How, then, can England look on with indifference, to say nothing of her desire to have as neighbour a great and certainly unfriendly power, in a land where such inflammable elements are to be found? Trade will spring up, I hear from all sides; yet, to all seeming, the prospect of the commercial advantages, which British statesmen behold in Russia's oncoming, and in the removal of anarchical conditions in Central Asia, rests rather on a pretended hope than on true conviction. Is it not strange, that a people, so practical in its ways of thinking as the English, should for one moment entertain the hope that some profit would arise for England out of the plans which Russia has followed up for years with toil, and expense, and self-sacrifice; that English goods will get the upper hand in the markets of Central Asia, as soon as they have passed under the Russian rule? Henry Davies, in his commercial report, may point to the considerable figures which the export trade through Peshawar, Karachie, and Ladak, to Central Asia, has to show; and yet he must allow that this would be ten times larger, were it supported by English influence beyond the frontier of northern India. And in the same proportion will it diminish, in which the Russian eagle spreads out his wings over those regions. To Lord William Hay's plan for laying down a commercial road through Ladak, Yarkend, Issiköl, and Semipalatinsk, the Petersburg cabinet has given its seeming assent; yet, in fact, nobody wanted to support the plan, nor will it occur to any Russian statesman to carry it out. The Chinese are far superior not only to the Russians, but even to the English, in mercantile zeal; and yet they trade along the great commercial road from Pekin through South Siberia only to Maimatshin, while from Kiachta the Chinese exports are forwarded, mainly through Russian hands, to Petersburg and Europe. And how fared the Italian silk merchants, who, under Russian protection, found their way to Bokhara, but were there arrested and robbed of their goods and possessions? One of them, Gavazzi, lets us feel very forcibly in his report, that he could never place full faith in Russian letters commendatory, in spite of all after applications from St. Petersburg. The products of English manufacturing towns are wont to drive Russian manufactures out of every market. The merchants of Khiva and Bokhara still carry with them Russian articles from Nijni-Novgorod and Orenburg, which they sell to Central Asiatics under the name of _Ingilis mali_, or English wares; such being always in most demand among the latter. People in England forget that plain dealing will for some time yet be wanting to Russian policy, and that, on the commercial roads which its arms have opened out, it will throw, of a certainty, in the way of foreign interests, obstacles of a like nature, if not indeed the same, as one now meets with from Afghan rapacity, from Œzbeg lawlessness, on the commercial roads to the Oxus.