“Do you consider the Shah of Persia a powerful monarch?” was his next question.
“Powerful, perhaps, in the Oriental sense,” we replied, “but very weak in comparison with the Western nations. Then, too, he seems to be losing the power that he does have—he is compelled to play more and more into the hands of the Russians.”
“Do you think that Russia will eventually try to take possession of Persia?” the viceroy interrupted.
“That, of course, is problematical,” we answered, with the [pg 228]embarrassment men of our age might feel at being instigated to talk politics with a prime minister. “What we do know, for certain, is that Russia is now, with her Transcaspian railroad, within about forty miles of Meshed, the capital of Persia’s richest province of Khorasan; that she now has a well-engineered and, for a great portion of the way, a macadamized road to that city across the Kopet Dagh mountains from Askabad, the capital of Russian Transcaspia; and that half that road the Persians were rather forcibly invited to construct.”
MR. LIANG, EDUCATED IN THE UNITED STATES, NOW IN THE SHIPPING BUSINESS.
“Do you think,” again interrupted the viceroy, whose interest in the Russians now began to take a more domestic turn, “that the Russians would like to have the Chinese province of Ili?”
To this question we might very appropriately have said, “No”; for the reason that we thought Russia had it al[pg 229]ready. She is only waiting to draw it in, when she feels certain that her Siberian flank is better protected. The completion of the Transsiberian railroad, by which troops can be readily transported to that portion of her dominion, may change Russia’s attitude toward the province of Ili. We did not, however, say this to his excellency. We merely replied that we believed Russia was seldom known to hold aloof from anything of value, which she thought she could get with impunity. As she was now sending cart-load after cart-load of goods over the border, through Ili, into northern and western China, without paying a cent of customs duty, while on the other hand not even a leaf of tea or thread of cotton passed over the Russian line from China without the payment of an exorbitant tariff; and as she had already established in Kuldja a postal, telegraph, and Cossack station, it would seem that she does not even now view the province of Ili as wholly foreign to the Russian empire.
At this the viceroy cleared his throat, and dropped his eyes in thoughtful mood, as much as to say: “Ah, I know the Russians; but there is no help for it.”
At this point we ventured to ask the viceroy if it were true, as we had been informed, that Russia had arranged a treaty with China, by which she was entitled to establish consuls in several of the interior provinces of the Chinese empire, but he evaded the question with adroitness, and asked: