RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 201, 3 December 1910, Page 10

RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA

A SUGGESTIVE STUDY OF CONDITIONS IN THE i'Ali EAST, ' The fact that (lostinies of no less imi portauce than those seemingly fougln out in the Russo-Japanese war are now I being evolved in the far East by economic forces in the slower and less dramatic, but surer, arbitrament of peace, is one of which, the world at large is more or less dimly conseious. immediately following the war there was an ap parently widespread feeling on the part of close observers who believed they understood the situation, that it would be only a matter of a few years at most before the armed coullict would break out again. Thus, for example, there was produced among other painstaking ana searching studies of the situation one by H. Putnam Weale, which bore the significant title, "The Truce in the i'ar East." But it is no exaggeration to say that confidence in the early re-opening of war is to-day somewhat less than iu was live years ago; attention is being I increasingly directed to economic ana political developments to which the war more or less directly or indirectly contributed. • When the Japanese captured Port Arthur and Dalny, and thus wrestea I from the Russians the ice-free port and terminal of the trans-Siberian railway upon which the Russians had set sucii store, and for which they had expended such treasures, it seemed that the "Russian advance" to the Pacific had definitely been, beaten back. And yet in the end history may prove that the baffled forcea of expansion which were thus denied an outlet at one point are sufficient ly strong to break through, elsewhere. The situation reminds one strongly of the answer given by an English professor of history to his own jquestion as to "why," not "how," it was that Columbus discovered America. His answer was, in brief, because the Turks were obstructing the ordinary trade routes to India and the East. As a result there was an increased economic pressure for the new passage to the East which Columbus set out to find. In a somewhat similar manner there is to-day at a distance 01 thousands of miles from Port Arthur and Dalny a trade route that is centuries old, and which, although it languished when the Eastern terminal oi the great transcontinental railroad was first achieved, seems again to-day to be the route along which history may see the slow accomplishment of things even more important than the capture of a supposedly impregnable fortress. "The Russian road to China" is the title of an uncommonly interesting and valuable book by Lyndon Bates, junr., recently issued by the Houghton Mifflin Company. "An ancient way leads across northern Asia to the Chinese borderland," writes Mr. Bates, at the opening of his work. "The steel of the great Siberian railway harnesses now the stretch which mounts the Urals, pierces the steppes, winds through the Altai foothills, and by cylopean cuts and tunnels girdles Lake Baikal. But from Verhneudinsk southward it has remained as an ancient postroad leading through the trans-Baikal highlands to the frontier garrison town of Kiahta. Over the Mongolian border at Maimachen, it has narrowed into a camel trail threading the barren hills to the encampment of the Tartar hordes at holy Urga. Thence it strikes across the sandy wastes of Gobi and passes the ramparts of the great wall of China, on its way toward Pekin and the Pacific."

An epic romance greater even than that which clings to the name of the Santa Fe trail to our own far West is to be found in the history of this route, which stretches not to the west, but to the east, from the kingdom of the Czar. Cossacks blazed its way, musketoonarmed Strelitz, adventuring traders, convicts condemned for sins or sincerity, land-seeking peasants, exiled dissenters, voyaging officials—all have trampled it. Hiving workmen under far-brought engineers have pushed the rails onward, bridging chasms and leaping defiles. Following eastward, unpeopled wastes have been sown with homesteads, hamlets have grown into cities, to the very gateway of China it has led the Muscovite. It is the path of Slavic advance. As.the railroad ties mark and measure the miles to-day, or as Indian skirmishes and massacres marked the old Santa Fe trail and the winning of 'the West, so it was marked bv conflict after conflict, such as the defeat of the Tartars by the prodigious Yermak and his Cossacks, who chose to face the bowmen of the khan rather than the soldiers of Ivan the Terrible.

If one will take a map of Asia and! examine closely the route of the transSiberian railway, he will note a place called Verhneudinsk, which is on the railway line a little east of Irkutsk and Lake Baikal. It is from this point that the ancient road of the camels and the caravans extends southward into Mongolia and then southwest to Pekin. Here, in fact, is the shortest route from Europe to the East. No measuring of the map is necessary to see that it is shorter than the route circling widely to the north, which the Russians have lost. "Here, through the defiles and the broken foothills of the Gobi plateau," writes Mr. Bates, 'lies the future redemption of the great unfettered land route to North China. The Chinese themselves are advancing to anticipate it. They have already built into Kalgan. To this trading centre 'across the pale a Russian railway may yet pass, and her colonists make fruitful the unpeopled wilds of Mongolia. In the cycles of progress old paths are reworn Down the ancient road lies the last avenue of advance. Eastward is Manchuria, where artillery and science grappling must decide the day with Japan. Southward is India, where England's guarded gateway among the hills can be opened only from behind. But into Mongolia fate may decree that the yellowcapped Cossacks shall lead once more the nation-absorbing march of the White Czar. For another memorable ride the Cossacks, who on their shaggy ponies led the long conquering way across the continent, may yet mount and take the road to China."

What makes Mr. Bates' book most valuable or rather what makes its chief value possible, is that in spite of the temptations for endless discussion which are offered by the thought of the new importance of this old caravan route, the author has shown sufficient «elf-re-pression to make his study of it coneise and condensed, so as to move quickly on to other questions of Russian and Chinese development. Indeed, "The Russian Road to China" is an unusual mixture of vivid photographic pictures painted along the way by the enthusiastic traveller and of searching inquiries into eeonomic and political conditions, which sufficiently indicate the work of the trained student and investigator. -Thus, for example, the story of the trip eastward to Irkutsk on the trans-Siberian railway is told in a vivid, journalistic manner, made additionally interesting by the reproduction of conversations on route, with various chance acquaintances representative of different classes and pursuits in the Russian life of the day. The possibilities of the railroad in developing a great and fertile region are given with a brevity which is commendable, since this is a familiar topic of which much has been written, and in .■Kjptfd to which it ia

once ;uid for all the claim that here may be one of the worlds great granaries. But of iar move interest is liie discussion of the social system in Siberia and of what it bodes ior the mure. This.system, according to which alinosL Uie wlioie rural population, even in the most thinly-settled districts, is gathered into villages and owns the land ill common, makes enormously for a deadly homogeneity. "The people are a mass, and units are lost in unity." But while the peasants are thus iost or frozen last 111 their lethargy of communism, the possibilities which they may achieve are shown by the energetic natures in the towns and cities who have climbed out and above them. "The way is long lor the peasants of Siberia—long and toilsome. But their vast patience is allied to as vast a courage, and both will lift them into the larger day. The measure passed by the last Douma, decreeing tne division of the Mir lands in severalty and private ownership 01 property, will be one of the most momeaitous and far-reaching ever legislatea for a people. It should end for rural Russia tile stagnation, and open an area of mighty endeavour and achievement.' Not least striking of the conditions of Siberian life is the presence of many races who live among the tolerant Siberians undiscriminated against and uncoerced. Outwardly it is a heterogeneous and disorganized jumble of nations and peoples, but closer study seems to impress upon the keen, observer the dominating and surviving qualities innate of the Slav, whose unalterable solidarity is beneath and behind the kaleidoscopic types of aboriginal tribes and exilea sectarians. By race-absorption, like that which has evolved Celts, Danes, Saxons, and Norsemen into English; British, Dutch, Swedes, Germans and Italians into Americans, the Slav is dissolving, transmitting to his own type and moulding to his own institutions the varied peoples. "Russia in Evolution" is the title of one of the most important of the chapters Mr. Bates hag written, for, while not assuming to predict what the future will bring forth, he has discriminatingly set before the reader the factors in the situation as it appears to-day, and shown how in many ways conditions in Russia are, after all, little different from those which obtain elsewhere. It must be said, however, that his picture of Russian despotism seems to err in being greatly too favorable. As a supplement to this account of Russia, there follows a chapter on "The story of the hordes," which is an illuminated study of the history and present-day impotence of the inhabitants of Mongolia, whose ancestors made the unmatched cavalry of Tamerlane and whose descendants may yet play a larger part in the world if this old route of the caravanse becomes again a highway of trade and the means of developing the interior of China.