492 THE BRITISH DOMINION IN ASIA

border-line, that is, by interposing some protected state between real territories and the power beyond them whose approach seemed to threaten our security. But the result of this manoeuvre has too often been to accel- erate our own extension, because we have eventually found ourselves forced to advance up to any line that rivals could not be permitted to overstep. Nor can anything illustrate more signally the radical and inherent mutability, and the accidental and elastic char- acter of all territorial and political settlements in Asia, than the fact that at this moment England's statesmen are still in quest of that promised borderland whose margin seems to fade for ever as we follow it. The object of this short and inadequate survey of the steps by which the English have mounted to as- cendency in India has been to explain the combination of determining causes and events, in Europe as well as in Asia, that have placed England in possession of her Asiatic dominion. The explanation is, in the pres- ent writer's opinion, not difficult; it can be elicited from an attentive comparative study of the course of history in Asia and Europe during the last three cen- turies. The dominant fact as regards England may be said to be this that as she has been preserved by the surrounding sea from the invasions, foreign wars, and revolutions that have interrupted the commercial and colonial enterprises of the Continental nations, she has been able to develop a vast mercantile system and to maintain a preponderance of naval power. Yet although we can trace backward the sequence