THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY WEDNESDAY, JULY 8, 1908. ENGLAND AND RUSSIA.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9136, 8 July 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY WEDNESDAY, JULY 8, 1908. ENGLAND AND RUSSIA.

The attitude of hostility and suspicion with which England and Russia came to regard each other during the last three-quarters of the nineteenth century has sometimes led Englishmen and Russians to forget the more friendly relations which long subsisted lietween them to their common advantage. Our merchants penetrated to Russia in Tudor days and met with the triendliest of welcomes. Ivan the Terrible at one time asked Queer Elizabeth to promise him an asylum in England, in case he should ever be compelled to f»ee!c one. He even suggested, we learn from Hakluyt, "that the Queen's Majestic and he might be to all their enemyes joined as one, and that England and Russland might be in all manners as one." The latter proposal would have been rather difficult of realisation, and the sagacious Tudor statesman did not see their way to accepting this very comprehensive form of alliance. They were content to promote the trade between the two countries, and to avoid dangerous political entanglements. The Czar Boris chose England as one of the Western lands to which he'sent'a certain number of youthful

Russians to b° educated. Peter the Great, came and lived and learned and worked amongst the English himself, and was anxious for an alli-i ance with them. All through the eighteenth centu-y there were warm advocates of a British policy at the Russian Court, and the great struggle with Napoleon made the two States allies against the Power which is now the ally of one of them and the close friend of the other.