THE HINDOO-RUSSIAN PLOT: ITS PROSPECTS.

Waikato Times, Volume XXIV, Issue 1987, 2 April 1885, Page 4

THE HINDOO -RUSSIAN PLOT: ITS PROSPECTS.

U\»i X this hi ading the Piontor Mail of the "JSili ■! uiuuy comments .is follows on Mi Yanibe iy's artiole in tlic Nineteentli Centuiv entitled "Will Russia eonquei India ?" :— Recognising to the full the gravity of the state of thinga thus reviewed, we slumlii still be far from regarding the " loi^.ral necpssity "of Russia's continued advance in the diiection of the south as a foice which can only be arrested —as Mr Y.uuU'iy suggests —by the Indian Ocean. The absorption of the Cential Asian Khanates is one thing, and the conflict ■with the whole power of the British Empire, which Russia will have to face when she unmasks her real attack on this country, is quite another. In answer to the question with which Mr VambtSiy head-, hs present essay, " Will Russia conquer India," we reply, "Never!' a-, confidently as the careless Radical at home who meiely icsts Ins denial on the le a3suiances winch Mr Gladstone h.is obtained in convciaatiou with Mad une i'c NovikolT. The British nation, as leo'-ufc yous has shown us, is cipable ot infinite folly in trusting, at its own estimate, a Government which rests in chains to confidence altogethci on its professions. That Russia •would conquer India if Mr Gladstone's admiirsfcration were an ctctn.il condition of Diit.sli existence, may be conceded fieeh, but by the tune the piocess of conquest lias begun the delusions which at pi <bant cloud the popular understanding might be counted to disappeai. The British empire is too luige an enterprise for any one Cabinet —even though endowed with the faculties in that direction which distinguish the Cabinet now in power —to shipwieck it utterly. The present regime may be found in the long account to ba\c involved the empiie in hideous and desolating warfare; and through national c.itastrophe3, associated with sacrifices of a very exhaustiug kind, may the nation be constrained to work its way back to political sanity from the melancholy infatuation of a foreign policy which for ytai3 past has been inviting insult and disaster. But let the great political delusions which reign supreme for the moment be once blown away by the cannon of an enemy, and the latent sticn^'th of the empire will then be restoied to activ ity and the obscured greatness of the British power re asserted. The .stun ilus which should meanwhile operate to in ike Englishmen who are alive to the true tendencies of our present behaviour before tho world, exert themselves to the utmost to get facts recognised, need not bo a pessimistic conviction that the sun of England has set, and that tho later destinies of our country must follow those of Spain into the dNgi.ice of an isolation which some Ruliual adviseis would court as a democi.itic tnumph. No cause which i 3 \itiht>Ld by .my pnnciplc is at work to bung about the fall of the British empire, as the fall of the Spanish empire was biought on by the inhcient vices of its impei ial policy. The Government of this country by England is a magnificent task, tending to the civilisation of vast masses of mankind, and canied on in that spirit of devotion to duty, which, as Lord DufFeun bO truly said on first taking over the reins here, has distinguished all the Viceioys, however divergent from one another in their views of Indian requirements, whom Great Biitain has sent out to administer her authority in the E .st. Statesmen may blunder, and schools of politn il writeis may misunderstand the mission of their lace, but blunders are retnev able through suffering in the long run, and falsa reasoning ultimately finds its level. The moial necessity of British lnllucnce m the world is a$ great now as it ever lias been —and greater —and while tint inner condition of things cm be clearly discerned, one should not surrender to despair because the folly of a single administration has squan lered some of the securities we once po-wssed from the uninterrupted and peaceful cxpnnsion of that influence and lias brought us within measurable distances of terrible struggle? which nn^'ht have been altogether avoided, <)i (our&o it is perfectly tiue, as Mr YauiiK y siys, that the deoign cf conqiß'iing India is a fixed idea with Russian statesmen. But uufoitunately he is quite in e'lior w hen lie says that nobody to-day ent ji tains any doubt of it. One man who doubts it for instance, and goes much further indeed —who strenuously repudiates the belief —is Mr Gladstone ; .md it w just because the predominant ]>uty in England, following the lead of then chief, put the notion quite aside as a mciij i\tiavagance of alarmists, that the intention so correctly imputed to Kuotu becomes a serious danger. Just beeaiiiccvciy intention, one by one, which R'is>ta has formed in connection with In i Cential Asian aivance for the last twenty years has been doubted in turn, and indignantly denied by lead11. o' British politicians till it became an aeeoinplisiied fact, —we ate landed now in tin 1 hiiinihatini/ entanglements which Mr \umliei} conceives to mean that the q ineis piactically up for us. The truth dt tho matter i.s that, though for students or Central Asian politics like Mr Yamb- < 13. it is inconceivable that any sane man can be blind to the meaning of events which spell certain conclusions, as plainly as letters spell a word, we are still in the stage of having to argue the reasonnbhncsa of these conclusions against a (lead block of ipnoraut apathy at home \\ Inch guarded fiom thrusts which would otboiwiac bring home to its inner intelligence a salutary consciousness of it*, ignorance by the self-interested exertiuiiT of political partisans. If the truth or the matter which Mr Vamboiy prematun ly assumes to be everywhere underbtijud could but be made clear to a com111 Hiding majoiity of Englishmen, the bittlu of good sense and sound policy would ha\c been piactically won. Wp < mild guard this country now fiom the po^ibility of ever having a Russian foot aeio-s its frontiers if it were not that the commanding majority of Englishmen at pi 1 Milt belie\e wo alieady possess a Niilbeient security against this in tlie iis^ui.ince 1 that tho Russians will never do anything so wicked as to try and come. Tin' cnipiiu in this matter is like a house gin nurd fiom the nursery with the open .it ui»ht, on the assump110111 1011 that then; cannot be any people in tin stt< et so riantfhty as to want to come in uninvited. People who read the sub |i if up 01 talk to those who have moved iHc'y in Russian society, know that Russian generals and Ministers discuss the conquest of India as the problem of then national life, without any more <-( n ,c of the infamy in which their ambition is steeped, than a band of Gieek bngands on a mountain might be con.seious of, while Englishmen, as a rule, go on disbtlicving the zcpoit of their plans mid aspirations fiom sheer inability to naliMJ such a destitution of moral 'u > ;ii tin -^titi of thiii^s de-jciibed inijlh-, (.lailizl' Hits c, he, U a saying ( eli'jed a-? a joke by people who fail in tliou 1 mds to undo stand th.it it embodies a l,'i ivc tiuth constituting the key to a coiiipielun ion of Russian policy. If T\luit Mi Vamb'iy says about nobody doubting the leal stale of the facts were tine, then he might have sp.ued himself the tiouble of wilting his piesent article. Thu clleet it .linis at producing would have been alieady wiought; the warning it conveys would have been needless. But the designs of Russia are not yet undeistood by Great Britain, thpugh wiitten across the sky of Northern India a^ plainly as the auioia borealis on Arctic lion/ons. This i< why the continued i< it' lation of the facts, the repeated ie- \ iv.il of the evidence, and the lec.apitulation of the tale Mr Yambt-ry now tells aic heartily to be applauded.

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