Darjeeling. On the other hand, imagine Russian columns starting from Osh or Irkutsk, even with a suppliant court in Pekin, and you may imagine time for British agents to spread the news across desert and ocean, time for British concentration at Darjeeling, time for the sack of Lhasa, all before a remnant of the devoted Cossacks should have time to struggle into the valley of Tsang-po, asking but one boon of the British—to be captured and fed.
This enormous difference in the physical relations of Tibet toward the north and toward the south, is a vital fact in the consideration of the probable complications. That the view here expressed is not a peculiar one, appears from the familiar recitals of distress experienced by all the explorers, with their small and specially equipped caravans. As shown in one of the appendices,' it is moreover a view held by some distinguished and expert British authorities. But let us suppose the incredible to have been accomplished ; that the supine Lion has permitted the outrageous Bear to hibernate in Lhasa's monasteries, and that the whole world has definitely yielded the ` ` Chinese integrity" policy, —a supposition which involves satisfaction of enormous appetites by a wholesale cutting up of the Chinese body, wrongly supposed to be a dead carcass.
Russia can get no substantial benefit out of Tibetan occupation per se. She would find it exceedingly difficult -- impossible, I think, to hold Lhasa against any Tibetan liberating effort. Russian soldiers must be fed, and only constant physical pressure at the centre would bring in food from
I See discussion of paper read before R. G. S., February 8, 1904.
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