BY SIR HAMILTON GRANT

K.C.S.I., K.C.I.E.; Chief Commissioner, North-West Frontier Province,
India; Deputy Commissioner of various Frontier districts; Secretary to
Frontier Administration; Foreign Secretary, 1914-19; negotiated Peace
Treaty with Afghanistan, 1919.


Sir Hamilton Grant said:--I have been asked to address you on the
subject of India, that vast, heterogeneous continent, with its varied
races, its Babel of languages, its contending creeds. There are many
directions in which one might approach so immense a topic, presenting,
as it does, all manner of problems, historical, ethnological,
linguistic, scientific, political, economic, and strategic. I do not
propose, however, to attempt to give you any general survey of those
questions, or to offer you in tabloid form a resumé of the matters that
concern the government of India. I propose to confine my remarks to two
main questions which appear to be of paramount importance at the present
time, and which, I believe, will be of interest to those here present
to-day, namely, the problems of the North-West Frontier, and the
question of internal political unrest.

Let me deal first with the North-West Frontier. As very few schoolboys
know, we have here a dual boundary--an inner and an outer line. The
inner line is the boundary of the settled districts of the North-West
Frontier Province, the boundary, in fact, of British India proper, and
is known as the Administrative border. The outer line is the boundary
between the Indian Empire and Afghanistan, and is commonly known as the
Durand line, because it was settled by Sir Mortimer Durand and his