Riy May number of that Nestor of monthly miscellanies, Blackwood's Kdinburgh Magazine, which is as vigorous as ever though it pearson its front the number pecocxxx1, opens with an excellently written and most informing article on "The Russian Acquisition of Manchuria." Most of us who take any interest in watching the way in which Russia is constantly adding to her Asiatic dominions have a vague idea of the devices by which she acquired Viadivostock and the Amur region from China, and we gladly read the details of the diplomacy involved as shown in this short history; not short but that it is complete, and almost as good reading as a romance. "He would be a cold-blooded Russian," says the writer, "who could repress feelings of exultation on looking round on this fair dominion of the East. Such a trophy of the genius of empire as the acquisition of any country as large as France, with a coast line of 600 miles, would, at its lowest expression, move the dullest people on earth. But this was no gaunt desert in the wilds of Africa, no cannibal-haunted swamp at the uttermost verge of the ocean, but an integral extension of their own domain, needing only existing roads to be continued into the new territory to weld it solidly into the empire. And the happy combination of imperial glory with the opening up of boundless prospects of material wealth to the toiling masses which is provided by the new possession, united all classes, from the Czar on his throne to the meanest field-labourer, in the national chorus of jubilation over this the grandest of all Russian annexations."
The writer goes on to show the advantage which every Russian proconsul who pushes forward his country's landmarks has in the security he feels that every one in the empire will applaud his audacity, even if it may be formally disavowed for reasons of State. "No visions of Exeter Hall, or Aborigines Protection Society, or Peace Society, or Anti-This and Anti-That Society, divert him-from the straight course, and make him do what he knows to be wrong, merely to placate the self-elected but imperfectly instructed censors of a free country. Nothing of all that. The Russian officer at the frontier is bold and free, living every moment of his life in full confidence of the applause of a hundred millions of people who forgive j everything to audacity.
And if we but reflect on the manner in which the British empire has been built up by the heroism of adventurers who conquered the world often with a halter round their neck, we may the more readily conceive the accumulated energy of men less heroic who have always their sovereign and countrymen to cheer them on, instead of checking, entrapping, reproving, or even, in extreme cases, betraying them."
All this is preliminary to the story itself, and it is premised that it is still not publicly known whether it is to Mouravieff-Amurski alone that the acquisition of this territory, which extended Russia's domain to the Pacific, and gave her there 600 miles of coast with the freedom of the Pacific Ocean, is due; and how he persuaded the Manchu officials in whose charge they were to surrender Northern and Eastern Manchuria "without a drop of blood spilt, without troops or appliances of any kind, or even the consideration of glass beads and printed kerchiefs, for which savages have been wont to alienate their patrimony." The story begins with the disgracefully abortive attack by the English and French fleets, during the Crimean war, on Petropanlovski. Ihe writer does not explain how the attack failed. "Certain it is, however," he says, "that the officers and crews of the English ships were mortified to the verge of mutiny; and as the English Admiral had the misfortune to (accidentally) shoot himself, the British tar, out of his limited but idiomatic vocabulary, summed up the whole business in an epigram better suited to the age of. Smollett than to the modern printed page." Though the English and French fleets had withdrawn, the Russian Governor knew that they would return and that the place was untenable. Favoured by the belief then prevalent that Saghalien was a peni sala, not an island, he in April, 1855, moved the whole population of Petropaulovski to the mouth of the Amur, where Count Mouravieff was Governor, and the guns brought from Petropaulovski were used to fortify Nicholaiefsk, which was farther protected by the English having neither charts nor pilots for the mouth of the river. This was all nominally still Chinese territory, and the small Russian settlements were only allowed by permission of the treaty of Nerchinsk made in 1689 between Russia and China, Anxious to get supplies from Russian Siberia down the Amur to Nicholaiefsk, Mouravieff asked permission from the Chinese to use the river, and it was refused. He took the law into his own hands, "and the Amur was soon put to regular use as if it had been the Volga." But what enabled him to take this high-handed course with impunity was that China was distracted at the time by the Taiping Rebellion, and hostilities with England. "Could any combination of cirenmcumstances be imagined that would have been more favourable to the precarious lodgment effected by Russia on Manchurian soil? The stars in their courses seemed to be fighting for the infant settlements. Che only two Powers which were interested—one directly, the other very indirectly—in the operations of the Russians, were not only both seriously engaged elsewhere, but were actually at war with each other!" And so Mouravieff extracted from the Manchu officials the Treaty of Aigun of May, 1858, which conceded to Russia the free navigation of the Amur, gave her the Amur province between the Yablonnoi mountains on the north and the left bank of the river, and accepted the right bank of the Amur as being in the joint occupation of Russia and China, only requiring some little delimitation, When doubts were thrown on the validity of this Treaty, China was unfortunately in the throes of the Anglo-French operations at Peking, and Ignatieff hurried to Peking, and persuaded the Imperial government, harassed and depressed, not only to confirm the Treaty, but to cede absolutely the whole territory east of the Ussuri. "And so, by a stroke of pen, without a shot fired, or quid pro quo in any form, the magnificent province of Primorsk, with its 600 miles of coast, was made over to Russia, and China with her own hand shut herself out for ever from all access to the Japan Sea."
The writer of this excellent article, in which many will recognise a well-known old China hand, goes on to give some account of the way in which Chung How and Hung Kun were overreached by Russian diplomacy in the matters of Kuldja and the Pamirs, but these are beside the main purpose of the article. "It is not uncommon," he says, "to hear the Chinese lauded as astute diplomatists, but it evidently depends much on whom they have to diplomatist with. In the hands of a Mouravieff or an Ignatieff, or any other eff' or ' off," the astute Chinese always prove themselves as helpless as sucking infants. The gracious presentation (to Hung, Kin) of the splendid map by the Russians is much of a piece with the exquisite courtesy of the Russian command dant, Colonel Skopolofsky, at the Manchurian frontier station of Hunchun, in teaching the Chinese commander how to build his forts and place and work
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.