170 REPOET— 1869. 



Russian province, whatever may be the starting-point of a Russian army intended 

 to reach the Punjab, no less than two, and perhaps even three months, spent 

 amidst snowy, desert mountains, are required before such an army is allowed to put 

 their frost-bitten feet on English ten-itory. I am far from denying that among the 

 advocates of a Russian invasion there are men of deep science and of unques- 

 tionable good faith ; but they all start either from the one or from the other of these 

 two very arbitrary hypotheses, namely, that what has been done once may be 

 performed again, or what is now impossible may hereafter become possible. In 

 support of the first hypothesis, the numerous invasions of India ascertained by 

 history have been quoted ; and a learned French orientalist, M. Quatremere, en- 

 deavoured even to prove that the lofty mountains which form the northern boim- 

 dary of Cashemir, and which hitherto have been considered as not having at any 

 time yielded a passage to a military expedition, have been traversed more than 

 once, as late as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, by considerable armies, 

 which, starting from Kachgar and Jarkand, reached the Punjab across Tibet and 

 Cashemir. But what do such facts prove ? Only one thing ; that those armies, con- 

 ducted by Eastern generals and directed against Eastern populations, were placed 

 more or less in the same conditions under which similar expeditions have been 

 Buccessfully performed by Alexander the Great and the Mongol conquerors, con- 

 ditions widely different from those which woidd be now imposed upon a Russian 

 or any other invading army, not only because Asiatic adventurers, as well as Mace- 

 donian or Roman conquerors, were not encumbered by the troublesome encum- 

 brances of artillery, indispensable to European troops, but also because they pos- 

 sessed over their enemies an overwhelming superiority either of moral or of 

 material strength, whereas now-a-days no invading army would enjoy this last 

 advantage. Even now, if an European army may succeed in dragging their ponderous 

 artillery over large snowy mountainous tracts, as the admirable expedition into 

 Abyssinia has so brilliantly proved, success is possible only under the express con- 

 dition of having Abyssinians or some other Asiatic popidation to deal with ; for if 

 the country, or even Magdala alone, had been occupied by French, Russian, or 

 Prussian troops, instead of those of Theodorus, the issue of that glorious expe- 

 dition might have been a most disastrous one. As for those who invoke the con- 

 tingencies of future times, and put an unlimited confidence in the progress of 

 engineering science, believing that, after all the marvels witnessed by our age, 

 there is no reason why the highest and the most extensive mountains of our globe, 

 those of Central Asia, may not be crossed by railways and pierced by tunnels, the 

 answer to those sanguine expectations is rather easy. Now, even granting (what 

 certainly is an enormous exaggeration) that there is no limit whatever to the con- 

 quests of man over nature, we must not forget that the most splendid triumphs of 

 this kind hitherto accomplished (such, for instance, as the akuost finished tunnel 

 and the mountain railway of Monte Cenisio, or the gigantic American railways 

 joining the Atlantic to the Pacific) are mere trifles in comparison with works required 

 for the accomplishment of similar perfomiances in the mountainous systems which 

 separate Turkestan from India. Indeed to launch steam-waggons along immense 

 vertical sui-faces, or across stupendous glaciers, or to scoop out tunnels running 

 many hundred miles, is now almost as impossible as to employ balloons for the per- 

 formance of such marvellous travels ; and if really the time will come when 

 peculiar steam-engines, or rapid and manageable balloons shall be invented, no doubt 

 this time is so far from us that at the brilliant dawn of that glorious day the 

 civilizing task of England and Russia in Asia will have been fulfilled long before ; 

 then the now barbarous populations wiU be perfectly able to defend themselves 

 without wanting any tutelage, and the newly invented marvellous engines will be 

 used for the transport of travellers and merchandise, but not for military expe- 

 ditions. In one word, the more we contemplate the real state of things, such as 

 has been revealed to us by the recent explorations of Central Asia, the more we 

 must admit that the phantom of a Russian invasion in India is a worn-out bugbear ; 

 and the day may not be distant when people will smile at such prophecies, and 

 when the inhabitants of Bombay will be as little afraid of the appearance of 

 Russian soldiers as the inhabitants of London are of the arrival of French troops ; 

 at all events, in both places such visitors wotild pay veiy dear for their untoward 



