Chastening of Herbert Spencer 227
has added a barrier of sentiment to one of stone and ice, rising between her wastes and the wide fields which England governs. The case is altogether different from that presented along the Afghan frontier, which has seen at least two great waves of conquest, moral and physical, rolling southward, and leaving, as permanent deposit, the richest strata of Indian life. Tibet, on the other hand, is like a distant shore that occasionally felt the last movement of a wave of thought or action, already spent as it reaches the Himalayan crest. To think of such a country as the lair of some great coiled danger ready to spring, is indeed to "see snakes." And to set in motion this second incredible series of events we have now to substitute for the supposed directive force of Russian intelligence and arms, the mere promises, cajoleries, and deceptions of Buriat spies, talking of their temporal to their spiritual master, and promising what?
The only thing which can be conceived as appealing to the Tibetan mind, would be protection against the aggression of the English. Yes, already enough had been done to fill the lamas with just fears, before the presents were unhappily sent to the Czar, before the convincing blow came upon them in the summer of 1904.
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