Some 210 miles northwest of Uralsk lies the Cossack capital of Orenburg, a frontier post which has played a famous part in the stirring annals of Russia's conquest of the khanates of Central Asia. Several times the entire city has been transferred to another site, but always nearer to the goal of Rus-
• According to a dispatch to the New York Evening Post of May 26, 1919, the advance of a relieving force of General Kolchak's Siberian troops found the garrison of Uralsk maintaining the gallant resistance to the "Red Army" which they have carried on since the beginning of the war.
sia's ambition — the rich oases of Khiva, Merv, Bokhara, and Samarkand, the centre of Mussulman culture and power in the days of the World Empire of Tamerlane.
Between Orenburg and Tashkent a commercially strategic line of railway, which may be said to rank but second in importance to the Trans-Siberian, now unites European Russia with these prosperous Asiatic markets. The wonderful fruits grown in the orchards of Samarkand and Bokhara were before the present disturbances transported via Orenburg in long trains of refrigerating cars and distributed all over the Moscow area. On the far Chinese frontier a great cotton-raising district had also sprung into existence during the last two decades of imperial government, when the abrogation of the Russo-American commercial treaty caused the government to aim at becoming economically independent in this respect.
The present city of Orenburg, standing on a high bluff, overlooking a boundless sweep of Tartar steppes, is fast losing its Cossack character through the influx of an alien commercial population.
In the neat public gardens of Orenburg, where before the advent of the Bolsheviki a Cossack band discoursed almost nightly to the promenaders, the population of Orenburg could be studied in all the strange variety of its racial elements. Apparently on the best of terms, the Russianized Tartar inhabitants and the military and civil officials of the goveminent here met on common ground. Hither came the comely Tartar maiden (who of her national costmne only retained the not unbecoming Tartar headdress) to flirt discreetly with the students of the Cossack military school. On the benches sat Sart and Tartar merchants talking over the day's business with Russian or Armenian shopkeepers.
Ranking after the territory of the Don and Uralsk Cossacks in extent, the land of the Orenburg Cossacks, stretching in a long narrow band along the course of the upper Uralsk River, is far more Cossack in character than the capital city. Yet under the colonial policy of the old imperial government, the fertile land was becoming filled with new-comers of the non-Cossack class — moujik colonists from the overcrowded villages of the north, besides Tartar peasants from the south. Even the half -nomad tribesmen, Kirghiz and Kalmoucks, who have wandered over these plains since the days of the Golden Horde, are now beginning to settle in Ullage communities. Often these little agglomerations are composed partly of mud huts or hovels, partly of the old felt tents of the more conservative tribesmen.
Everywhere the virgin soil is capable, even under the most primitive agricultural conditions, of phenomenal returns for labour expended upon it. The statistics of Orenburg show that the population of this province and its dependencies were, before the war, among the most rapidly growing communities of Russia.
The Russian has always been successful as an Asiatic colonist — for reasons worthy of consideration by our new "mandatory" powers. In this "melting-pot" one may study the process, so much freer of "race-pride" than the Anglo-Saxon methods of colonization, which enabled the Tsarist government to fling wide the frontiers of their Empire during the last half of the nineteenth century.
In this task of Europeanization the Cossack has played an important role. Fitted by his origin and history to be an intermediary between East and West, he is happily endowed with sympathy and understanding for two often irreconcilable viewpoints. Above all, he has none of the fine contempt for the "yellow races" which besets the Anglo- Saxon, not to mention the now happily disarmed apostles of Kultur. Aside from the pathetic and ridiculous attempts of the Bolsheviki to introduce their stereotyped Marxian kultur into the worldold Cosmos of Asia — Russia has played a noteworthy role in her Asiatic dominions. While showing powers of as. imilation, only to be explained by Russian racial history, the rule of Tsarism was generally less resented among her subject nations than England's milder sway in India. Autocracy and its methods came from Asia and is in no sense generally disliked by the vast majority of Asiatics to-day.
In its future dealings with these subject people of the old empire a hberalized Russia will find a difficult problem, yet to aid her in this task she will have the organized experience of her Cossack frontiersmen. No one who has had first-hand knowledge of these borderlands can believe for a moment that the Cossack's mission will end until the vast plains of Central Asia have advanced much farther than they have to-day along the paths of Europe's compelling — if not so immeasurably superior — civilization.
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[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]