Consequently, our frontier line ought to swallow up the former and stop short at the limit of the latter.
These three principles supply a clear, natural, and logical explanation of our last military operations in Central Asia. In fact our original frontier line, extending along the Syr-Daria to Fort Perovski on one side, and on the other to the Lake Issik-Kul, had the drawback of being almost on the verge of the desert. It was broken by a wide gap between the two extreme points; it did not offer sufficient resources to our troops, and left unsettled tribes over the border with which any settled arrangement became impossible.
In spite of our unwillingness to extend our frontier, these motives had been powerful enough to induce the Imperial Government to establish this line between Lake Issik-Kul and the Syr-Daria by fortifying the town of Chimkent, lately occupied by us. By the adoption of this line we obtain a double result. In the first place, the country it takes in is fertile, well wooded, and watered by numerous watercourses; it is partly inhabited by various Kirghiz tribes, which have already accepted our rule; it consequently offers favourable conditions for colonisation and the supply of provisions to our garrisons. In the second place, it puts us in the immediate neighbourhood of the agricultural and commercial populations of Khokand. We find ourselves in presence of a more solid and compact, less unsettled, and better organised social state; fixing for us with geographical precision the limit up to which we are bound to advance, and at which we must halt; because, while, on the one hand, any further extension of our rule, meeting, as it would, no longer with unstable communities, such as the nomad tribes, but with more regularly constituted states, would entail considerable exertions, and would draw us on from annexation to annexation with unforeseen complications. On the other, with such states for our future neighbours, their backward civilisation and the instability of their political condition do not shut us out from the hope that the day may come when regular relations may, to the advantage of both parties, take the place of the permanent troubles which have up to the present moment paralysed all progress in those countries.
Such, Sir, are the interests which inspire the policy of our august Master in Central Asia; such is the object, by his Imperial Majesty’s orders, of the action of his Cabinet.
You are requested to take these arguments as your guide in any explanations you may give to the Government to which you are accredited, in case questions are asked or you may see credence given to erroneous ideas as to our action in these distant parts.
It is needless for me to lay stress upon the interest, which Russia evidently has, not to increase her territory, and, above all, to avoid raising complications on her frontiers which can but delay and paralyse her domestic development.
The programme which I have just traced is in accordance with these views.
Very frequently of late years the civilisation of these countries, which are her neighbours on the continent of Asia, has been assigned to Russia as her special mission.
No agent has been found more apt for the progress of civilisation than commercial relations. Their development requires everywhere order and stability; but in Asia it demands a complete transformation of the habits of the people. The first thing to be taught to the populations of Asia is that they will gain more in favouring and protecting the caravan trade than in robbing it. These elementary ideas can only be accepted by the public where one exists; that is to say, where there is some organised form of society and a government to direct and represent it.
We are accomplishing the first part of our task in carrying our frontier to the limit where the indispensable conditions are to be found.