3. The Afghans, most warlike of all Central Asiatics, might, with the powerful support of English counsels, easily be raised into a military power of some importance. What the Instructeurs Militaires of their day accomplished in the army of Sultan Mahmood and Mehemed Ali Pasha; what English officers accomplished with the troops of Abbas Mirza,—would be as nothing in comparison with the consequences of a similar undertaking among the Afghans; out of whom, so far as one may judge from the military bearing and manœuvring of a Kabul regiment drilled by Sepoy deserters, a regular army will very easily be formed. Such a result may also be attained with the fortresses of Herat and Kandahar, whose fortifications, in the event of their coming under the charge of a second Pottinger, would certainly prove a far harder prize for Russian besiegers than if they were given over to the warlike skill of Afghans alone.
4. The prime gain, however, which we look for from a permanent agency is, that England, being accurately informed of proceedings in Central Asia, of the military and political movements of Russia, will no longer be exposed to the danger of finding herself suddenly surprised on one point or another, and, through the continual uncertainty in which she wavers touching the true state of things, of being disabled from taking the right precautions. At this moment, the Viceroy maintains a few Moonshies without any official character in Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat; Moonshies, that is, scribes, and Mohamedans, who, being among other things well paid, are engaged to furnish occasional news. Besides these, there are also spies, or secret emissaries, despatched in this or that direction on special conjunctures, who roam in the disguise of a merchant or a pilgrim through Turkestan, and furnish tidings of political events. Letting alone the fact that I regard both the former and the latter class as alike unfit for such an office, because they never enter in their memorandum-books anything but bazaar-reports and the politics of the caravan, I may, as one who has lived whole years among Orientals, be allowed to place the very smallest faith in those people. Do persons in Calcutta consider what Mohamedan fanaticism is; are they aware that no amount of gold will succeed in turning one Mussulman to the account of the Feringhie against another Mussulman? To all appearance these emissaries and spies will display the greatest diligence, the most reckless loyalty, the most forward zeal; and yet in the interior of Central Asia they will fulfil the commands of their order by squatting on the self same carpet with those religious comrades, with whom they repair to one common mosque. On this point British statesmen will certainly not agree with me, though that is the very reason why they are so little acquainted with what goes on in Central Asia,—why the absurdest stories spread through India into Europe,—and why they can regard the affairs of the Khanats in the light which Russian diplomacy has kindled for them.
Far as I am from wanting to set up as a political advice-giver, I find that these unpretending counsels point out the only means whereby Afghanistan's neutrality can be secured, and herself erected into a powerful barrier against Russia's further progress in Central Asia. In view of so weighty a question as the possession of the East Indies is for the greatness and continuance of English power, it were too dangerous to seek a false protection in palliative measures. Political errors, however trifling, form in time so many links in one unbroken chain of disasters,—a chain which, presently, the greatest struggles, the most clear-eyed statesmanship, may trouble themselves to break in vain.
6. The General Interests of the Question.
It still remains to answer the one further question, why we cannot look with indifference on the danger for English interests from Russian ascendancy, and for what special reason it is that the decline of England's power seems to us so detrimental, that we see in Russia's undue influence a bar to the advance of the spirit of our age.
The answer is very simple: Russia was, is, and long will be Asiatic. The cheering prospect that the overgrown body of Russian power will, according to the laws of nature, necessarily break up hereafter into two or more sections, and the danger that threatens us be thereby lessened, is one which we cannot for a moment entertain. We need only fix our eyes on the character of political life in Russia, its social circumstances, the relation of the people towards the upper castes of the governing circle, the general state of popular culture, and the modes of popular thought, to see how everything there is Asiatic, aye, wildly Asiatic in tendency; and how little, in spite of the long struggle after European civilisation, has yet been taken in, to speak comparatively, from what we call European or Western life. Without repeating the well-worn adage, "Scrape a Russian and you will lay bare a Tartar," it is none the less impossible, whether from personal experience, or the reports of later, and to Russia most friendly travellers, to help acknowledging how much may yet be found, on the Neva and in other large Russian towns, of that surface civilisation which many Asiatic governments bring successfully to bear on short-sighted Europe. No doubt this pretence of civilisation succeeds better in Petersburg, wielded by a government containing a strong admixture of Christian and European elements, than in Cairo, Constantinople, and Teheran. The Russian noble, in appearance a finished European, thoroughly versed in our language, manners and modes of thought, will certainly cut a better figure than the semi-European Effendi on the Bosphorus, or the Persian Mirza. A government which draws towards itself, at a cost so heavy, so many scientific and artistic forces, which has lately advanced with so much zeal in founding schools, universities, scientific associations, which hires persons in Europe to blazon forth the progress of Russian civilisation,—can assuredly reap for itself greater credit than the Porte or the Persian ministry, which, engaged in upholding their weakly existence, cannot bestow so much attention on the needful pageantry.
No wonder, then, if to a superficial glance Russia seems more European, more imbued with the spirit of our civilisation, and can easily win the sympathy of those who would love her with all their might. But if once we try impartially to lift up the outer covering and peep into the inside of the great Russian community, what shall we behold?
Great, indeed, is the disenchantment that awaits us at every step, when we seek to discover in the majority of the Russian people those traces of progress, which ought to exist according to the statements of Russian hirelings in the European press. The Englishman who, in 1865, in a pamphlet called "Russia, Central Asia, and British India," sought to indoctrinate the English public with the same idea, and, inferring the commencement of many reforms from the bearing of such innovations as slave emancipation, placed such a conversion in the foreground, though even Russian writers like Herzen and Dolgorukoff are doubtful of it, would in all likelihood have thought very differently, if he had drawn the parallel, not between persons of intelligence, but between the Russian people and the Asiatics.
On that immense frontier where Russia touches Asia, we shall everywhere find the Russians standing on a markedly lower level of development, and in freedom of manners far behind those Asiatic peoples to whom we would impart the advantages of our younger European as compared with their old Asiatic civilisation. Alexander Michie, a traveller from Pekin to Petersburg, and so great a friend of Russia that he calls Siberia a second Paradise, and deems the exiled Poles enviably fortunate, cannot, however, help proclaiming aloud the superiority of the Chinese to the Russians, wherever he finds the two holding intercourse with each other. And this is the case not only in Maimadshin and Kiachta, but even among the Mussulmans. The Russian, as a northerner, will display more energy than the Asiatic de pur sang; but his remarkably dirty exterior, his drunkenness, his religion bordering on fetishism, his servility, his crass ignorance, his coarse, unpolished manners,—are characteristics which make him show very poorly against the supple, courtly, keen-sighted Eastern. Just as I have heard a cultivated Moslem Tadjik in Bokhara speak with contempt of the uncivilised Russians, whom he set above the Kirghis only, so in all likelihood will every Chinaman, every Persian in Transcaucasia, and every well-educated Tartar in Kazan, say the same. What can these nations, then, learn from Russia?