ading: _COMMUNICATION WITH INDIA._]

About the same time the question of a shorter route to India attracted
much attention both in Russia and in England. The first project was
that, ultimately adopted, of a sea passage by Malta to Alexandria, a
land transit across Egypt to Suez, and a second voyage by the Red Sea to
Indian ports. The alternative line was more properly described as an
"overland route," since it was proposed to make the journey from some
port in the eastern Levant across Syria and by the Euphrates to the
Persian Gulf. Colonel Chesney was sent out in 1835 as the pioneer of an
expedition by this route, and parliament twice voted money for its
development, but it was vigorously opposed by Russia, and abandoned as
impracticable owing to physical difficulties in navigating the
Euphrates, then considered as a necessary channel of communication with
the sea. The scheme has since been revived on a much grander scale in
the form of a projected railway traversing Asia Minor to Baghdad, and
running down the valley of the Tigris. In the meantime, the Red Sea
route, at first discredited, has far more than justified the hopes of
its promoters. With the aid of steam-vessels, since 1845, and of the
Suez Canal, since 1869, it has reduced the journey to India from a
period of four months to one of three weeks, and profoundly affected its
relations with Great Britain.

It would be well if the premature, but not unfounded, fear of Russian
invasion had produced no further effects on Anglo-Indian policy.
Unhappily, those who justly perceived the importance of Afghanistan, as
lying between Persia and the Punjab, were possessed with the delusion
that it would prove a more solid buffer as a British dependency than as
an independent state. In their ignorance of its internal condition and
the sentiments of its unruly tribes, the Indian government despatched
Sir Alexander Burnes to Kabul, nominally as a commercial emissary, but
not without ulterior objects. They could not have chosen a more capable
agent, for he added to a knowledge of several languages a minute
geographical acquaintance with Central Asia and an insight into the
character of its inhabitants which probably no other Englishman
possessed. He was to proceed by way of Sind to Peshawar, and in passing
through Sind he received news of the siege of Herat, the significance
of which he was not slow to appreciate. Thenceforward his mission
inevitably assumed a political compl