His attitude was after all more political than personal. Great changes had recently occurred in the politics of Central Asia. The fall of the Manchu dynasty and the establishment of a Republic in China had resulted in the secession of the princes of Mongolia. They had first placed themselves under the protection of Russia, only to find that they had exchanged King Log for King Stork. Russia had sufficiently recovered from the staggering effects of the Japanese war to recommence her forward movement in Asia, which for long had seemed as gradual and as irresistible as the encroachment of the tide upon a sandy beach. The Mongols soon came to loggerheads with their adopted protector, and were beginning to experience the same process of assimilation that had in previous generations been the fate of Bokhara and Western Turkestan. A sudden conflagration in which Russia became involved in Europe, together with the rise to power of a prince of exceptional ambition and capacity, gave the Mongols an opportunity of striking for complete independence, of which they were not slow to take advantage. The advance of a Russian army of 20,000 men was checked near Urga for want of supplies from the north. With an Austro-German army threatening Moscow and St. Petersburg, the Russian government recalled the greater part of their Eastern forces, leaving the Mongolian expedition to extricate itself as best it could. It might still have proved equal to the strain but for a Mussulman rising, which, after long smouldering, now broke into flame in the conquered Khanates eastward of the Caspian. The revolt spread with the rapidity of a prairie fire from Khiva to Tashkend, paralysing any efforts that might have been made to relieve the army destined for Mongolia. A raid of many thousands of Tartars who cut the railway at Irkutsk turned the check into a retreat. The first sign of wavering brought against the Russians every man who possessed a pony and a rifle from the Great Wall of China to the Altai mountains. Under this pressure the retreat became a rout, and the rout a slaughter. Within a year Mongolia became the most powerful of the Central Asian States, and with the guns and equipment of the annihilated Russian army as a nucleus, the Mongol Napoleon set about building up a new empire extending from the shrunken frontiers of the Chinese Republic to the shores of the Caspian. Five years had sufficed to transform the political aspect of Central Asia. Russia, exhausted by a three years’ struggle with her western neighbours, was powerless to stem the flood of Mongol conquest. For the moment the tide had apparently spent itself on the eastern border of Asiatic Turkey, and the mountain chain dividing Persia. There had been a lull for more than a year, during which the world wondered with no little apprehension what would happen next. Some thought that the Mongol prince who had inspired this recrudescence of