surreptitiously utilized,[435] accommodating 6000. Besides the barracks, permanent blockhouses were met with every three or four miles. The guards of the railways, whose numbers were just at this time fixed at 30,000,[436] were recruited from the regular troops, from whom they were distinguished by green shoulder-straps and collar-patches, and also by higher pay, and the regular troops themselves could be contained in large numbers in the depots and barracks and blockhouses when the evacuation was completed.[437] At the same time, the Russians seemed to have destroyed nearly all the forts and confiscated the guns of the Chinese, whose defense had thus been reduced almost to nil. The military power of the Tartar Generals at the capitals of the three Manchurian Provinces was held under a strict surveillance of the Russian officers, who also readily controlled highroads and rivers. It was, moreover, uncertain how much of this control and supervision by the Russians would be relaxed after the promised evacuation, or how much it would then be replaced by the powerful position the Russians would hold in their own quarters in Manchuria. The conclusion seemed inevitable to some people that by the so-called evacuation, if it should ever take place in the face of the enormous obstacles which the Agreement did not seek to remove, Russia would gain a much stronger hold upon the Manchurian territory than during the preceding period of open military occupation.[438] It was also pointed out that the forts, docks, and other military and naval establishments at Port Arthur, costing millions of rubles, were not compatible with the short term of the lease of the port, and their practical value would be seriously impaired by a true evacuation of the rest of Manchuria.