she covets the possession of rich India as an outlet to the southern seas, she, at all events, means mischief to England, mischief to the holy cause of our civilisation in the East, and mischief to the still more sacred interest of humanity at large.

CHAPTER XI.

COMPARISON BETWEEN THE ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN CIVILISATIONS IN THE EAST.

HAVING spoken, hitherto, pre-eminently and exclusively to the English public, of the political rivalry between England and Russia in Central Asia, I shall now address myself to the European and American readers interested in this question, trying to prove to them that my sympathies with the cause of the English do not rest simply on some unaccountable freak; that I am not in love with one and hating the other; but that the sympathies exhibited by me are the outflowings of a long study, practical and theoretical, of a careful and impartial balancing of the results these two representatives of our western civilisation have been able to show hitherto in their respective fields of activity. This comparative study of English and Russian civilisations in the East, could justly fill up a book by itself, and will cut a rather sad figure in the narrow precincts of a single chapter; but it is unavoidably necessary for me to hint at the

salient points of their divergency, flattering myself, as

do, with the hope that this Central Asian question, slighted for so long a period by our diplomatists-nay, even ridiculed by a certain class of politicians— will not only interest England and Russia, but every civilised community in the world. It is not a Central Asiatic, but a strictly European question, of farreaching political and cultural importance.

Russia-so we read in the argumentations of French and German political writers -being of Asiatic origin, and conspicuous for many features of Asiatic society, is far superior to England in propagating the doctrines and principles of our western culture, and in introducing a settled rule and order into the semi-barbarous countries of Asia, and more fitted for that task than the stiff, rigidly cold, unpliable English.

In my controversies, covering nearly twenty years, concerning this question, I have been often told, that by overlooking the wide gulf which separated the thoroughly Europeanised Englishmen from the Asiatic, imbued with the spirit of the eastern culture, thousands and thousands of years old, I generally forget that a less refined agency, occupying the middle position between the two opposed cultures, will and can naturally serve as a more efficient intermediary, and that, therefore, Russian society, standing as it were

on the verge of both cultural worlds, must decidedly prove a more successful propagator of our western lore in the East. Well, I never liked to be taken for a fanatic, nor did I ever indulge in obstinate negation ; for I always admitted, and even now admit, that Russian civilisation, with all its drawbacks and vices, is still superior to that culture which is the offspring of Mohammedanism, and which, fruitful as the latter may have been in the past, is at present nothing but an abdication of the exertion of self-will, and a relapsing into the dark recesses of past ages. It would be a useless attempt to deny, that by introducing a settled rule into the formerly barbarous regions of Asia, where the reign of rapine and bloodshed has laid waste large tracts of country, Russia has conferred a good many blessings upon those miserable fellow-creatures of ours. But I beg leave to ask: can the state of things created through Russian agency, be really called civilisation, and does it represent even the faintest ray of that glorious light which we call the modern culture of the Christian West? And farther; who could find fault with us, if, knowing as we do of the existence of a purer channel, of a more enlightened torch-bearer, and anxious to give but the best to the poor oppressed Oriental, we should wish to substitute the more faithful representative of our ideas for the equivocal and unreliable Russian agent?

shall

Facts being far more eloquent than theories, I pass in review before the reader those nationalities which have been undergoing for nearly four hundred years the Russian process of civilisation; and he will agree with me, that far from having gained anything, they are, at this day, losers morally and materially, and are as far from any notion of our western culture as any of their brethren living under fanatical Mohammedan rule.

Looking at the nearly half million of KazanTartars, a mentally gifted fraction of the Turkish nation, and famous in olden times for its Moslem culture, we shall find that, excepting a few superficial features, such as the familiarity with modern European beverages, there is not the slightest trace of the world of the nineteenth century to be remarked in the social and political life of these stubborn Asiatics. If we except one or two Tartar books, containing very primitive instruction in geography, in the history of Russia, and translations of Russian fables, we may well contend that the Government has done nothing to raise the standard of education of these people; they are left in moral stupor, and all their mental discipline they owe to the schools established and sustained by themselves. There is in Kazan a public governmental school; but the tendency and spirit of the instruction are strictly Russian, and the effect