tection of his imperial brother of the east,' who may be prevailed on to send to Madrid some half dozen thousand good Muscovite troops, as a household guard and security for the royal person, against the plots of the Descamisados.' An alliance with the United States of North America, we may be well assured, will be one of the most intimate. Political agents and merchants will open a communication with the east. Our commerce will be ruined-reports will be spread of the intention of Russia to restore the Mogul, and re-establish the overthrown musnuds, and thus pave the way for the invasion of India. Cadiz and Corunna, and possibly Lisbon, will be crowded with Russian and Spanish troops ostensibly for the succour of Ireland, in which President Jackson will co-operate, and the Canadas will fall as a matter of course. It is but a sort of melancholy consolation that France must be involved in the same ruin with ourselves. The existence of their free constitution, with the palladium of a free press, will be too obnoxious to be permitted to endure. No respect will be entertained either for the French chambers, or the English parliament, Our House of Commons will be divided, the landed gentry will go down to the house,' threaten the government, and vituperate the emperor. This will be a groundwork of complaint for the insults passed upon a faithful friend and ally, (what! after he has despoiled us of every thing?) by the turbulent assembly of the English commons. We shall then go to war with the Czar, (we think, indeed, it would be full time ;) the Chancellor of the Exchequer knows not how to raise the necessary supplies; the quarter's revenue exhibits a progressive falling off. propriety of spoliating the great landed, church, and funded properties, will now be familiarly agitated.' Public credit receives a shock-consols fall as low as in 1797; all the branches of the public service will be in arrears; and, what is worst of all, ' those moveable fortresses,' which it gladdens the heart of an Englishman to look on, 'those stupendous masses now reposing on their shadows,' as Mr. Canning beautifully described them, will now be discovered, by reason of the suspension of annual and necessary repairs, to be scarcely sea-worthy: filth, rust, rot and corrosion will have already made havoc in every beam, plank, and stancheon belonging to them.'

The

While our navy is gradually falling into this state of complete ineptitude, the Russian navy is rapidly increasing to one hundred sail of the line, manned with expert seamen that have been bred on the lakes' of Marmora, Black Sea, Aral, &c., advantages which, if Buonaparte had possessed them, would, Colonel Evans thinks, have given a new turn to the war. With regard to this making of 'seamen' in close seas, the late Admiral Greig seems

to

to have entertained another, and, we rather suppose, a sounder opinion than that of Colonel Evans. The Empress Catharine having visited the admiral's ship, on returning from a two months' cruize in the Baltic, said, 'Admiral, I suppose you have now capital seamen, and that my fleet is equal to an English one of the same force.'Madam, replied Greig, do not deceive yourself; to make good seamen, we must keep the sea day and night.' 'How,' said the Empress, have you not been at sea for two months?' It is true,' the admiral replied, I have been out of port, but can hardly call it being at sea; seldom out of sight of land; no tides to contend with; no night; but, if we can expect to cope with the English, we must be at sea at all times, and in all seasons, surrounded by shoals, and driven by the tides, rapid and uncertain as they frequently are, sometimes in nights that are seventeen hours long. Nothing but such practice, Madam, can form perfect seamen, fit to contend with those of England and Holland.'*

More evils than those we have here enumerated are predicted by our Cassandra-like Colonel, should the Russians get possession of Constantinople. But, fortunately for the nerves of his readers, the μavrɛus nanay has not left these ominous forebodings without a chance of preventing them, if taken in time; and his prescription is, an armed intervention'-an Anglo-French expeditionary armament of not less than fifty thousand troops, and twenty sail of the line; two-thirds of the latter to be furnished by us, and twothirds of the army by the French, to proceed immediately to the scene of action, that is, to the Black Sea, to be supported by a concentration of the Swedish, Prussian, and Austrian armies, towards their eastern frontiers, and the assemblage of an allied fleet at Stockholm. This measure, we agree with him, if he could bring it to bear, would restrain at once the overweening Muscovite's ambition and arrogance, and subdue the senseless pride of the Asiatic.' His plan may be a good one, and all that he says we doubt not be accomplished; but as to the co-operating allies, he has already told us that little of a spontaneously energetic character is to be augured from the court of Vienna; that it may happen to personate both the dupe and the accomplice; that as the price of complicity (qu. confederacy?), a province or two will be readily conceded by Russia, and honours and applause showered on the celebrated Austrian minister; and that the whole will terminate in sending back, with all practicable speed, that imperial house to its original little domain of Hapsburg,'-and deservedly, we say, if Austria should be wicked or stupid enough to play so suicidal a part as Colonel Evans is pleased to sketch out for the heirs of Rodolph of Hapsburg.

* Jones's Travels in Russia, &c.

Then,

Then, Frederic William of Prussia is, by intermarriage, related to Nicholas, in the same degree that the Emperor Francis was to Napoleon, but with infinitely greater inducement to a collusion of views. And, lastly, as the son of the ex-King of Sweden is (or is to be) married into the house of Orange, so closely and confidentially allied with that of Russia, the succession of the family of Bernadotte seems very questionable, and consequently his measures can scarcely be unembarrassed, conscious as he must be of the illegitimacy of his title, and that the muzzles of the Russian guns are almost within sight of his councilchamber.' If we had not abundant proofs how readily the ties of relationship give way to political expediency, we should despair entirely of Colonel Evans's confederation. We have no apprehensions, however, of the civilized nations of the west submitting to receive laws from the northern barbarians: and, without wishing to undervalue the talent of this author, hope we may be permitted to say that he has written too rashly and hastily, considering the extent and complexity of his subject.

We agree then with the general principle laid down by the writer of A Few Words,' that the extension of Russian dominion would not add any thing to its power of aggression, and might very considerably weaken it by lengthening its line of defence; that an extension of the dominion of Russia over the rude nations, its neighbours, is not so much an increase of resources as a channel for draining them ;' and that the secondary estates of the continent, in the event of Russian aggression, would, no doubt, range themselves under the banners of their more immediate neighbours the French, even if their interests and their inclinations did not determine them to that side.' And as to this country, the author says,—

'I may assert, without fear of contradiction, that, since the period of the great territorial acquisitions of Russia-since the Turks were compelled to cede Bessarabia and half of Moldavia; since the second partition of Poland, and the conquest of Georgia, Great Britain has, notwithstanding the enormous dilapidation of capital occasioned by the intervening war of the French Revolution, made strides in wealth, and in power the consequence of wealth, previously unexampled. What measure of progress shall we take? The extension of surface under the plough, or the general improvement in the arts of tillage; the growth of our commerce in every sea and every port of the world where commodities can be exchanged for commodities; the prodigious increase of the quantity of manufactured produce, and of mechanical inventions, yearly accelerating the ratio of that increase; the progress of building in every direction; the constant additions to enjoyment and convenience; former luxuries now become ordinary comforts, and the

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the class of those enjoying them increased beyond precedent.'A Few Words, pp. 37, 38.

But the case with Russia is widely different.

Oppressed as she is,' says the Bishop of Calcutta, by an autocratical government, with an all-powerful nobility, with an half-digested feodal system, with an incapacitating spirit of corruption in every branch of administration, with foreigners in possession of every post of honour or profit, it is not too much to say that Russia has reached in the present reign (that of Alexander) the highest pinnacle of rank and power which her circumstances can ever admit her to attain.'*

The Bishop observes that no government has so little command of money, with so much real wealth, or so small an available military force in comparison with the amount of her standing army. The truth is, the accounts of the Russian army, of its discipline and valour, have been most grossly exaggerated. It never amounted, at any one time, to 400,000 efficient troops, spread over a surface equal to one-tenth part of the habitable globe. Its commissariat is in a miserable state; and as to its discipline, we can state on good authority, that when the battering train was brought up before Varna, it was found that the shot would not fit the cannon, and they were obliged to send to Moscow and Petersburg for a supply. As to their valour, it is, probably, on with that which is common to most armed bodies. want of discipline in the Turks, judging from the results, could only have been compensated by, if not a superior, at least an equal degree of valour. The long protracted sieges of Chumla and Varna have fully established this point. Here the Russians have gained no reputation, but, on the contrary, have lost character, by purchasing the surrender of the latter fortress from a Macedonian traitor, half Greek and half Turk, the price, as we have been informed, being 500,000 roubles, argent comptant, protection to himself and followers, and an establishment on the Crimea, where this base wretch will live suspected and despised, and perhaps die à la Czar.

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In Persia it required two campaigns, with the best soldiers that Russia could bring forward, to subdue the undisciplined troops of Abbas Mirza, and a whole campaign has been wasted before the entrenched camps of Varna, Chumla, and Silistria, the losses of which have required a new levy of one hundred thousand men (some make it double). The Russians fought well, it is true, on their own soil, against Napoleon, but without once gaining a decisive battle; and, in conclusion, to use the words of LieutenantColonel Evans himself,

* Journal of a Tour in Russia, &c., by the Rev. T. James, A,M.

'Suffice

Suffice it to say,-that since about a hundred thousand Frenchmen, incumbered with twenty thousand sick and wounded, were enabled, though two thousand miles distant from their own frontiers, to remain unmolested masters for nearly seven weeks of the antique capital of the invaded empire, situated as it is in the very heart of its dominion, eventually also only voluntarily retiring from it, while still decidedly superior in the field,—it must in candour be conceded that the invulnerability of Russia is yet to be proved.'-pp. 218, 219.

And this admission is made after all the gloomy prognostics with which the gallant colonel had shaken the nerves of his readers.

Leave we, then, the west to take care of itself, and say a few words on the too oft repeated and hackneyed topics, a Russian invasion of India, and the destruction of our India and China trade, by diverting it into a new channel overland. On these subjects,— which since the days of the Czar Peter have become, as we have elsewhere observed, a sort of periodical nervous intermittent,Colonel Evans appears to us to be completely floating adrift, without sail or compass. With regard to the first point-the army destined for the invasion of India is supposed to assemble at Orenburg, march for Attock by Herat, Bokhara, Khiva, and Samarcand, which are stated to be as good, if not more advantageous intermediary stations, than any between Delhi and Attock.' This is as new to us as it is bold on the part of the writer. He goes on to state, that a considerable commerce is carried on between Orenburg and Khiva, Samarcand, &c.,-a position which we are obliged to deny, and to state distinctly that no commerce is carried on by Russia with these countries; its only Asiatic commerce being with China, at Kiakta, to the value of about five millions of roubles.* He further states, that the property of the country consists in cattle, camels, and horses; that the latter are in droves of thousands together;' this, we shall content ourselves by observing, is physically impossible. Where the colonel has discovered that the deserts (that of the Kirghis being one of them) in geographical maps, by no means invariably infer sterility,' we are at a loss to find out, and all the information that we possess entirely negatives the assertion, that the means of transport are here more abundant than in any part of the world' !

Having crossed the desert (of which more by and bye), we come to Bokhara, which, in the inflated style of oriental hyperbole, the Arabian and Persian writers designate as one of the three terrestrial paradises.' Sir William Ouseley, the only authority of Colonel Evans, in the same flowery style of the Persians, (from which we believe he translates,) says, If a person stand on the Kohendis (or ancient castle) of Bokhara, and cast his eyes

Tableaux Statistiques, &c., de Weydemeyer.

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around,