in Bokhara, Khiva, and the Turkoman country itself, a few years since, amounted to 100,000. Of course it is difficult to gather statistics on such a point, but 40,000 slaves are said to have been released by the Russians in Khiva alone.

Forty thousand slaves! When did we render such service with the sword? Have we done it in Egypt? The lionhearted Gordon himself, in the bitter agony of his seclusion, was half disposed to temporize with the slave-trade in the Soudan. Again Colonel Stewart says—

The value of slaves has considerably fallen since the Russians have closed the slave markets in Khiva and Bokhara. The Persian slaves in Bokhara have not been released, but the open sale of captives has not been permitted, and although a few slaves, especially women, can still be secretly sold in Bokhara, Russia has struck a great blow at the Turkoman slave-trade.

The noble deed performed by that power, he says, has added very much to her influence in this part of the world.' In almost every village he found numerous slaves who spoke of the kindness of Russia in freeing them. Captain Gill, who visited the country later on, speaks in the same key. He, too, had been much struck with the watch towers, into which the poor cultivators crept till the marauders had swept by. The people were, however, abandoning these castellated hovels, and once more building in the open, and the reason was they no longer feared the raids of the Turkomans.' They had quite enough to do to meet the advancing Muscovite tide. 'Whatever objection,' says Captain Gill, might be felt to Russia advancing to India, the fact could not be denied that the Russians had done a great deal of good to these countries on the borders.'

All but the veriest Russo-phobist will deem this a verdict of not guilty, as regards the question of the bona fides of the Russian advance. But this does not make the Indian danger one whit less. A stealthy friend any day is more dangerous than an open foe. open foe. Every one,' says Thackeray, 'knows what harm the bad do, but who knows the mischief done by the good?' On the contrary, it is certain that this character of the Russian advance is, in itself a potent source of danger. Russia has made friends with the border tribes of Khorassan, the dependents of the Shah. Persia, as Lord Salisbury said, in 1881, is a mere puppet in the hands of Russia.' Meshed, a Persian town larger than Herat, is on the route of the Caspain line. Any day, on some pretext or other, we may hear of a diversion of the line southwards to that place, and once master of Golden Khorassan,' the

granary of Persia, as Colonel Stewart terms it, there would be nothing to hinder Russia from seeking her long-wanted seaboard on the Persian Gulf. If denied the Bosphorus, nothing is more certain than that she will seek this counterpoise. The first overt move we make to seize Afghanistan, that moment the kingdom of Persia is no more. The empire of the Tzar will be washed by four oceans.

Nor must we leave out of mind the Turkoman tributary to her might. As she turned Cossack against Turkoman, so would she turn both against us. It has been stated that the flower of Turkoman chivalry, if we may call it such, perished neck and crop at Geok Tepé; but the fibre is left. What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh, and a young race of desert warriors would be formidable antagonists indeed. These are no white-livered, slavery-cowed, conquest-smitten wrecks of manhood, such as sop rice in India, or digest lentels by the Nile, but fierce, daring warriors, inured to the dangers of flood and field from the cradle to the grave. Than the men of Dantli, Colonel Stewart never saw finer specimens of humanity.' Their horses can perform wonderful feats of endurance. He heard of some covering one hundred miles in twenty-four hours, carrying rider, body-clothing, and everything. The Turkoman himself habitually sleeps on the snow with only a poshtin or long sheep-skin coat on. What chance

would Bengal lancers have against a troop of such cavalry? In forty-eight hours they could strike from the proposed terminus of the Caspian line to Herat, and in half that time they could march to it from the Bolan Pass.

Few people have any idea of what the Turkoman territory, this new acquisition of Russia, really means. It is a vast kingdom in itself, stretching from the Caspian to the Oxus. It is not a desert track, as is commonly supposed, but a fertile land desolated by the dreaded Turkomans. These are merely an off-shoot of the great Mahommedan race. Gladstone, in 1876, writing of the Turks in Europe, said

Mr.

They are not the mild Mahometans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind; civilization disappeared from view; for the guide of life they had a relentless fatalism; for its reward hereafter a sensual paradise.

Eloquent, sweeping portrayal, but defective. The Turk in Europe did not stand alone as the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. He was, if anything, outdone in ferocity

by his nomadic kinsman ef the Kara Kum desert. The Turkoman stopped short at cannibalism, but everything else in the category of savage crime he could consistently plead guilty to.

Here in this desert track, where Russia is now establishing her power, once flourished a great Christian people and a mighty empire. Meru, or Merv, is mentioned in the earliest records of the Aryan race. Later on it was the seat of a Christian archbishop of the Nestorian Church. Along the route where the railway is now being laid may be seen the remains of Christian churches. When the Arabs captured Merv, A.D. 666, they found a rich city. In 1221 Merv was besieged by a Mogul army, and so large had the city grown that it is said 700,000 of the inhabitants were put to the sword. Subsequently it had varying fortunes under Persian rule, till the Teke Turkomans came and left only a name and a tradition to tell where Merv once stood. This region was the cradle of the Parthian race, and the nucleus of the great Parthian empire. Its desolation is only superficial. The Hari Rud, Murghab, Kuskh, Tejend, and other rivers we have lately heard so much of, all rise in the mountains of Afghanistan, flow northwards, and get lost in the sands of the Kara Kum desert. In ancient times dams and canals were constructed to divert the waters, and so irrigate large tracts of country. This, no doubt, will once more be done. Along the highway from Merv to Herat the canal is still in existence. This appears to be the easiest of all approaches to Herat. The strategic importance of Merv, in fact, cannot be exaggerated. It is, in a sense, the key of the whole plateau of Central Asia, something like what Delhi is to India, or what Crew Junction would be here in England to an army advancing from Cumberland.

Skobeleff once said he would wring the Bosphorus out of Central Asia, meaning that he would threaten India, and then compromise for the long-dreamed of prize by the Golden Horn. That may still be the dream of Panslavist Jingoism, or it may not. In any case, as before remarked, the danger of playing with a neighbour ready at any time to say, whichever way you like it,' is one not to be slept over. To allow national policy to be lulled by the languor of the land of the lotus,' or any other cause, would be nothing short of suicidal and criminal folly. Equally guilty would be a blind, unreasoning Russo-phobism attributing sinister designs to every Russian advance. We have seen, on the testimony of our own officers, the great humanizing mission which Russia is carrying out.

Have we any right to interfere with that? Who is

there who would prefer barbaric devastation in any portion of God's earth to a civilization no matter how crude and naturally tyrannous? And if Russia has ambition, ulterior designs, call it what we will, can England condemn in others what in her own case has founded an Empire on which the sun never sets? Germany and Russia stand side by side. We have not yet heard of a Russo-Germanic war-and may never do so; we may never even hear of a Russian invasion of India, even though we annex Afghanistan-as annexed one day it must be or of the Tzar being crowned in the sacred city of Mash-had. Civilization at any rate will, for the nonce, rejoice at a real overland route to India. The Euphrates Valley route has long been the dream of engineers crying in the wilderness, but the rumours of war are now doing what the herald of peace could never acomplish. With our line at Sibo, and the Russian line at Merv, there will be a blank of only 719 miles, and excepting this, and the break by steamer from Baku to Michaelovsk on the Caspian, there will be continuous railway communication from Calais to Calcutta.

Russia will not even be content with an Indo-European line. Unless Mr. Colquhoun looks sharp she will have anticipated him with a Chinese-European trunk line. Merv would

be the junction. It would then stretch away to Bokhara and Tashkend, and onwards by the Chinese frontier to the Corea. The designs of Russia on this latter-mentioned portion of the Celestial dominions are well known, and Russian official organs make no secret of an ambition to carry out a great skeleton railway to this quarter. Commercial reasons alone would justify such a policy. In Russia nearly all the railways are owned by the State, and there can scarcely be a doubt but a line to the far East, such as Russia is aiming at, would be a great commercial success. Some Russian merchants, it is said, have offered to construct it, getting the Trans-Caspian line as far as it is laid at cost price. But Muscovite autocratism would never dream of loosing hold on such a valuable military weapon. Our policy is different. The leading point of Indian railway policy at present is to encourage private enterprise, where private enterprise will go in. Apparently there would be no lack of private capital to construct the Indo-Chinese line, if only the proper concessions be granted by the Celestials. At the present time English railway speculators are sounding the Court of Pekin as to the genuineness of recent protestations in favour of railway construction, so that in our day we shall probably see, not one, but two railway routes to China.

P. T. O'CALLAGHAN.

348

ART. V.-The State and the Unemployed.

Copy of the First Report of the Commissioners for Inquiry into the Administration and Operation of the Poor Laws in 1834. (Parl. Papers, 1885, H. C. 347. Issued Feb. 12, 1886.)

A RECENT writer has described the report which led to the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, as the most remarkable and startling document to be found in the whole range of English, perhaps, indeed, of all social history.' No one who has read the report will see any exaggeration in these words. Fiction can offer no parallel to its terrible facts and figures. The wildest imagination could not have conceived the scenes of degradation which were witnessed in England half a century ago, and which are here described in vivid detail. One would prefer to forget the record of shame. One would willingly leave to the minute historian the study of a document which marks by a clear line the close of the blackest and most ignominious period in our history. But to all who are striving to improve the condition of the people the report has too deep an interest to be thus put aside; for it proves that the blackness and the ignominy were due to the unwise action of the State. It shows, writ large, the inevitable dangers which attend a policy of public relief. In face of the old evils, and with the old errors still lingering in our minds, there is much to be learned from the story which it tells.

The Commissioners, one of whom, Mr. Chadwick, still survives, were appointed in 1832 to inquire into the operation and the administration of the Poor Laws in England and Wales, and to report their opinion as to what amendments might beneficially be made. Their inquiry was wide and careful. The evidence which they laid before Parliament 'comes,' they said, 'from every county, and almost every town, and from a very large proportion of even the villages in England. It is derived from many thousand witnesses, of every rank and every profession and employment, members of the two Houses of Parliament, clergymen, county gentlemen, magistrates, farmers, manufacturers, shopkeepers, artizans, and peasants.' If the vastness of the subjeet and the perplexing variety of the modes of administering the law, made the task of inquiry difficult, the unanimity of the witnesses made the final judgment easy. Almost with one voice they condemned the prevailing system. The Commissioners only ratified general opinion when they reported