The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 11, 1915. RUSSIA AS A COLDNISER.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXVII, Issue 86, 11 August 1915, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 11, 1915. RUSSIA AS A COLDNISER.

One part cf [Russian civilisation ,tl.at E iglish people liave so far fade I to, 'take into account is ( .tUe,jyea| ■Qolonjn-, ing work that her settlers are doing hi Central-Asia and Siberia^says iJie Auckland Star, and goes on to point out that even hi Russia itself the aristocratic classes and the intelligents themselves know little or nothing of 'the great movement Eastward that is steadily going on amongst the peasantry. Books of travel and description find no place in Russian literature, and neither the Government nor the j)eople practice the Western arts of advertising. The emigration is chiefly amongst the peasants—that is, the workers who, until this era, have been attached to the soil, and the maimer in which they travel hears a curious likeness to that in which their remote ancestors roamed out of Asia westward into Europe. They are in a much larger proportion to 'the-, total population of Russia than the agricultural and pastoral labourers are in England, and even during their serfdom they had a stronger hold upon j;he land than the English farm laborens have yet. They are being crowded out of their native villages, and bufore the war began streams of colonists were making their way daily across Central Asia, the great and almost untenanted tract bordered by Asia Minor. Persia, Afghanistan, and the Chinese Empire. From the same source we learn that though in its origin the emigration is a spontaneous impulse amongst the overcrowded villagers, it is engineered and directed by the Russian Government for political ends. Yet there is something admirable, as well as something questionable-, in the paternalism of CV.ardom. Kor political purposes the Government has pushed emigration and settlement farther and farther East, even over the borders of .Northern Persia and of China, and it extends its dominion by giving military protection to its settlers, who no doubt are in need of it. The emigration is as carefully directed as it could be under State Socialism. When a family wishes to emigrate, it must send a khodok or messenger in advance, to travel around amongst the places ready for settlement. He chooses a plot, and takes it in the name of the family that sent him. He may act for three, families, but not for more, and he generally travels with two or three other messengers. Numbers of villagers, sometimes all the inhabitants of a village, go • together. On his return preparations are at once made, and the peastake leave of their old homes. This colonisation, it is stated, is flianging the whole surface of Central! Asia., and Russianising it by a proc->\J

similar to that which has Anglicised Maorilaiid. Croat tract* of those! lands are almost untenanted wildovUC3SOS. Wherever the Russians come into contact with other races, they do not absorb or denationalise them, nor, on the other hand, do they give them local self-government. They force their own laws upon them, but hav? uo design to destroy nationality. The farther they extend their dominion.' the more varieties of race do they inelude. The general conclusion arrived at is that the expansion of Russia must be taken into account in any future settlement of Asiatic boundaries. It is too big a thing, too signi+M-ent, to be ignored. They have pushed into Armenia, across the Caucasus, into Northern Persia, and are beginning to make their way into Mongolia. Central Asia, and Siberia, are colonial extensions of Russia, and their borders touch the disputed territories of ancient kingdoms and empires, like Persia and China. With these, too, some kind of struggle must come, though it may be not in war, but by commercial development and by settlement, The colonists also themselves, as a more modern and independent type, must react at some future date upon: the Russians "who have stayed at home." .Meanwhile they are a factor to be reckoned with by all Russia's' enemies, as the colonials have been in the case of Britain.