CHAP. VIII.] ATTORNEY-GEN. ON RUSSIAN ATROCITIES. 341

denounce it wherever we find it, whether in the Maho metan or the Christian, in the Turk or the Russian.'

The orator who gave utterance to these remarkable opinions is no obscure ignoramus, but Her Majesty's Attorney-General and head of the Bar of England; a gentleman whose business and training it is to master the facts of a case, to cross-examine witnesses, to sift evidence, and to separate the chaff from the grain. So much as to the speaker; and the facts upon which he founds his conclusions are easily accessible. They all lie inside the two volumes of Mr. Schuyler's work on Turkistan and his report on the Bulgarian atrocities. It is upon these two authorities that the AttorneyGeneral explicitly rests his case. Let us see, therefore, what Mr. Schuyler actually does of Russia in Turkistan.

say as to the doings

The Attorney-General says the expedition to Khiva 'was undertaken only last year,' i.e. in 1875. It was undertaken in 1873. But that is a small mistake, though an extraordinary one for an AttorneyGeneral, speaking to his brief, to have made. The next assertion of the Attorney-General is that the expedition to Khiva was about as unrighteous a war as was ever waged by the powerful against the weak-a war against poor unhappy peasants, men, women, and children, and all for no offence that one can find, except that these unhappy ones may have fled from the homes that Russian rapacity had violated and deserted' [? desolated]. And all this, bear in mind, is based on the evidence furnished in Mr. Schuyler's book on Turkistan, a book which the Attorney-General said he had been reading.' Now if the reader will consult the references which I have given in the last chapter, or, still better, if he will read the whole of

Schuyler's book, he will find that not only does it not afford a scintilla of evidence in support of the AttorneyGeneral's assertions, but that it flatly contradicts them. What Schuyler says on this point may be compressed into a few sentences. The first contact between Russia and Khiva took place in the year 1620. In that year the Cossacks of the Ural, nominally Russian subjects, but practically independent, and doing pretty much what they liked, plundered some Khiva merchants, and organized three separate expeditions against Khiva, all of which ended disastrously for the Cossacks.

It was not, however, till the year 1700 that any serious intercourse took place between the Governments of the two countries. In that year an ambassador from the Khan Shaniaz came to Peter the Great, and begged him to take the Khivan nation under Russian protection, which he agreed to do, and confirmed this consent in 1703 to the new Khan.' There the matter ended till 1713, when a Turkoman came to Astrakan, was converted to Christianity, and told many stories of the gold which was to be found along the valley of the Amu Darya, and how the Uzbeks had closed the old channel of the stream which had flowed into the Caspian; and suggested to the Russians to break down the dam, and restore the river to its former channel.' These stories took effect, and in 1717 an expedition was fitted out under Prince Bekovitch, who defeated the Khivans in a decisive battle on the banks of the Amu Darya, about a hundred miles from Khiva. The Khan,' says Schuyler, surrendered himself entirely to the mercy of the Russians, and, after obtaining the full confidence of Prince Bekovitch, proposed to him to go and take actual possession of Khiva, after dividing his army into several parts for the greater

CHAP. VIII.] FIRST EXPEDITION OF RUSSIA TO KHIVA. 343

convenience of provisioning it. This was no sooner done than the Khivans treacherously fell upon the separate portions of the expedition, massacred them almost without exception, and sent the head of Prince Bekovitch as a present to the Amir of Bokhara, who, however, refused to accept it. Even this disaster did not prevent an ambassador of Peter's, the Italian Florio Beneveni, from penetrating to Khiva, and being well received there. This was in 1725, a few months after Peter's death. Subsequently a large number of Russian embassies visited the country, but none of them were able to bring the Khivan Khan to terms, or to induce him to stop capturing and enslaving Russians, or even to free those who were already in his hands.'

This state of things became so intolerable at last that an expedition was sent in 1829, under General Perovsky, to bring the Khivans to terms. But two-thirds of the expedition perished in the desert, and the remainder returned in a miserable plight. From that year till 1873 the Khivans went on plundering and enslaving Russians, some of them soldiers and officers belonging to the Imperial army. Treaty after treaty was made with successive Khans; and of those treaties, every article,' says Mr. Schuyler, remained a dead letter,' till at last the patience of the Government became exhausted,' and it was resolved that some means must be taken to put an end to this state of things.'

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All this is told in black and white in Schuyler's chapter on 'the Khivan Campaign and its Consequences;' yet the Attorney-General of England, addressing a crowded audience of his countrymen last October, calmly declares: 'In this work, written by Turkistan, ii. 328.

Mr. Schuyler, I find an account of an expedition which was undertaken only last year by Russia against some people in the centre of Asia; and, taking his account, that war appears to me to have been about as unrighteous a war as was ever waged by the powerful against the weak!' What is one to think or say? I really feel helpless before this portentous manifestation of prejudice, so dense, so impenetrable to the light of the plainest facts, that, having those facts in his hands, the Attorney-General declares them to be precisely the reverse of what they are. If he had placed an albino on the platform of the Preston Corn Exchange, and deliberately told his audience that he was a negro, with black complexion, black hair, and black eyes, he would not have been guilty of a grosser perversion of the truth than that involved in his statement about the unrighteousness of the expedition to Khiva. And all this phantasmagoria of apocryphal history was patronisingly paraded as a crushing refutation of 'a little inaccuracy' on the part of Mr. Gladstone.

This is bad enough; but we have not yet sounded the full depth of the Attorney-General's prejudices. Not only was the war one of the most unrighteous perpetrated by the strong against the weak, but it was a war on the feeble and defenceless, on 'poor unhappy peasants, men, women, and children, and all for no offence that one can find, except that these unhappy ones had fled from homes that Russian rapacity had violated.' And this violation was of a character which the Attorney-General describes as follows: There were during that war barbarities and outrages as detestable and vile, and more cold-blooded, than the Bulgarian outrages.'

Here, then, are two assertions: first, that the Russians

CHAP. VIII.] TRUTH AND FICTION ABOUT RUSSIA.

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345

made war upon entirely innocent and unhappy peasants, men, women and children.' In other words, it was a war against non-combatants, chiefly women and children; for the women and children form the great majority of the peasantry in Central Asia as elsewhere. And all this, again, one can find' in Schuyler. To Schuyler therefore let us go. His account is that as the troops approached the vicinity of the town of Khiva they were exposed to constant attacks from small bodies of the enemy.' When they began to put their batteries in position before the walls of Khiva, 'they were attacked by sorties of the enemy; and as they approached the walls, they were exposed to the full fire of the guns mounted over the gate, which were well aimed. The cannonade on both sides continued for some time, and General Verevkin,' who commanded one of the four columns, was severely wounded in the head.' Then a deputation came out from the city to ask for a cessation of the cannonade and for conditions of peace.' The Russian officer in command agreed to cease firing and to refer to General Kaufmann as to the conditions of peace, provided the Khivans did not renew the fire. But no sooner had the deputation departed than the Khivans on the walls again began their fire, and a second envoy then appeared, saying that the Khan should not be held responsible for the firing, as this was done by the Yomud Turkomans, over whom the peaceful inhabitants of the city and the Government had no control.' This was followed by another cessation of fire on the part of the Russians, and a renewal of it on the part of the Khivans. The Russians then stormed and captured the north gate, with a loss of 15 killed and wounded.' 'At the moment this was taking place, General Kaufmann was

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