings which, unless
thus regulated and diffused, might endanger the
peace of nations or too violently shock the conscience
of the world. I know of no more striking illustration
of this tendency than the development of Lord Salis-
bury's Siamese Declaration of January, 1896, by which
the single and uncontested authority of Siam over the
unguaranteed Siamese territory lying outside of the
Menam watershed was specifically affirmed, with Lord
Lansdowne's Declaration of April, 1904, by which this
territory was openly divided into French and British
Spheres of Influence, in which the two Powers mutually
48
Frontiers
conceded to each other liberty of action. Lord Salis-
bury's was the first step: this was the second: and if
at any time there is a third, its approximate character can
be foreseen.
Evidences of Progress.
The recent portions of my lecture may have suggested
the suspicion that modern nations, in the extension of
their Frontiers, are not only not more scrupulous,
but are more crafty in their methods than rulers of
former times. Such would, I think, be a mistaken
impression. About the respective ethical pretensions
of the ancient and modern world I will not here
dispute. But I regard it as incontestable, not merely
that the expedients which I have described make on the
whole for peace rather than for war-which is perhaps
a sufficient vindication of them: but that there has been
a progressive advance, both in the principles and in the
practice of Frontier policy, which has already exercised
a widespread effect, and is of good omen for the future.
Let me, before I conclude, collect the evidences of this
amelioration.
The history which I have narrated shows the immense
increase in the number and diversity of the Frontiers
that have been adopted to protect the possessions
and to control the ambitions of States. The primitive
forms, except where resting upon indestructible natural
features, have nearly everywhere been replaced by
boundaries, the more scientific character of which,
particularly where it rests upon treaty stipulations,
and is sanctified by International Law, is undoubtedly
a preventive of misunderstanding, a check to territorial
cupidity, and an agency of peace.
Frontiers
49
But there has been a much greater and more bene-
ficent advance in the machinery and implements
employed than in the nature or diversity of the Frontiers
chosen. In the first place the idea of a demarcated
Frontier is itself an essentially modern conception, and
finds little or no place in the ancient world. In Asia,
the oldest inhabited continent, there has always been
a strong instinctive aversion to the acceptance of fixed
boundaries, arising partly from the nomadic habits of
the people, partly from the dislike of precise arrange-
ments that is typical of the oriental mind, but more still
from the idea that in the vicissitudes of fortune more is
to be expected from an unsettled than from a settled
Frontier. An eloquent
An eloquent commentary on these pro-
pensities is furnished by the present position of the
Turco-Persian Frontier, which was provided for by
the mediation of Great Britain and Russia in the Treaty
of Erzerum exactly sixty years ago, and was even
defined, after local surveys, by Commissioners of the
two Powers as existing somewhere in a belt of land
from 20 to 40 miles in width stretching from Mount
Ararat to the Persian Gulf. There, unmaterialized
and unknown, it has lurked ever since, both Persia and
still more Turkey finding in these unsettled conditions
an opportunity for improving their position at the
expense of their rival that was too good to be sur-
rendered or curtailed. In Asiatic countries it would be
true to say that demarcation has never taken place
except under European pressure and by the inter-
vention of European agents.
But even in Europe, where fixed boundaries are of
much older standing, it is surprising to note the absence
or inadequacy till recent times of proper arrangements
D
Vor M
'50
Frontiers
for calling them into being. The earliest instance of
a Frontier Commission that I have come across is that
of the Commission of six English and Scotch repre-
sentatives who were appointed in 1222 to mark the
limits of the two kingdoms, and it is symptomatic of
the contemporary attitude about Frontiers that it broke
down directly it set to work, leaving behind it what
became a Debatable Land and a battle-ground of deadly
strife for centuries. Even in the seventeenth-century
treaties, by which the map of Europe was practically
reconstructed, there is no express provision for demarca-
tion. It is not till after the middle of the eighteenth
century that we find Commissioners alluded to in the
text of treaties, and reference made to topographical
inquiries and surveys of engineers. What seems to us
now the first condition of a stable Frontier appears to
have been then regarded as the least important.
Perhaps one reason was that no one expected and few
desired that stability should be predicated of any
political Frontier.
Contrast this with the methods now employed.
Local surveys or reconnaissances, where one or the
other has been found possible, precede the discussions
of statesmen. Small Committees of officials are fre-
quently appointed in advance to consider the geo-
graphical, topographical, and ethnological evidence that
is forthcoming, and to construct a tentative line for
their respective Governments; this, after much debate,
is embodied in a treaty, which provides for the
appointment of Commissioners to demarcate the line
upon the spot and submit it for ratification by the
principals. Geographical knowledge thus precedes or
is made the foundation of the labours of statesmen,
Frontiers
51
instead of supervening at a later date to cover them
with ridicule or reduce their findings to a nullity. I do
not say that absurd mistakes and blunders are not still
committed. I could, if I had the leisure, construct
a notable and melancholy list. But the tendency is
unquestionably in the direction of greater precision
both of knowledge and of language.
Lastly, when the Commissioners reach the locality of
demarcation, a reasonable latitude is commonly conceded
to them in carrying out their responsible task. Provision
is made for necessary departures from the Treaty line,
usually 'on the basis of mutual concession'; tribes or
villages are allowed to use watering places or grazing
grounds across the Frontier, or to choose on which side
of the border they will elect to dwell. Some Treaties
(for instance that between the United States and
Mexico) allow for the pursuit of raiders across the
common Frontier without the creation of a casus belli.
`When the Commissioners have discharged their duty,
not as a rule without heated moments, but amid a flow
of copious hospitality and much champagne, beacons
or pillars or posts are set up along the Frontier, duly
numbered and recorded on a map. The process of
demarcation¹ has in fact become one of expert labour
and painstaking exactitude.
¹ I use the word intentionally as applying to the final stage and
the marking out of the boundary on the spot. Diplomatic agents
and documents habitually confound the meaning of the two words
' delimitation' and 'demarcation', using them as if they were
interchangeable terms. This is not the case. Delimitation signifies
all the earlier processes for determining a boundary, down to and
including its embodiment in a Treaty or Convention. But when
the local Commissioners get to work, it is not delimitation but
demarcation on which they are engaged.
D 2
52
Frontiers
A further development has taken place in the per-
sonality and qualifications of Commissioners. Com-
monly these are carefully selected representatives of
the two Powers directly concerned. Occasionally in
Asia, and almost invariably in Africa, the curious
phenomenon is witnessed, sometimes under Treaty
stipulations, as a rule independently of them, of the
demarcation of boundaries by Commissioners drawn
not from the country directly affected but from the
great Powers between or within whose spheres of
influence it may lie. Thus Great Britain and Russia
determined on their own account the north-west Frontier
of Afghanistan in 1886. Where native agents are ad-
mitted, usually in a subordinate and advisory capacity,
they are apt to interpret their functions as justifying
an exceptional measure of vacillation, obstruction, and
every form of delay. Any one who has had experi-
ence of demarcation on the Frontiers of Persia and
Afghanistan will recall the prodigies that are capable
of being performed in these directions. Sometimes,
after an International Agreement, such as the Treaty
of Berlin, the Frontiers there laid down are demarcated
by European Commissioners, officers of the highest
technical knowledge and repute being nominated by the
several Powers.
All of these marks of progress however, practical and
valuable as they are, shrink into relative insignificance
when compared with the startling change introduced
by the reference of Frontier questions to arbitration by
external individuals or States. This method is the
exclusive creation of the last half-century or less, and
its scope and potentialities are as yet in embryo. Some-
times the reference may be to a Sovereign or jurist
Frontiers
53
of international reputation: the rulers of the more
detached or less powerful States, such as the Kings
of Sweden and Italy or the President of the Swiss
Confederation, being much in request; in one case, that
of Venezuela, the United States were admitted as
amicus curiae, acting on behalf of the smaller State
of which they had assumed the virtual protectorate.
Treaties providing for arbitration in a number of cases
which may embrace Frontiers have been concluded
between several of the leading Powers.
Finally, in the last decade, there has been set up
the International Tribunal of the Hague, which, if its
prestige be maintained and a permanent Court estab-
lished, will probably become in an increasing degree
the referee and arbiter of the Frontier disputes of the
future.
These symptoms, when viewed in combination, will,
I think, be sufficient to justify the claim that progress
in the delimitation of Frontiers is positive and real.
It would be futile to assert that an exact Science of
Frontiers has been or is ever likely to be evolved: for
no one law can possibly apply to all nations or peoples,
to all Governments, all territories, or all climates. The
evolution of Frontiers is perhaps an art rather than
a science, so plastic and malleable are its forms and
manifestations. But the general tendency is forward,
not backward; neither arrogance nor ignorance is any
longer supreme; precedence is given to scientific know-
ledge; ethnological and topographical considerations
are fairly weighed; jurisprudence plays an increasing
part; the conscience of nations is more and more
involved. Thus Frontiers, which have so frequently
and recently been the cause of war, are capable of
54
Frontiers
being converted into the instruments and evidences
of peace.
There are many other branches of the subject upon
which I should like to have dwelt to-day, but which
I have not here the time to examine. Such are the
reciprocal influence of Fortifications upon Frontiers,
and of Frontiers upon Fortifications; the effect upon
Frontiers of modern scientific inventions, such as the
electric telegraph, railroads and tunnels, and munitions
of war; the experience and romance of Frontier Com-
missions. There is also a class of so-called Natural
Frontiers which I have been obliged to omit, as possess-
ing no valid claim to the title, namely those which are
claimed by nations as natural on grounds of ambition,
or expediency, or more often sentiment. The attempt
to realize Frontiers of this type has been responsible
for many of the wars, and some of the most tragical
vicissitudes in history. But its treatment would almost
demand an independent Essay. When I began to write
this lecture I had further contemplated tracing the com-
parative evolution of the Frontiers of all the great Em-
pires in history, giving an exact account of the Indian
Frontier system, at present the most highly organized
in the world, and comparing it point by point with its
ancient counterpart and prototype, the Frontier system
of Rome. These designs must be postponed for a larger
work on the same subject, if the leisure for this be ever
found. Another deferred topic is the engrossing subject
of Border Literature, in which it would, I believe, be
possible to demonstrate a common growth and characteri-
zation in diverse periods and many lands. I should also
like to have analysed the types of manhood thrown up
by Frontier life, savage, chivalrous, desperate, adven-
"
Frontiers
55
turous, alluring. To only one of these allied subjects
will I refer before I conclude, and that is the influence.
of Frontier expansion upon national character, as illus-
trated in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race.
We may observe two very distinct types of this
influence on the eastern and western sides of the
Atlantic. A modern school of historians in America
has devoted itself with patriotic ardour to tracing the
evolution of the national character as determined by its
western march across the continent. In no land and
upon no people are the evidences more plainly stamped.
Not till the mountains were left behind and the
American pioneers began to push across the trackless
plains, did America cease to be English and become
American. In the forests and on the trails of the
Frontier, amid the savagery of conflict, the labour
of reclamation, and the ardours of the chase, the
American nation was born. There that wonderful and
virile democracy, imbued with the courage and tenacity,
of its forefathers, but fired with an eager and passionate
exaltation, sprang into being. The panorama of
characters and incidents, already becoming ancient
history, passes in vivid procession before our eyes.
First comes the trapper and the fur trader tracking his
way into the Indian hunting-grounds and the virgin,
sanctuaries of animal life. Then the backwoodsman
clears away the forests and plants his log hut in the
clearings. There follow him in swift succession the
rancher with his live-stock, the miner with his pick, the
farmer with plough and seeds, and finally the urban
dweller, the manufacturer, and the artisan. On the top
of the advancing wave floats a scum of rascality that is
ultimately deposited in the mining camps of California
56
Frontiers
and the gambling dens of the Pacific Coast. Scenes of
violence and carnage, the noise of fire-arms, and the
bleaching bones of men, mark the advance. The voice
of the backwoods-preacher sounds through the tumult
in accents of mingled ecstasy and rebuke. But from this'
tempestuous cauldron of human passion and privation,'
a new character, earnest, restless, exuberant, self-confi-
dent, emerged; here an Andrew Jackson, there an
Abraham Lincoln, flamed across the stage; and into
this noble heritage of achievement and suffering, the
entire nation, purified and united in its search for the
Frontier, both of its occupation and its manhood, has
proudly entered
Now let us turn to the other side of the world, where
on a widely different arena, but amid kindred travail, the
British Empire may be seen shaping the British charac-
ter, while the British character is still building the
British Empire. There, too, on the manifold Frontiers
of dominion, now amid the gaunt highlands of the
Indian border, or the eternal snows of the Himalayas,
now on the parched sands of Persia or Arabia, now
in the equatorial swamps and forests of Africa, in
an incessant struggle with nature and man, has been
found a corresponding discipline for the men of our
stock. Outside of the English Universities no school
of character exists to compare with the Frontier; and
character is there moulded, not by attrition with fellow
men in the arts or studies of peace, but in the furnace of
responsibility and on the anvil of self-reliance. Along
many a thousand miles of remote border are to be found
our twentieth-century Marcher Lords. The breath, of
the Frontier has entered into their nostrils and infused
their being. Courage and conciliation-for unless they
r
Frontiers
57
have an instinctive gift of sympathy with the native
tribes, they will hardly succeed-patience and tact,
initiative and self-restraint, these are the complex
qualifications of the modern school of pioneers. To
these attainments should be added-for the ideal Frontier
officer-a taste for languages, some scientific training,
and a powerful physique. The work, which he may
be called upon to perform, may be that of the explorer
or the administrator or the military commander, or all
of them at the same time. The soldier, perhaps more
often than the civilian, furnishes this type; and it is on
the Frontier that many of the greatest military reputa-
tions have been made. The Frontier officer takes his
life in his hands; for there may await him either the
knife of the Pathan fanatic, or the more deadly fevers.
of the African swamp. But the risk is the last thing
of which he takes account. He feels that the honour
of his country is in his hands. I am one of those who
hold that in this larger atmosphere, on the outskirts of
Empire, where the machine is relatively impotent and
the individual is strong, is to be found an ennobling and
invigorating stimulus for our youth, saving them alike
from the corroding ease and the morbid excitements of
Western civilization. To our ancient Universities,
revivified and reinspired, I look to play their part in this
national service. Still from the cloistered alleys and
the hallowed groves of Oxford, true to her old traditions,
but widened in her activities and scope, let there come
forth the invincible spirit and the unexhausted moral
fibre of our race. Let the advance guard of Empire
march forth, strong in the faith of their ancestors,
imbued with a sober virtue, and above all, on fire
with a definite purpose. The Empire calls, as loudly
58
Frontiers
as it ever did, for serious instruments of serious work.
The Frontiers of Empire continue to beckon. May
this venerable and glorious institution, the nursery of
character and the home of loyal deeds, never fail in
honouring that august summons.
OXFORD
PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
BY HORACE HART, M.A.
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

A
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3 9015 00364 2413

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