This aversion to the Englishman is manifested in many ways; it is well nigh atmospheric. There is one bit of Russian history, apparently not widely known, which seems to explain this attitude in a measure, and certainly throws light on Russia's procedure in Persia, and for that matter her whole propaganda throughout the breadth of Asia. When the Czar Paul I., in 1801, combined with Napoleon for an expedition overland with the avowed purpose of ruining the British establishments in India, making the native sovereigns dependents of Russia instead of England, and acquiring commercial mastery of the whole region, he wrote in his voluminous orders to Orlof Denisoff, ataman of the Don Cossacks, who composed the Russian force: "Be sure to remember that you are only at war with the English, and are the friend of all who do not give them help. On the march you will assure men of the friendship of Russia."

Russia's progress to the southward and eastward for the past seventy years has been, and to-day is, a literal fulfillment of those mandates in their entirety. It is customary to call that progress mysterious, but a far greater puzzle than the Russian purpose is what England means to do, the meaning of what she has already done. In Persia, where the evidence of British recession is so plentiful and where every day the Russian arm, unchecked, stretches out farther and farther, one can hardly understand what the British Premier meant when he told the British

people they would soon have a chance to know more about the Persian Gulf. They seem apt to know a great deal less first, and the intimate history of what has happened since then is still a sealed book which Lord Salisbury's government does not seem inclined to open.

He

Sir Henry Drummond Wolfe, former representative of Great Britain at the Court of Teheran, secured for English corporations, by virtue of the loans, concessions of all sorts, looking to the development of Persia, banking charters, mining charters and the like. retired from the post leaving the English in possession of material rights and privileges throughout the Kingdom, and in control of the custom house receipts of the Gulf ports as security for interest on monetary advances. That position the present British government has to all appearances abandoned. In England's refusal to guarantee the Persian loan

of the approaching lines have already been laid, but it is done without any flourish of trumpets, and the regions through which the routes lie are remote from the paths of general travel, so that little is learned of the progress made.

It is necessary to believe that the railroad. line from Tiflis to Kars will connect, sooner or later, with the road through Asia Minor, for which concession was not so long ago granted by the Porte. By way of Tiflis, Baku and the Transcaspian line from Krasnovodsk, by Kars, Khoi, Tabriz and Teheran, or yet again by another line which has been surveyed directly between Tabriz and Baku, touching the coast at Astara, the termination of the Russian land boundary, Russia will then possess unlimited transportation to the Trans-Siberian line, and so to the Pacific, to say nothing of the possibly more important approach to the point of British contact below Herat. In the labor of surrounding India, Constantinople is not forgotten. Russia crowds both ways and all ways.

One small incident in connection with the

Asia Minor concession shows how narrowly the Russians have watched developments in the East, how long in advance they have planned the steps which are now being taken, and with what nicety they have sowed throughout all Asia the seed from which they are eventually to reap such a stupendous harvest. In Trebizond there lived a Russian, who held the billet of Consul for Riza, a small and altogether unimportant seacoast village some leagues away, which he seldom visited. In 1899 he had been for sixteen years in Trebizond, engaging in no business, but drawing pay as consul all the time, living comfortably and in good neighborhood with all men, and in no wise burdened with the duties of his consulate. He had served in the Russian army, in which, his neighbors understood, he had ranked as a colonel of engineers. When the grant for the German railroad through Mesopotamia was announced,

as the first fruits of Emperor William's pilgrimage to the East, the consul at Riza suddenly packed up and started for the interior, whence, after some days, he went to Constantinople and then to Russia. The news that followed was the news of the Russian concession. The consul for Riza, colonel of engineers, had merely been waiting in Trebizond quietly, à la Russe, for sixteen years, and the thing he had been put there to wait for had happened. Such instances are illuminating. In their light the admission by England, at last, of a Russian consul to Bombay, always refused hitherto, takes on a new meaning.

But whatever the ultimate object, it seems beyond question that the opening of the rich. Persian fields to trade by means of railroads and wagon roads will prove their regeneration. In nothing is the difference between the two régimes more manifest than in the roads on

RUSSIANS OF RECENT MANUFACTURE the two sides of the Aras river. In the Russian territory the military road, running south from Akstafa, is superb, and is still in process

of betterment, down as far as the rough pass which nature has cut through the mountain chain bordering the river. There, apparently of purpose, the road-makers have stopped work, and the way through the cut, running for the most part in the bed of a turbulent stream, is at some seasons wholly impassable. To the traveler that is a foretaste of Persia. There is a similar gorge on the Persian side, after which one comes out on what a Persian is content to call a highway. It is broken by landslides, creeks and irrigation ditches, and though in some places fairly good in spite of neglect, is for a great part of the way indistinguishable from the waste of mud, gravel and rock, or the water courses through which many localities it runs.

in

Persian inactivity in the matter of road. building is, of course, due in great measure to national poverty and inertia, but for years, until the latest understanding with Russia, there entered in, also, the theory upon which the Ottoman government has so stub