Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/554

550 have been shown to be quite as worthless as Russia's own professions on the subject. And this is not all. They have consistently sought to mislead the British public as to the position and aims of Russia in Asia – have, successfully for the most part, endeavoured to frustrate all attempts to induce the Government to get Russia to specify a definite limit to her encroachments – and have misrepresented the warnings of those statesmen who distinctly foretold what must ensue, as the utterances of Chauvinists wishing to provoke a quarrel with a friendly Power whose mission it was to divide with ourselves the task of civilising Asia. Should a rupture ensue from the present collision on the Afghan frontier, the preachers of "masterly inactivity," and the Liberal Government, that has always been a servile promoter of their doctrines, will be, in reality, more to blame than Russian generals or Russian diplomatists.

Looking back from our present stand-point face to face with the Russian outposts in the Murghab and Heri-Rud valleys, we may well wonder how, in the face of patent facts, a policy of "masterly inactivity" ever for a moment obtained a hearing. From 1863 down to the present time, Russia's career has been one uninterrupted progress; and she has utilised the occasions when a halt has been called for an explanation of her intentions, to consolidate her conquests and to prepare for the next spring. In the course of eleven years she covered the vast country between the Jaxartes and the Oxus, either wholly reducing it to Russian territory, or leaving it under the nominal government of native rulers who are mere puppets in the hands of the Czar's military commanders. In 1863 her southern frontier was the line of the lower Jaxartes and the Chu river to Issik Kul Lake. She seized on Tashkend in 1865, reduced Bokhara to vassalage in 1867, entered Samarcand in 1868, and annexed Khiva in 1873. The flagrant violation of her pledges in the case of Khiva, and the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war, forced her for a while to pause in her aggressions; but no sooner were her arms set free in Europe than she began a new advance, this time by the Attrek Valley, which was to lead her direct to the Afghan border, and thus bring to a direct issue the question how long the forbearance of Britain would last.

In reality her conquests in the khanates were of little consequence compared with this last encroachment, which was planned, and to some extent carried out, by the genius of Skobeleff. Until the Turkoman tribes lying to the south of the Oxus were as completely broken to her yoke as the Khirgiz and Usbegs on the other side, her power must always be more or less subject to disturbance. When the Turkomans were reduced, there would lie no further obstruction to a junction between her armies of Turkistan and of the Caucasus. When the news of Skobeleff's victory at Geok Teppe, and of the occupation of Askabad which speedily followed, showed that the way lay open to Merv and Sarakhs, it was surely high time for Britain to bethink herself of what the next step must be. When the Russians in 1863 commenced to move from Fort Kasala on the Jaxartes, the British Government began to entertain suspicions as to their ultimate destination – although then a distance of 1682 miles, much of it desert, and all of it difficult, separated them from our frontier; but now that at Sarakhs she is little more than 700 miles from Quetta,