The Express.
London, England, 1853-12-29 00:00:00

Znt Orpreoo.

-. -.--

TO CORRESPONDENTS.
A A..w 1 r nt hatmork"essulrilte Sir nor r••••nitar•
hir pat.:Abed awry Turriay ad Ynby a4tu, is uu:e
Orr p.d.t.

douruandrom tamale,' for "The Rageors." tandem h:.eSq Wre•.
add Vot ter Orr. N. rofartrwolran, by Tho wok o• ti e
day of pab3adire.

111011 WATTS AT CONDOM BRIDGE.
Ton Dat—tlbbiabs. ..111bwaren, lb. 21e.
To.r..simm—>kisg. 3s*.

LONDON, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2%

lr is now four-and forty years since. in our diead
Of NArut.t.u,'i Oriental delusions about our Indian
Empire, we established a permanent and resident
mission at the Court of Teheran, the modern capital
of Persia. We established it for the avowed purpose
of excluding from Central Asia the influence of any
European power entertaining jealous or hostile
designs against our supremacy in British India, then
far distant from the Indus and the Sutlej. Though
thus established to protect our own interests, we
made the mission a charge, not on the revenues
of England, but on those of India ; and
from lsou to 1t.31 its annual expense to our
Indian fellow-subjects has been 12,0001. In that
period it has, consequently, cost them the enormous
sum of :48,0001. To say that this expenditure has
been of no service. either to India or England, is as
assertion that might possibly be contested; se we
will neither say that, nor argue that the people of
India have any separate interests in Persia from
the people of England. But where their interests
are common, the expense ought at least to have been
equally shared ; and had that been the case, the cost
of our diplomacy in Persia would, it is very certain,
have been long ago overhauled by the Imperial Par-
liament; whereas, paid by India, is has never
attracted the slightest attention.
In some small and petty matters, such as the set-
tlement of the boundary line between Persia and
Turkey, or the negotiation of a commercial treaty
with a country with which we have no direct trade,
our Persian Mission may have been useful. But in
its greater objects it has signally failed. It has not
prevented the growth and the extension of an Euro-
pean influence in Central Asia hostile to our power
in India, for Russia is all-powerful in the court of the
SHAH; it has not preserved friendship and amity
between England and Persia, for now, for the second
time, we are threatened with Persian hostilities; it
has not been able to keep Petah. and Turkey on'
good terms—a matter of first-rate importance
to us,—for again, at the bidding of Rae-
Persia has marched every man and
every gun it can muster to join in the Rur
sian attack on the very existence of the Ottoman
Empire; it has not restrained the progress of Persia
towards the East, for Herat—which, as a key to
Affghanistsn from the west, we insisted, in 1838, the
SHAH ►huld retire from—is now subetantially a Per-
sisn town. In short, after spending the sum of
628,0001. on a Persian mission, we now rind ourselves
with so little influence in Persia, that it has recalled
its Minister from London without deigning to give
the English Government any explanation of the
reasons; it has declared war against Turkey
without condescending to tell our Minister at
'Teheran; and, to crown the whole, it has
mast a mission of its own to Cabal to induce
our old enemy Dosr Al.►ttultLu and the Affghan
chiefs, who are orthodox Mussulmeo, to unite with
heterodox Nlussulman power in hostilities against
the SULTAN, the inheritor of the Caliphate and the
head of the faith of the Crescent. It is not therefore
in Persia that we get money's-worth for the vast sum
ear diplomacy has cost India.
Though there is something humiliat:og to state-
aaft in spending half-a-million sterling and wasting
so moth ability to establish irtitience in Persia,
and then to be unceremoniously treated in this way,
there is nothing very serious or shaming to our-
selves in boding that, after the lapse of almost half a
centary,we have no power or author it y over the SHAH ;
though, without doubt, the advauce of even a Per-
sian army, 20,000 strong, against the Asian pro-
vinces of Turkey, is (if true) a serious diversion in
favour of Russia. Happily, however, it is one that
must increase and augment, as it ought also to ex-
pedite, the obligation of England to abate in Europe
the power, and punish the audacity, of Russia. For it
is in Europe, in the Black Sea and the Baltic—before
Sebastopol and Cronstadt—that these Asian difficul-
ties can beat be solved, and the eastward progress of
Russia effectually checked. It is only by per-
mitting Russia to go on unmolested in Europe that
we shall ever have to encounter her arms in Asia ;
and it is by acting against Odessa and St. Petersburg,
not by Persian missions, that we shall best protect
India.
No doubt, however, Russia has made considerable
progress in Central Asia since she was pulled up for
a season, in 1838, by the explanations then demanded
by the British Government. She has, it would
seem, pressed forward across the desert which sepa-
rates the Caspian from the Sea of Aral, sad there
building a small steamer, astonished the Tartars by
steam navigation on the Oxus, en rerae for Khiva.
But for a while only; for, like most Russian marine
enterprises, this also failed, the steamer having been
wrecked. Russia has, it is also said, advanced a land
expedition to Khiva; and its Khan is now described
as being very little better than a Russian vassal—
s fact, if fact it be, which a ministerial
journal assures us " cannot be tolerated." For our
part, we see no great danger in all this, provided
England plays a worthy part in Europe and a ra-
tional ono in India. In 1838, we got alarmed at a
not dissimilar state of things; but we had not then,
it must be recollected, any power at all over those
passes by which only India can be invaded from the
west, and we had a formidable independent military
state, where we had little influence, !4..) watch in the
Puojaub. But now we are at the months of the
Khyber, the Kohat, and the Bolan Passes ;
sow there is no RUNJEET SINGu to dis-
pa•.s the passage of our troops through the
Panjaub ; now the Lower Indus as well u
the Sutlej is ours; now, therefore, we have only to
conciliate the Affghans and to win the affections of
oar new subjects, the Sikhs, the Beloochees, and
the Hill Tribes. Then we shall be impregnable
on the north-west—may Ica•:e Central Asia to its
fate, and do without any mission in Persia.
Since boar MAHOMED'S return to Cabal, his
conduct and that of the Affghan Chiefs generally
towards the Indian Government, which had wronged
them so cruelly, has been of an exemplary and even
a generous character. For, with abundant oppor-
tunities, he has never once exhibited the least
hostility himself, nor has he ever given the
slightest encouragement or the least support
to the Hill Tribes that resist our insane
determination to make them pay tribute to
us. On the contrary, he has conducted himself
like a friendly and well-disposed neighbour. It
may perhaps be over-sanguine to expect that we can
now establish a firm and cordial alliance with the
Host and his Chiefs; but, if we co•sld, such an alli-
ance might be well worth some sacs ifices, even the
restoration of Peshawur, on our pat t. In 1838 Pe-
aks% ur was not ours to restore to Affghan, and
when Host Misnomer) then pressed for its restora-
tion as evidence of our sincerity, he in effect asked
us to join him in a war against ROLIZZI SLNGU—