speaking French, dancing prettily, nucleus of a true frontier aristocracy of refinement. They had been educated at Orenburg in Siberia, had never seen the Moscow-Petersburg form of Russian society, and would probably marry officers or civilians who likewise know nothing of European Russia.
So it was in far Kashgar. The old retiring Consul-General had spent a lifetime in Asia—and now, the end of labour drawing near, he had decided to die, not in one of the great towns of the West, but in Tashkent, in the very heart of Russian Turkestan. In Kashgar, too, were several civilians who had never been west of the Ural Mountains. It has been impossible to subject those frontier folk to Moscow discipline. True, there is always one reservation due to the very essence of the Russian system, and which sharply marks off any Russian from any American, that is, he rarely talks politics with strangers ; never, at least, any radical politics. He might—though this is not on my part experimental knowledge—question the wisdom of the protection policy of his Government, or any such similar policy, but the form of his government seems to be adopted as a necessary background to life—as a " form of thought." Either a loyalty, almost universal, or a fear, equally universal (the former, I think), prevents the average Russian mind from entering this region, mysterious to him, familiar and vital to nearly all Europeans and Americans. Once outside this reservation, these frontiersmen in Asia show much of the self-reliance, the mental temerity which characterise our own frontier, or any other frontier occupied by strong men.
IIIF Color HighRes
