Chastening of Herbert Spencer 225
Tibetan fields. Substantially the whole force would be rendered impotent for offence by the requirements of the commissary department. So narrow is the present margin of food-supply, so impossible the import of food from the north, that every augmentation of numbers attempted by an occupying power would only increase the difficulty of maintenance. But let us further suppose the incredible. Imagine, then, a small band of surviving Russians, who shall have committed such frightful slaughter as to paralyse the faculties of the lamas, preventing them from offering even the Quaker resistance of the English nonconformist to irritating school-rates. Imagine some of them enrolled behind Russian leaders and newly learned in the art of firing Russian rifles. Now they must be projected against, nay, through, Bhutan, Sikkim, or Nepal. In the nature of the case, the Europeans are but a handful, and the natives are but a rabble, and the ammunition-supply is small and the food-supply precarious. It would be wearisome to try, in these pages, the chances of every pass by which they might graze the crest of the Himalayas.
I appeal for justification to every British officer in whose breast burns even a spark of the old flame, when I say that not a single man of such an invading force would ever reach the soil of India proper. The Himalayas would swallow them; the place of their graves need never be known save to the British-led Sikhs and the Goorkhas who would have killed them. And if this be not true, then the emasculated Briton should render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, for Caésar is ever enthroned
IIIFカラー高解像度
