Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/11

 Greeks, and though the Turks were reduced by the second campaign to complete helplessness, not an acre of land in Europe was demanded as the price of peace.

It is mainly the more recent advances of Russia in central Asia that have excited the attention of Europe and the suspicions of England. Yet nothing can be more natural than these advances, and England is the country which ought best to understand this, since the causes are almost exactly the same as those which drew us on from conquest to conquest till we became masters of India; or as those which have similarly drawn on the French in Algeria, and the Americans over the land they had reserved for the Indian tribes. A civilized state with semi-civilized states or predatory nomad races on its frontiers cannot stop where it will. With the former it makes treaties; the treaties are broken; it is obliged to punish, and can often only punish by annexing, or by assuming a protectorate which comes to almost the same thing as annexation. With the latter no treaty can be made, and the civilized power must therefore protect its borders by stationing troops along them, and must chastise every inroad by pursuing the marauders on their homeward way, perhaps for great distances. This is found so expensive and troublesome that a regular expedition is undertaken; the offending tribe is defeated, and to prevent fresh irruptions forts are erected and garrisons stationed in its country, which thus becomes reduced to submission. This advance involves a contact with fresh tribes, who molest the peaceable natives or the civilized settlers by their inroads; and the same process is repeated, the line of outposts always moving forward, and the line of settled subject country following it. In some such way as this has the frontier of Russia advanced from the river Ural to the banks of the upper Oxus and the Thian-shan Mountains, One of the most distinguished officers in the Russian service, a man whose veracity no one could dream of questioning, assured me that the archives of the war office at St. Petersburg were full of directions to the generals commanding on the Turkoman steppes, forbidding them to engage in fresh wars or annex fresh territory; but that the nature of things had been too strong for the war office, and had carried the Cossack outposts steadily forward. Something, I think, must also be allowed for the desire of the frontier generals to find occupation for their troops, and to distinguish themselves by conquest, just as Cæsar advanced against the will of the senate, and our Indian generals or statesmen in spite of the East India Company. And it is no doubt also true that the extension of territory has been regarded with a certain pleasure by the unthinking majority of the Russian people, more particularly by the army, everywhere the home of chauvinism. But one may well believe that the government has not desired, much less designed, these advances, for they bring nothing but expense and responsibility. Turkestan is a poor country, quite unable to pay the expense of managing it; the central Asian trade which it opens up is of no great consequence, so thinly peopled are all these countries; and in case of a European war the necessity of wasting troops in this remote corner of the empire might be seriously felt.

That Russia, finding herself at the north foot of the Hindoo Koosh (which she may probably reach before long), would in the event of a war with England use her position there to annoy us by stirring up the Afghans or hill tribes of the Punjab frontier, or even by intriguing with the native princes of India itself, is probable enough. But it is quite another thing to fancy, as so many people in England do, that she is going to the Hindoo Koosh for that express purpose. Had she wished either to menace India or to increase her Asiatic dominions by war, there was, there still is, another course open to her. That course, not more costly in the first instance, and far more profitable in the long run, is to annex Persia, a country with no army, no fleet, and hardly any government, a country of great natural resources, with a splendid geographical position between the Caspian and the Indian Ocean, inhabited by a population far less warlike and fanatical than the Turkomans, industrious and settled, 