ryside with fire and sword. We may observe,
in this instance, how shifting and indeterminate was the exact
frontier line between the two kingdoms, and how the local fighting,
the inroads from one side or the other, did not necessarily involve a
rupture of their formal relations. The wardens on each side executed
rough justice upon marauding clans; they wasted and slaughtered in
reprisal for raids; the great nobles engaged in a kind of private
warfare; but all this might go on without embroiling the two
governments in a national war. On the western English border the Welsh
hillmen kept the neighbouring counties in continual alarm; and their
chiefs played an important part in the civil wars and rebellions of
England. They were at last quieted by Edward I., who succeeded in
subduing Wales though he failed in Scotland. Lastly, though the union
of the two kingdoms brought peace to the Anglo-Scottish border, the
Highland line along the Forth river still kept up, though in a much
less serious degree, the troubles of a regular government in contact
with restless tribes. Nor was it until the middle of the eighteenth
century that these relics of an archaic condition of society, which
had long ago disappeared in other parts of western Europe, were
finally effaced in Great Britain. Long afterwards, in the nineteenth
century, when the conquest of the Punjab carried the north-western
frontier of British India up to the slopes of the Afghan mountains,
the scene of perpetual strife between a strong settled administration
and turbulent borderers which had passed away on the Tweed or the
Forth, and on the Welsh Marches, reappeared in the districts beyond
the Indus.

To Englishmen, therefore, whose experience of this situation is long,
varied, and actual, Mr. Baddeley's book on the Russians in the
Caucasus should be of exceptional interest. It is indeed well worth
studying by those upon whom, whether at home or in India, has been
imposed the arduous duty of superintending our policy in dealing with
the Afghan tribes for the protection of our Indian districts. It is
true that the conditions and circumstances, military and political,
under which Russia prosecuted her long war with the Caucasian
mountaineers, rendered her position in many respects different from
that in which the English found themselves when they first came into
contact with Afghanistan, and which has changed very little in the
course of sixty years. The aims and purposes