came to be entertained as it now seems to be to the exclusion of all other routes. No mention of Merv in connection with Russia is to be found in any book or article published prior to the year 1874. Merv derived a great part of the importance now attached to it from incidents which occurred during the Khivan expedition, or rather immediately after the capture of the city of Khiva. Mr. MacGahan has told us of the wanton and cruel attack made by General Golovatchoff on the Khivan Turkomans. He saw it, rode with the troops who executed it, has graphically described it, and says plainly that he could not understand it. General Kaufmann had insisted on immediate payment of a tribute, which the Yomud Turkomans agreed to yield, but were notoriously unable to collect without some short notice. General Kaufmann was severely criticised, as Mr. MacGahan writes, by his own officers for adopting this course. "He knew very well," they said, "it was not possible for the Turkomans to pay in the specified time; he had allowed himself to be hoodwinked by the Khan, and was becoming a mere tool in his hands for the furtherance of his schemes of conquest over the Turkomans." The conduct of the general was much blamed in the Russian newspapers; but probably the worst thing said of it came from General Kryzhanoffsky, Governor-General of Örenburg, who explained the massacre by remarking to Mr. Schuyler that "it was necessary to have some actions in which the Taschkend expedition could distinguish itself, and receive its share of honours and rewards, the glory of the affair having been so far to the Orenburgh and Caucasus expeditions alone." Accordingly, General Golovatchoff, sent out by General Kaufmann to ascertain the probability of payment, entered upon a solution of the problem by "attacking the Turkoman villages and encampments, burning the houses, destroying the waggons of household stores, and spreading devastation generally among them."

according to General Kryzhanoffsky, a direct encouragement to wilful murder. I do not, however, mention Golovatchoff's raid among the Turkoman families merely to condemn it, but in order to inquire into its true origin. It may have been dictated by other not more humane but less paltry motives than those assigned by General Kryzhanoffsky. The Orenburg column was on such bad terms with the less successful column from Taschkend that the Turkomans, immediately after General Golovatchoff's incursion amongst them, said to the Orenburg troops that "if they were not so friendly with General Kaufmann, now would be just the time to fall together upon General Golovatchoff's expedition and utterly annhilate it." It is possible, then, considering the jealousy between Orenburg and Taschkend, that General Kryzhanoffsky may have been merely uttering a bitter jest when he said that General Golovatchoff had made an onslaught on a host of unoffending men, women, and children for the sake of "glory," and in the hope of obtaining "honours and rewards." Consciously or unconsciously, he seems to have indicated the true motive of attack when he afterwards told Mr. Schuyler that it was likely to lead to serious results. "It will now be necessary," he observed, "to have expeditions against the Turkomans for many years. It will be a second Caucasus, and in the end we shall find ourselves obliged to take Merv, which will undoubtedly lead to complications with England.”1

"Complications with England" represent in this case those drawbacks which, great or small, almost every advantage carries with it. Every step of importance made by Russia in Central Asia has involved "complications with England" from which, however, by means of ex planations and assurances, Russia has had no trouble in freeing herself; and it is certainly more credible that the deliberate destruction of so many Turkoman households may have been effected because "no peace with the Turkomans"

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was the political order of the day, than because General Kaufmann wished to obtain from them an obviously impossible payment, or because General Golovatchoff was eager for a decoration. The Turkomans attacked with such apparent wantonness by General Golovatchoff were, it is true, Turkomans of the Yomud tribe, whereas the Turkomans around Merv are of the Tekke tribe. General Kaufmann, however, told Mr. MacGahan that the Yomud Turkomans, after the destruction of their property by the Russians, sent an embassy to the Tekke Turkomans asking permission to emigrate to their territory. Few of them, according to Mr. MacGahan, did really emigrate. But General Kryzhanoffsky was evidently convinced that Tekkes and Yomuds would make common cause, and it is he who is responsible for the statement that General Golovatchoff's ruthless descent upon the latter would lead to serious results; that the Russians would find it necessary to make expeditions against the Turkomans for many years; and that they would in the end find themselves obliged to take Merv, "which would, undoubtedly, lead to complications with England."

If the Russians propose to take possession of Merv it matters little whether they do so from the force of circumstances or in the execution of a design. We have seen what the circumstances were which are now to impell the Russians towards Merv; and it has been already stated that no English publication anterior to the year 1874 speaks of Merv in connection with Central Asian politics. In the correspondence, however, respecting Central Asia, presented to Parliament in 1873, a despatch will be found from Mr. Ronald Thomson at Teheran to the Earl of Clarendon, dated November 14th, 1869, in which it is suggested that as the Russians will find it very difficult to establish communications across the desert from the Caspian Sea to the Oxus, they would probably in the end abandon that idea and seek a more prac

ing the course of that river eastwards, and then skirting along the hills of the north of Bojnoord and Kochan, in the direction of Merv, which is not more than four marches from the Oxus, and within ten easy stages of Herat." The only notice which seems to have been taken at the time of Mr. Ronald Thomson's surmise is to be found in a letter from Mr. Alison to the Earl of Clarendon, in which it is set forth that "the formation of a route along the Attrek river would afford matter for serious consideration to Persia." Of Merv and its proximity to Herat, of Herat and its importance in connection with India, not a word is said.

Strange as it may at first seem the question of Merv as part of the great Central Asian question was first introduced by Prince Gortchakoff; who, on the 4th of May, 1870, spoke to Sir Andrew Buchanan of a report which had reached him from Persia, "attributing great activity to Shir-Ali Khan, who is said to be endeavouring to induce the Tekke Turkomans, a tribe occupying lands to the south of Khiva, to acknowledge his sovereignty." As no sovereignty was claimed for the Amir of Afghanistan over the Tekke Turkomans-which would have amounted to including Merv within the Afghan territory-the matter dropped; but on September 21st of the same year Mr. Stremooukoff, director of the Asiatic Department in the Russian Foreign Office, remarked in discussing the interminable question of the Afghan frontier, that probably no objection would be made to include Khoja-Sali (the last Afghan post westward on the Oxus) within it, "but that great care would be required in tracing a line from thence to the south, as Merv and the country of the Turkomans were becoming commercially important." What changes were just then taking place around or in connection with Merv so as to render the place "commercially important" is not explained. A place, however, may be commercially important, and strategically very important indeed; and Mr.

inaccuracy in describing Merv, which commands roads in every direction, and is frequently traversed by caravans as "commercially important." In any case Sir Andrew Buchanan was struck by the observation, and nearly a year after it had been made, on the 13th of June 1871, reminded Lord Granville of it in one of many letters on the subject of the Afghan boundary.

Merv not belonging to Afghanistan was naturally not included within the Afghan frontier. But it seems remark

able if so much was to be said about it afterwards, that not a word was uttered on the subject-at least not by England-when the Afghan frontier was being traced. Merv is nearly on the same parallel as Khoja-Sali, the most western point of Afghan territory on the Oxus; so that if "care had not been taken," as Mr. Stremooukoff suggested, in drawing the line-if, for example, it had been drawn due west-Russia, by excluding herself from all interference in the affairs of Afghanistan, would have been definitively shut out from Merv. She expressly stipulated that this should not be the case, having previously given the English Government to understand, in the same order of ideas, that if the Amir of Afghanistan claimed to exercise sovereignty over the Tekke Turkomans, "a tribe occupying land to the south of Khiva," his pretensions could not be recognised.

In insisting on the fact that the Afghans had nothing to do with Merv nor the Turkomans of Merv with Afghanistan, the Russian Government gave no hint of any intention to occupy the place on their own account. But Prince Gortchakoff has declared so often and so pointedly that "Afghanistan would be considered as entirely beyond the sphere in which Russia might be called upon to exercise her influence," that it is difficult not to see in the constant reiteration of this phrase a meaning not contained in the phrase itself. "No intervention or interference whatever opposed to the independence of that state enters into his Imperial Majesty's intentions,"

sponse to Earl Clarendon's suggestion of a neutral territory between the English and Russian empires in the east, he, for the first time, assured Her Majesty's Government, through the usual channels, that Afghanistan should certainly be left alone.

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Afghanistan" has since been accepted by both Governments as comprising besides Afghanistan proper, which was all Prince Gortchakoff originally included beneath that name, certain dependencies south of the Oxus regarded at one time by Prince Gortchakoff as belonging to Bokhara, by the British Embassy at St. Petersburg as belonging to Khiva, but which the Indian Government showed to be feudatory states under Afghan sovereignty. The negotiations on this subject are known to have lasted something like four years; and nearly five years after they were first begun, on the 21st of January, 1874, we find that Prince Gortchakoff has "repeated to Lord Loftus the positive assurance that the Imperial Cabinet continues to consider Afghanistan as entirely beyond its sphere of action." This was in answer to a despatch calling Prince Gortchakoff's attention to the injurious effects that might be expected from the expedition the Russians were preparing to send against the Turkomans of the region around Merv and to Merv itself; as to which point Prince Gortchakoff contented himself with observing that Russia had "no intention of undertaking an expedition against the Turkomans," though he, at the same time, let it be understood that this intention might be departed from if "these turbulent tribes were to take to attacking or plundering us."

According to Mr. Schuyler (Report to the United States Government), "the arrangements made last year with England with regard to the boundary of Afghanistan simply meant that if Russia came up to the Oxus nothing would be said;" though Mr. Schuyler was convinced (and he thought the "same would be evident to any one who understood well the

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was the political order of the day, than because General Kaufmann wished to obtain from them an obviously impossible payment, or because General Golovatchoff was eager for a decoration. The Turkomans attacked with such apparent wantonness by General Golovatchoff were, it is true, Turkomans of the Yomud tribe, whereas the Turkomans around Merv are of the Tekke tribe. General Kaufmann, however, told Mr. MacGahan that the Yomud Turkomans, after the destruction of their property by the Russians, sent an embassy to the Tekke Turkomans asking permission to emigrate to their territory. Few of them, according to Mr. MacGahan, did really emigrate. But General Kryzhanoffsky was evidently convinced that Tekkes and Yomuds would make common cause, and it is he who is responsible for the statement that General Golovatchoff's ruthless descent upon the latter would lead to serious results; that the Russians would find it necessary to make expeditions against the Turkomans for many years; and that they would in the end find themselves obliged to take Merv, "which would, undoubtedly, lead to complications with England."

If the Russians propose to take possession of Merv it matters little whether they do so from the force of circumstances or in the execution of a design. We have seen what the circumstances were which are now to impell the Russians towards Merv; and it has been already stated that no English publication anterior to the year 1874 speaks of Merv in connection with Central Asian politics. In the correspondence, however, respecting Central Asia, presented to Parliament in 1873, a despatch will be found from Mr. Ronald Thomson at Teheran to the Earl of Clarendon, dated November 14th, 1869, in which it is suggested that as the Russians will find it very difficult to establish communications across the desert from the Caspian Sea to the Oxus, they would probably in the end abandon that idea and seek a more prac

ing the course of that river eastwards, and then skirting along the hills of the north of Bojnoord and Kochan, in the direction of Merv, which is not more than four marches from the Oxus, and within ten easy stages of Herat." The only notice which seems to have been taken at the time of Mr. Ronald Thomson's surmise is to be found in a letter from Mr. Alison to the Earl of Clarendon, in which it is set forth that "the formation of a route along the Attrek river would afford matter for serious consideration to Persia." Of Merv and its proximity to Herat, of Herat and its importance in connection with India, not a word is said.

Strange as it may at first seem the question of Merv as part of the great Central Asian question was first introduced by Prince Gortchakoff; who, on the 4th of May, 1870, spoke to Sir Andrew Buchanan of a report which had reached him from Persia, "attributing great activity to Shir-Ali Khan, who is said to be endeavouring to induce the Tekke Turkomans, a tribe occupying lands to the south of Khiva, to acknowledge his sovereignty." As no sovereignty was claimed for the Amir of Afghanistan over the Tekke Turkomans-which would have amounted to including Merv within the Afghan territory-the matter dropped; but on September 21st of the same year Mr. Stremooukoff, director of the Asiatic Department in the Russian Foreign Office, remarked in discussing the interminable question of the Afghan frontier, that probably no objection would be made to include Khoja-Sali (the last Afghan post westward on the Oxus) within it, "but that great care would be required in tracing a line from thence to the south, as Merv and the country of the Turkomans were becoming commercially important." What changes were just then taking place around or in connection with Merv so as to render the place "commercially important" is not explained. A place, however, may be commercially important, and strategically very important indeed; and Mr.