The extension of Russian influence in Afghanistan has been rather in the direction of a growth of prestige and of respect for a country which had swallowed up half Asia. Megalomania is a more common failing among peoples of primitive civilisation than is imagined; and Russia has impressed the imagination of the Afghan, who has been unable to appreciate the solid but less showy work of consolidation going on in British India. Despite the sternness of her government in many respects, religious tolerance of the widest sort has been the rule in her conquered territories; but in the Khanates she has won the allegiance of the religious world by a judicious method of putting a premium on the proper observance of rites which the Central Asiatic, a lax Mohammedan, is inclined to neglect. The most dangerous feature in the situation, and one that keeps Indian frontier officials for ever on the alert, is the possibility that some fanatic in the mountains may at any time set alight the embers of a 'holy war,' and may raise the battle-cry of Mohammed, which in old times led so many conquering tribes down to the plains of India. Fortunately, the modern civilisation which comes with railway lines and electric light is creeping slowly through the ancient empire of Timur in the wake of Russian advance; and the commercial spirit of the Central Asiatic, stimulated by these agencies, will probably triumph over superstition and warlike tendencies, so that it may reach in time even the rugged mountaineers of Afghanistan.

With the future of Central Asia this article is not concerned. Its fate is bound up with that of great nations; and its peoples have no longer an independent existence. We have briefly traced some of the phases of its history, and indicated the relations between its several parts and their place in the problems of to-day. Our chief aim, however, has been to set before our readers the work done by travellers, explorers, and students in completing our knowledge of a region still fascinating because it is still mysterious.

Art. X.-RUSSIA AND JAPAN.

1. Russian Affairs. By Geoffrey Drage. London: Murray, 1904.

2. Korea. By Angus Hamilton. London: Heinemann, 1904.

3. Manchuria and Korea. By H. J. Whigham. London: Isbister, 1904.

4. Li Hung Chang. By Mrs Archibald Little. London : Cassell, 1904.

5. The Expansion of Russia. By F. H. Skrine. Second edition. Cambridge: University Press, 1903.

6. Correspondence respecting China. Presented to Parliament 1887-1904.

And other works.

THE late Mr David Urquhart's portentous picture of the Russian ogre pursuing a deliberate scheme of worlddominion with an aggressiveness and diplomatic subtlety alike miraculous, has long passed into one of those popular superstitions which acquire almost the force of a creed. For the average Western intelligence, accustomed to watch the prosaic workings of the political machine as they are presented day by day in parliamentary debates and blue-books, there is something uncanny in the hidden power which directs the onward movements of the Russian people. The personal element at the back of it, with its disenchanting routine, its cross purposes, its hesitations, its mistakes, is invisible. The same mysterious silence leaves neglected opportunities unarraigned and errors of action unavowed. All that is apparent is the net result of the expansive energy of a great nation, its natural impressiveness unimpaired by vulgar details of how that result is attained.

More or less consciously Mr Urquhart's convenient hypothesis is the starting-point of a very large body of English thought in its attitude towards the present crisis in the Far East. It seems, indeed, to find a triumphant justification in the imposing magnitude of the very task on which Russia is now engaged. If the postulate of the congenital and abnormal earth-gluttony of the Muscovite seemed requisite to explain the invasions of Turkey, the encroachments on Persia, and the successive annexations

of the Central Asian Khanates, how much more necessary is it to account for the menacing appearance of the legions of the Tsar on the far away Yalu, at the end of a colossal chain of colonies and dependencies which girdle the north of Asia and reach half-way across Europe! It is, however, a misfortune that this should be the case; for, although no doubt heavy blame attaches to Russia in respect of the conflagration that has been lighted in the Far East, the postulate in question involves a fundamental misconception, historically false and morally unjust, which is calculated to add seriously to the far-reaching perils of the crisis.

How superficial are the observations on which this assumption rests may be seen from the fact that those who hold it never dream of attributing to Japan an appetite comparable to that of Russia. The contrast of the immense expanse of Greater Russia with the relatively small acquisitions of Japan in the Eastern Sea is apparently enough to stamp such an idea as preposterous. And yet such contrasts are not so much a matter of appetite as of opportunity. There is a certain energy in almost all highly civilised races which, under favourable conditions, invariably makes for territorial expansion; and there is no reason for believing that the expansive energy of the Japanese is one whit less intense than that of the Russians. We have abundant proof to the contrary in the colonies founded in southern Korea at an early date, and in the many attempts to conquer that country with which Japanese mediæval history is filled. The expansive energy of the Japanese on its political side was not fully liberated until the revolution of 1868; and then it had to equip itself with Western appliances and methods before it could hope to take part in the scramble for Asia with any chance of success. Germany was not in a position to employ its expansive energies until three years later; and the record of the Japanese-the Kuriles, the Loo-Choo Islands, the Pescadores, and Formosa, together with the bold attempt to appropriate the Liao-tung peninsula after the great war with China-may well stand by the side of the colonial achievements of Prince Bismarck. There can

be little doubt that, if the Japanese revolution had taken place a century earlier, it would not have been on the

Yalu but probably on the Yenisei that the struggle with Russia for the hegemony of Eastern Asia would have been fought out.

Not only is there no real difference between the earthappetite of the Muscovite and that of other great colonising nations, but there is also nothing in the policy which has enabled it to achieve such stupendous things that differentiates it in any essential way from the motives and methods of rival empire builders. The enormous expansion of the Russian dominion and the rapidity of its advance have been mainly due not so much to conscious statesmanship as to ethnological and geographical conditions. The vast scene of that expansion is a prolongation of the mère patrie generally analogous to it in physical features, and peopled with races with whom the Russian colonists easily establish terms of sociability if not of assimilation. In these circumstances Russian colonisation was a comparatively natural and rapid process, and the political consolidation of the conquests thus affected was correspondingly accelerated.

Nevertheless, the policy of the Government has been distinctly opportunist. For the most part Siberia, as far as Kamchatka, was conquered without plan, and at a time when the Tsars were preoccupied with Poland and the Near East. When the subjugation of Poland and the impasse of the Crimean War turned the political aspirations of the nation towards Central Asia, the aim of Russian statesmanship was less conquest than the discovery of a defensive frontier. As we have found in India and Africa, the establishment of such a frontier is a matter of reciprocity. Where the contracting parties are, on the one hand, a highly organised state and, on the other, weak Sultanates unable to guarantee the execution of their international obligations, there can be no real reciprocity; and consequently further conquest becomes inevitable unless established colonies are to be for ever abandoned. Nevertheless, the Government at St Petersburg frequently turned a deaf ear to the appeals of the commercial classes for energetic action; and not a few conquests were made by daring generals in defiance of orders to the contrary from headquarters. This was roughly the history of the Russian advance in Central Asia until about ten years ago.

In the Far East Russian policy has been still more strikingly opportunist. But for the Crimean War the Anglo-French campaigns against China in 1858-60, and the Afghan crisis of 1885, there can be little doubt that the Russians would not be to-day on the Yalu. In 1858, when China was at the mercy of the allies, Russia seized the opportunity to extort from her the Treaty of Aigun, by which she acquired the territories north of the Amur. So little, however, had this step been dreamed of ten years previously that when, in 1849, Admiral Nevelskoy proposed only to explore the mouth of the Amur, Count Nesselrode vetoed the scheme as likely to lead to political complications. A year later Count Muravieff's project for the annexation of the Amur was unanimously rejected by a committee of ministers which examined it under the presidency of the Tsar Nicholas. It was even resolved to dismantle the fort at Nikolaievsk, founded by Nevelskoy and destined to become the capital of the Amur province, together with other illegal settlements.*

This timorous policy was reversed, not by any native jingoism, but by the exigencies of the Crimean War. Only a few of the Amur ports had been evacuated when the war broke out; and it became necessary to send supplies to the others as well as to the small Russian squadron in the Sea of Okhotsk, then threatened by an Anglo-French squadron under Admiral Price. The only feasible plan was to carry the provisions down the Amur; and this was done by Muravieff without the permission of China. The squadron was successfully victualled, and the settlements were effectively defended. The need of the Amur and also of a good port in the Far East having been thus demonstrated, the Treaty of Aigun was only a question of opportunity. It was, however, soon found that the Amur was not enough, that the fertility of the annexed territory had been exaggerated, that Castries Bay was not the ideal harbour it had been pictured, and that the whole colony was costing far more than it was worth. Again there was talk of evacuation; but in the nick of time the Powers came once more to the aid of Russia. War had been resumed by the allies against

* Vera Vend, 'L'Amiral Nevelskoy,' pp. 39-40, 65, 69–72, 83, 84, 88-89. † Ib. pp. 212, 213, 217-220; Ravenstein, The Russians on the Amur, pp. 117 et seq.