on the existing British frontier, between Russia and Great Britain. These are (1), the enormous influence gained by the former over Persia; (2) the employment as the vanguard of her armies of the conquered Turkomans.

With respect to the first I shall again quote from the same competent authority, to whose warnings in May of last year the country turned a deaf ear. "Next to her resources for a campaign," said Sir Edward Hamley on that occasion, "Russia's relations with Persia are of prime importance." Describing then the various phases of the attitude of Persia towards Russia between 1876 and 1880, Sir Edward thus continued: "But, in the following year, after Skobeleff had established himself at Bámi, a remarkable change occurred in the attitude of Persia. Ostensible orders to the contrary notwithstanding, he was allowed to procure vast supplies of provisions from Khorásán; and when, after the capture of Geok Tepé, he marched beyond Askabad in pursuit, he was allowed to violate Persian territory without remonstrance, and the Turkomans who escaped into what they supposed to be the neutral territory of Persia were handed over as prisoners to the Russians. In fact how can Persia, without the strongest support, resist such a neighbour? The Russian border is co-terminous with hers from Mount Ararat to beyond Askabad. The fleet on the Caspian and the new railway give Russia the means of invading at a hundred points the bordering territory, furnishing a hundred good reasons why Persia could no more oppose the will of Russia than the mere human being of her own tales could oppose the tremendous spirit who rose in clouds from the sea, or descended on over-shadowing wings from the sky." Information which has been received since the lecture from which this passage is quoted was delivered, and since the Russian advances to Merv and Sarakhs, therein foreshadowed, have

become accomplished facts, goes to prove that at the present moment Persia is an inert mass to be moulded at will by her powerful neighbour.

The second advantage I have referred to-the incorporation of the Turkoman cavalry in the Russian army has been also already accomplished. The rule of terror, always an initial factor with Russia when dealing with Oriental races, did its work, as I have already said, at Geok Tepé. That crushing defeat and the unsparing manner with which it was followed, broke the free spirit of the desert-born warriors. Recognizing in their subduers their masters, they accepted their fate, and they are now ready to forage, to fight, and to plunder for the successors to the empire of Nadir Shah !

I return from this digression-a digression necessary to display the great results obtained by Russia from Skobeleff's triumph at Geok Tepé-to describe the further progress made in the Transcaspian line of conquest. I left the Russian army pursuing the Turkomans as far as Askabad, only 388 miles from Herát. I propose now to describe their further progress since that date.

The victory of Geok Tepé had subdued for ever, a very important tribe of the Turkomans, the Akhal Tekkes. But there were other tribes scarcely less formidable. These were the Sarik Turkomans, numbering 65,000 souls, lying along the Murgháb river between Merv and Herát; the Tejend Turkomans, occupying the country watered by the river of that name to within thirty miles of Sarakhs; and the Merv Tekkes or the tribe which pastured its herds round about Merv. All these tribes were to be absorbed.

The turn of the Tejend Turkomans came first. Terrified by the defeat of their brethren at Geok Tepé and its consequences, they offered, almost on the morrow of the victory, their submission to the conquerors. That submission

brought into the possession of Russia the Tejend oasis, a territory, to use the words of Lieutenant, now, I believe, Colonel, Alikhanoff, who surveyed it, "almost larger than that of Merv," and brought her within striking distance-30 miles of Sarakhs, and within 232 of Herát. The Tejend river which waters that oasis is, in very deed, the Heri-rúd which waters Herát, for, flowing northwards as it approaches. the Persian frontier near Kuhsan, it takes, just beyond Pul-iKhátun, the name of the swamp in which it finally disappears. It forms then, if not a water road to Herát, yet a road which supplies troops marching along its banks with one of the two primary necessities for an army.

For a time after that submission Russia remained apparently quiescent. She was only biding her time. Whilst the attention of the politicians of England was fixed upon the events passing in Egypt and in the Soudan, they read one morning in January, 1884, that Merv had been occupied. Some years before, even statesmen who believed in the promises of Russia, had declared that her troops could never be allowed to occupy Merv. Yet in 1884, that occupation was allowed to pass with but a feeble protest!

The full significance of that important acquisition is not even yet properly appreciated by the governing classes and the people of these islands. In vain did two Englishmen and one foreigner attempt to rouse them to a sense of the danger it involved. One of these, Mr. Charles Marvin, whose services in respect of the Russo-Afghan question have been invaluable, and who, speaking and writing with absolute knowledge personally acquired, can understand better than any living man the feelings of the Cassandra of the Homeric legend, published at once a pamphlet* in

#66 The Russian Annexation of Merv." W. H. Allen & Co.

which he dwelt emphatically upon the opportunities which such a movement gave to Russia. "The conquest of Merv," wrote Mr. Marvin, in February, 1884, "is something more than the annexation of a mid-desert oasis. It means the complete junction of the military forces of the Caucasus and Turkestán. It means, with the annexation of Akhal, the absorption of 100,000 of the best Irregular cavalry in the world, at a week's march from the city of Herát. It means the meeting, for the first time, of the Cossack and the Afghán. It means the complete enclosure of Khiva within the Russian empire, and the reduction of Bokhara from the independent position of a border state to the dependence of an incorporated province. It means the enclosure of more than 200,000 square miles of territory, and the addition to the Russian empire of a region as large as France. It means the completion of the conquest of the Central Asian deserts, and the commencement of the annexation of the great fertile mountain region of Persia and Afghánistán. It means the deliberate occupation of a strategical point, fraught with political entanglements of such a wide-spread nature, that, whether Russia desire it or not, she will be inevitably led, unless forestalled or checked by England, to Meshed, to Herát, to Balkh, and to Kábul. And she will not remain there. She will continue her swift advance until she triumphantly lays down her Cossack border alongside the Sepoy line of India."

It may be objected by some that these are the opinions of Mr. Marvin, and that they do not care to listen to Mr. Marvin, because, when the Conservatives were in office he was charged with divulging information which compromised the Government. I may remark, in passing, that that charge in no way affects the credibility of a man who has heard with his own ears the opinions expressed on the subject by Russian generals and Russian diplomatists, and

who, for the love of England, has spent his own money to warn England's people. But let us turn from Mr. Marvin, from this past-master of the history of Transcaspian aggression, and read what the greatest strategist of England has to say upon the subject.

66

Commercially viewed," said Sir Edward Hamley in the lecture from which I have already quoted, delivered in May of last year, "Russia has gained in Merv for the present merely a fresh burthen. The Turkomans, debarred from brigandage, and unfit for any sustained commercial or agricultural enterprises, will be but an impoverished community. They possess no towns nor institutions, nor territories which exhibit any mark either of prosperity or of the faculty of becoming prosperous. The one advantage of the possession is that the caravan route passing Bokhára to Meshed and the interior, and that from India by Herát to Central Asia, lie through Merv. But that it was once a centre of great prosperity is proved by the fact that the remains of four great cities exist there, the inhabitants of the last of which were driven out by the present semibarbarians about a century ago. Under Russian rule that prosperity will revive-the land will once more teem with the crops to which nothing is wanting but good husbandry. And, when once again become populous and fertile, it will afford a secondary base against the Afghán frontier. the meanwhile it closes the gap aforesaid, and as soon as Russia lays down her frontier line, the whole of that vast empire from the Baltic to the Danube, thence along the Black Sea, across the Caucasus to the Caspian, along the Persian frontier to Merv and Turkistán, and so on to Siberia, will lie in a ring fence. This is the Power which is now separated from a frontier which, presumably, we cannot allow her to overstep, by a borderland which is a barrier in no sense, and which I will endeavour briefly to describe."

In