Instead of this consummation so devoutly to be wished, and possible even now, though late, if action be taken under good advice and in the fulness of knowledge, either Power—
“Thus with his stealthy pace With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost.”
If ever the pot called the kettle black, it is the story of Anglo-Russian recriminations. Russian intrigues are ever met by British manœuvres and Muscovite earth-hunger can only be paralleled by English annexations. _Here_ a tribe is instigated to revolt, so that its extermination may “rectify a boundary,” _there_ an illusory scientific frontier is gradually created by encroachments on the territories of feudatories accused of disloyalty, if not of attempts to poison our agents. By setting son against father, brother against brother and, in the general tumult, destroying intervening republics and monarchies, Anglo-Russian dominions are becoming conterminous. Above all
“There’s not a one of them but in his house I keep a servant fee’d.”
And it is this unremitting suspicion which is alike the secret of present success and the cause of eventual failure in wresting and keeping Asiatic countries and of the undying hatred which injured natives feel towards Europeans.
The attempt to obtain the surrender of the Takk fort, and of the Takk valley, a short and easy road to the British District of Kaghán, has merely indicated to Russia the nearest way to India, just as we forced her attention to Hunza and are now drawing it to Chitrál. David Urquhart used to accuse us of conspiracy with Russia in foreign politics. Lord Dufferin in his Belfast speech sought the safety of India in his friendship with M. de Giers and his Secretary popularized Russia in India by getting his work on “Russia” translated into Urdu. Certainly the coincidence of Russian as well as British officials being benefited by their respective encroachments, Commissions, Delimitations, etc., would show their “mutual interest” to consist in keeping up the farce of “Cox and Box” in Central Asia, which must end in a tragedy.
As an official since 1855, when I served Her Majesty during the Russian War, I wish to warn the British public against the will-o’-the-wisp of our foreign policy, especially in India. I can conceive that a small, moral and happy people should seek the ascendancy of its principles, even if accompanied by confusion in the camps of its enemies. I can understand that the doctrines of Free Trade, of a free Press, a Parliamentary rule, the Anti-Slavery propaganda and philanthropic enterprises generally, with which the British name is connected, should have been as good as an army to us in every country of the world in which they created a Liberal party, but these doctrines have often weakened foreign Executive Governments, whilst “Free Trade” ruined their native manufacture. What I, however, cannot understand is that a swarming, starving and unhappy population should seek consolation for misery at home in Quixotism abroad, especially when that Quixotism is played out. If bread costs as much now as in 1832 although the price of wheat has fallen from 60s. to 27s. a quarter, it is, indeed, high time that we should lavish no more blood and treasure on the stones of foreign politics, but that we should first extract the beam from our own eye before we try to take out the mote from the eye of others.