eye—for the atrocities committed by the Turcomans had excited general indignation against them—the explanation which most commended itself was, that as Russia had already established an important government in Turkestan very imperfectly supplied with the means of communication with the Wolga, she found it indispensable to supplement the northern line with a more direct and assured route to the west, which route should traverse the Turcoman steppe _viâ_ Merv and Askabad, and should thus connect Tashkend and Samarcand with the Caspian. And it is quite possible that consideration of this nature—which from a strategical point of view were perfectly sound and proper—may have had some weight in determining the course of events, combined, as they naturally were, with a full appreciation of the advantages in respect to prestige and military power which must accrue from the creation of a new empire in Central Asia; but I must adhere to my view that neither strategy, nor lust of conquest, nor military glory, nor any of the thousand and one motives which in matters of peace and war ordinarily actuate nations, was the governing principle in directing the Russian advance into Central Asia. That principle was, I believe, an intense desire to reach the threshold of India, not for the purpose of direct or immediate attack, but with a view to political pressure on Great Britain, with which Power she would thus, for the first time, be brought in territorial contact. With this conviction strong on my mind, and with a lively sense of the inconvenience to India of Russian contiguity, is it surprising that I should feel constrained to put the following questions? Ought we to have remained passive while the meshes were thus being woven round us? Ought we not rather to have impeded by all the means at our command the passage of the Russian columns from the Caspian to Merv? There were many such means available. We might have persuaded Persia, whose jealousy was already excited by the movement of the Russian columns along her frontier, to interdict that supply of grain and transport animals from Khorassan which was indispensable to a successful advance. We might have furnished the Tekkehs of Akhal with arms and money to resist the invaders. We might have warned the Russian Government in plain but forcible language that her occupation of Merv would infallibly lead to war. It is impossible, indeed, to acquit ourselves of shortcoming in this respect. It is impossible to avoid the conviction that, by a want of firmness in action as in language, the crisis which now threatens us has been unduly accelerated. I have no wish to reopen old sores, or to revive the acrimonious strife of 1881, when the questions of the evacuation of Candahar and the abandonment of the Quetta railway were debated with the keenness of political disagreement, embittered by the virulence of party feeling; nor, indeed, although strongly advocating at the time the retention of the