ABSTRACT
Interest continued to focus on the route to India whenever Egyptian troops and Russian, Turkish, and French intrigues combined to foment difficulties of any sort. English appreciation for the Pasha's courtesy in maintaining the overland route during the whole period of the political crisis, while conspicuously absent from official correspondence, was nevertheless shown by many private concerns after the affair had been settled. As one expression of the attitude held by the English mercantile interests, a committee was formed in London in 1842 for striking a gold subscription medal to Mehemet Ali. British army officers who had made their way through Afghanistan as far as the frontiers of Russia a few years earlier insisted that it was highly improbable that a Russian army could have successfully invaded India because of the difficulty of depending on such a long line of communications.
