To consider the military obligations comprised under (b) it is necessary to carefully consider the principles recently laid down by the Prime Minister, in an answer given to a question in Parliament on March 7 last, as follows:
'The governing considerations which, as it seems to us, ought to determine the number of troops to be maintained depend not so much on considerations affecting Home Defence as upon the claims which colonial, and still more Indian, needs may make upon our military resources.'
The North-West Frontier of India.—One of the most important lessons taught us by the recent war is the comparative ease and relative simplicity with which Russia massed and maintained a vast field army of not less than 600,000 men at the end of 6,000 miles of a single line of railway. An authorized statement was recently published to the effect that 775,000 of all ranks had been sent to Kharbin since the beginning of the war. This number added to the troops already in Manchuria makes, says the well-informed Times correspondent in St. Petersburg, an aggregate of not less than 820,000 men (Times, March 26, 1905). If Russia can place so large an army in the field at such a distance from its base, and can maintain it effective for so long a period by only a single line of railway, what could she not effect in Afghanistan with two lines of completed railway, and with a far less distant base? Our requirements for the defence of our North-West Frontier, at a modest calculation, can not be estimated under such circumstances at less than 500,000 men. Towards this number India can only at present provide, exclusive of Imperial Service troops, a total field army of 139,000 men (Military Member, Indian Council, Times, March 30, 1905).
The Southern Frontier of Canada.—It is customary to forget the treaty obligations, apart from sentiment, which we have accepted in holding inviolate the 3,500 miles of the Southern Frontier of Canada. Nine years
