the formation of roads, or the construction of canals throughout the empire, which have been devoted to the protection of trade on the Kirghiz Steppes, the best interests of commerce would have been immeasurably further advanced; and therefore, so far as they are concerned, we are fairly entitled to assume that they did not furnish the real motives for any such expenditure. Perhaps a more plausible excuse is to be found in the annual captures by the Kirghiz of Russians who were sold to the Khivans as slaves. But the number of these was very trifling, and the sums spent in a year, for political purposes, would have sufficed to repurchase ten times over those who were thus unfortunately kidnapped. We have had, indeed, sufficient experience of the intrigues of Russia in the East, to enable us to perceive at once, that the object which she has in view in subjugating Tartary is none other than that which she betrayed in her secret intercourse with Persia; and, in the present state of our political relations with the Russian empire, it is important to inquire how far her designs in the East have been attended with success, in order that we may be able to appreciate at their proper value those rumours respecting the advance of her armies in this direction, which find a ready circulation among those whom ignorance disposes to credulity, and an exaggerated estimate of the power and resources of our enemy excites to alarm. Thus we have had it regularly communicated to us as a fact for the last six months from India, that a Russian army is at Oorjunge, two marches distant from Khiva, with an occasional intimation received from good authority, that it is prepared to invade India, reinforced by levies of indomitable cavalry, supposed to have been raised upon the Steppes of Tartary. Alluding to such reports as these, the _Journal de St Petersburg_ inquires naturally enough whether the _Times_ and its contemporaries have correspondents in the little states of Upper Asia, and records with much amusement some of the most glaring inconsistencies which have been gravely listened to, and credited by the British public. Thus, although Russia was said to have formed a quadruple alliance with the Khans of Khiva and Boukhara, and Dost Mahomed, it was nevertheless necessary to seize the town of Khiva, which succumbed after an energetic resistance of thirty-two days—certainly a most improbable mode this of cementing the alliance. At the same time, it is due to another portion of the home community to give them the benefit of holding views of a very different character. They utterly ignore the influence of Russia in the East—treat her possible advance in that direction as a chimera—and the power which she has already acquired as a bugbear from which nothing is to be apprehended. The fact that views so diametrically opposed to one another are very generally entertained in this country, induces us to hope that