Russia and Turkestan

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 13, 1874

Russia and Turkestan.

THE year of grace, 1873, will certainly occupy an interesting place in future chronology. It will be known to historians as an epoch of wars and rumors of wars in all portions of the world—revolutions in Spanish America, bloody encounters between the Aborigines of Oceanica and European colonists, republicanism in France and Spain, struggling against ecclesiastical and monarchical despotism on one side, and communistic iconoclasm on the other, Russia warring with the wild hordes of Turkestan, England battling with Ashantee, and Dutch settlers fighting fiercely with the Malays of Atcheen. The conflicts between civilization and barbarism in Africa, Asia, and the Indian Ocean, are of scarcely less historical importance than the civil wars in Europe, although of minor interest to the many. It can hardly be affirmed, however, that the expeditions to Khiva, Atcheen, and Coomassie have been brilliantly successful. The Dutch have been fairly worsted in Sumatra, the British are doing rather badly on the gold coast, and the Muscovite successes in Central Asia have so utterly failed to inspire the Mohammedan nomads of the steppes with a proper respect for their conquerors, that the Czar of all the Russians is, at last accounts, projecting another expedition to Khiva. It is really to be hoped that he may be enabled to spread the salutary terror of his name further than the sacred gates of distant Samarcand, and that no unpleasantness may again arise between England and Russia upon the subject of Central Asian conquest.—Cincinnati Weekly Inquirer.