With this "pacification" of the Caucasus, the Czar obtained the unimpeded use of the high-road leading into Asia Minor. He then struck a blow against the independent tribes on the eastern shore of the Caspian. With the Court of Teheran he entered into relations calculated to threaten Turkey with a double danger from the Asiatic side, in case of a renewal of war. Again, he enlarged his Empire, at the cost of China, by filching territories as extensive as some of the greatest European countries. In what once was Independent Turkestan, his armies overran one Khanate after the other, thus coming nearer and nearer to India from the north-west. There is a striking war-picture by Vereshagin, with a pyramid of skulls as its centre--a very Golgotha of the horrors of massacre; but Russian monarchs, in their ceaseless career of conquest, out-Tatar the Tatar in the fiendishness of their atrocities. Witness the order given by General Kaufmann, the pampered tool of Alexander II., in these Turkestan campaigns:--"_Kill all; spare no age, or sex!_" Witness also the death-dance that took place when his Majesty, the crowned head of Holy Russia, the magnanimous Champion of Religion and Humanity, made his victorious entry into Plevna,[48] carousing there jubilantly, whilst the Turkish wounded lay unattended in the town for fully two days--a helpless mass of men, dying in raving agony. I have anticipated for a moment the course of events. In glancing at the reign of Alexander II., the eye involuntarily runs over the full panorama of tyrannic outrages. From the time of the wholesale proscription of the Tcherkess and Abchasian tribes to the heart-rending horrors committed against Toork populations and wounded Ottoman prisoners of war, there has been, in his career, a perfect climax of inhumanity. Conferences for the professed humanization of warfare were, with him, only the hypocritical precursors of fresh barbarities. But it is not necessary to forestall events. Enough was done in the way of atrocities even in the earlier years of his rule.