There is no doubt whatever that, if trouble had arisen in the west, and our troops had been withdrawn from Manchuria, a repetition of the Chinese disorders of 1900 might easily have occurred; our communications with the Pri-Amur would again have been interrupted, and we should have had to reconquer Manchuria.[57] With each month that passed the doubt as to our ability to carry out the terms of the treaty of April increased, and this difficult period of uncertainty turned to one of acute anxiety on account of the increasing hostility to us of China and Japan. Officially, we continued to give assurances that we should keep to our engagement, and we even carried out the first portion of it by withdrawing our troops from that part of the Mukden province up to the River Liao; but we were, as a matter of fact, already taking steps essential to our own interests, but absolutely at variance with the treaty. Before the Boxer rising of 1900 I had expressed the opinion that Northern and Southern Manchuria possessed entirely different values for us, the greater importance of the former being due to the various considerations. In the first place, the country through which the main Siberian line passed was of special importance, because upon it depended the security of our communication, and because the experience of 1900 had shown the extreme weakness of its protection as organized by the Finance Minister. I therefore asked that a small force of four infantry battalions, one battery, and one squadron of Cossacks might be stationed on the line as a mobile reserve at Harbin, in addition to the local railway guards. Barracks for a force of this size were built, and were ready for occupation in 1903; but placing troops merely along the line itself—and a small number at that—would have been of no use if China had intended to make things unpleasant for us in Manchuria. The line would have been cut, and the culprits would never have been discovered, for the officials, who outwardly _kow-towed_ to us, were all the time acting in accordance with instructions from Peking. The only thing we could expect was an influx of Chinese into Northern Manchuria, and the crowding of the tracts bordering on the Chinese frontier. Against this, even complete annexation of Northern Manchuria did not appear to me desirable, or likely to serve any useful purpose, as the Chinese population so annexed, possessing the rights of citizenship and settling along the left bank of the Amur, would have swamped the native population of the Amur and coast districts.[58] During the whole of the last century we had only succeeded in colonizing very sparsely with our own people that part of Siberia east of Trans-Baikalia to the sea, which means that the bonds binding it to Russia were extremely weak. In the Amur and coast districts, with a frontier of 1,600 miles bordering on China (from Trans-Baikalia to the sea), the whole population only consisted of 400,000.