of their value, either on account of their intrinsic magnitude, or in their relation to the safety of India.
The Gates of the Red Sea.
Aden, which, for administrative purposes, is actually attached to the Bombay Presidency, needs only cursory mention. Its great fortified harbour, commanding the southern approach to the Red Sea, with the island of Perim right in the middle of the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and Sokotra Island off the Horn of Africa, forms, as it were, one of the outer gates of India which we are bound to retain under our control for the protection of the shortest and most important sea-route from the Metropolis to our great Indian dependency, as well as to the Far East and to our Australasian Colonies. Moreover, owing to their insular or quasi-insular position, these possessions lie almost beyond the reach of the disturbing influences at work in other parts of the Asiatic continent. Aden, of course, is situated on the mainland of Asia, but in so remote a comer of the Arabian peninsula that the troubles which arise from time to time with neighbouring tribes of Arabs, or even with Turkey when the Porte elects to extend to them its dubious protection and assert its somewhat shadowy rights of sovereignty in those regions, may be regarded merely as unpleasant incidents of little more than local importance.
The Persian Gulf.
Until a few years ago our position in the Persian Gulf might have seemed equally unassailable. At the cost of no small sacrifices of blood and treasure we had in the course of the nineteenth century restored peace and security to its waters, over which, until we began to show our flag, wholesale piracy had for generations run riot We had gradually taught the turbulent chiefs of the littoral to exchange their hereditary pursuits of slave-raiding and buccaneering for the less exciting, but
