happenings, and ready, if to her it shall seem good, to write her criticism in the blood of men. Hence much discretion, much patience on the part of Russia. The sixty of M. Petrovsky's consular guard, and the similar body strangely stationed at Tashkurgan,—up there on the shoulder of the Pamirs a hundred miles away,—must idle away hours, days, years perhaps, before they shall be told to destroy the Chinese force, whose mean appearance suggests that butchers of men and butchers of cattle occupy the same grade in Chinese philosophy. The Tibet expedition of the British-Indian Government was not yet undertaken. Its normal effect would be to hasten the Cossacks' march of conquest from Kash-gar to Khotan, as a reprisal at China's expense. But the Japanese war, on the other hand, must tend to check him, if for no other reason than that every spring of action in St. Petersburg is now bent towards Manchuria. Meantime it is not to be desired by Russia that the minds of the Turkestan native should, by intrusive travellers, be disturbed from their simple conceptions. "We must be ruled by somebody. The rulers of the earth are the Chinese, who now possess us ; the English, who possess India, and who do not seem much concerned about us, since there is but one sahib here, and he has no soldiers ; and the Russians, who possess all the world to the north of us, and whose officer, with soldiers and merchants at his back, is able to do almost as he will with our Chinese masters. Besides these three great peoples there are none other rulers of men on earth."
Such being the sentiments of a million or more
IIIF Color HighRes
