"GENERAL IGNATIEFF once explained to me," says Mr. Labouchere in the last "Truth," "the mystery of Russian diplomacy. 'We put,' he said, our foot outside our frontier. When other Powers call attention to this, we hasten to say that we will withdraw it. We do so half-way, and thus the question is peacefully settled, but we get one-half of what As a matter of high ays admired this mode of getting the cherry by successive nibbles."
As Mr. Labouchere remarks, there is much to be commended in this simple, but successful mode of acquit sition. Assimilation by nibbling is by no means t" be despised as a method of putting on weight. In the case of a great country it prevents indigestion on the one hand, and on the other tends to the preservation of the peace. What might be worth fighting for in the lump is hardly noticed when taken piecemeal, and Russia has been more than ordinarily clever in her method of carrying out the principle explained by the late General. She now stands the greatest continental power of all time, and second in total area of empire to Great Britain only. How closely her growth has followed the nibbling Loan may be seen from a hasty sketch of her development. To go back no further than 300 years, we find her under Peter the Great, whose exploits need no recapitulation. Before the eighteenth century had expired, the Crimea had been made independent of the Turks and the Black Sea was free. The dismemberment of Poland was completed. Wars against Napoleon occupied the next twenty y during and after which Russia tended her influence over the Persian dominions about the Caspian. How she has lost no opportunity of attacking Turkey is too well-known to need recall. How her successive efforts have resulted in reducing the Mohamedan State in Europe to a wretched territory with fewer inhabitants than the British Capital, how the little kingdoms and_principal ities carved out of the Turk's dominions archeing gradually brought under the Muscovite thumb nas recently been shown. All this is known to the man in the street. Bnt it was not to these things probably that -the cynical General referred. He was evidently thinking of the tactics followed by Russian diplomatists in Asia, where the policy has always been to advance and retire precisely as he describes. In Siberia there was no question of turning back. Yermak and his Cossack followers took the whole of that vast territory with scarcely a rebuff in the incredibly short space turer's start being 1581, that of reaching Okhotsk, 1636. On the Amur, however, they came into contact with the Chinese, for whom they had so much respect that the nibbling, though never entirely given up, Was sometimes intermittent and always cautious. Three years after the opening of Shanghai, however, we find the first steamer on the Amur, and while the Triad Rebels were busy, Russia occupied posts in Saghalien. Another bite was taken when the Arrow war was in progress; then, by the treaty of Aigun, Russia not only got the left bank of the Amur for herself, but also acquired the maritime province of the Ussuri.
It was in the seventies that the greatest advances were made in Central Asia, when by successive nibbles the various Khanates were one by one broug'it under the influence of the White Czar, and Persia became more and more subservient. The Ili question is an admirable sample of the advance and semiretirement alluded to by General Ignatieff.
Coming to recent times, we find much the same result in the Far East. To-day Russia is practically supreme in Manchuria; she has acquired an altogether disproportionate area for her settlement in Tientsin, she docs as she likes at Newchwang, while at} Port Arthur and Talienwan sh nds on terra firma that is ab-utely her own—under a lease. Corea she wishes to appear quiescent, so that Japanese susceptibilities may not be offended, but the Russian papers are plainly outspoken in their references to the Hermit Kingdom. It is to be Russia's, and Russia's alone. The " Novoe Vremya" and its contemporaries recognise the reasonableness of the Japanese desire for expansion, but they point to the Pscific Islands, and especially to the Philippines which, they say, Russia would aid Japan in acquiring. It is part and parcel of the Russi" policy not to fight. When the European nations began to show their teeth after the 1877-8 attack on Turkey, the diplomats of St. Petersburg left the Balkan Peninsula severely alone, When China—even China—really meant fighting, if need were, for Ku'dja some thirty years ago, the graceful retirement act was repeated. Daring the past year or so Russia has given her most solemn pledges to the United States, to Japan, and to Europe generally that she will respect the integrity of the Chinese Empire, that she will seek no selfish advantage, that she will restore Manchuria and give up Newchwang. To the Japanese she has been more than complaisant over Corea. How are all these promises to be kept? According to General Iguatief's description, or not at all? The answer to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.