The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-12-23
GREAT PROGRESS BY RUSSIA
CREATING 4 WORLDS MARKET IN
 CENTRAL -1SIA.

system OI It01lfO0CS NOW
 Practically Completed = Wonderful
 Engineering-An Alliance Between
 Britain, Russia and China Prophesied
 Would Ensure Peace for Centuries.
 London, Dec. 13.-John w. Bookwal- ter of Ohio, who has just returned from a three months journey through Rus sia, says that he enjoyed unusual facil- ities for observing what is going on in that country. He travelled 17,O00 miles, to the terminus of the Siberian railroad, to the end of the line reaching the frontier of Afghanistan and to the end of the one penetrating China through Manchuria. All these are now practically completed. He was allowed to go everywhere to see everything and to take hundreds of photographs, thanks to special permits issued to him by the minister of the interior on the application of the United States ambas- sador at St. Petersburg. During his journey he conversed with the gover- nors of provinces and with military and civil officials of all ranks.
 Americas best open door to Central < Asia and China is through Russia. AL ready all the locomotives and rolling stock on the railways are of American manufacture. Central Asia will in the near future be the greatest market in the world for manufactories of all kinds and our obtaining the virtual monopoly of this market only depends on our re- taining the friendship Russia now has for us. A great surprise to the world is in preparation in that part of the earth, and it will come, I believe, very soon. Not many years will elapse be- < fore the world will see Russia, England and China combining for the partition of Asia. The very force of circum- stances will bring this about. England and Russia will never be able to agree on a partition of China between them- selves. Still less will they allow the other powers to share with them in the spells of that empire. They will be 2 forced to defend China, which alone is helpless, against the rest of the world, and to share with her the dominion of Asia.
 The alliance of England, Russia and China, or two-t thirds of the human race, will be such an alliance as history has never yet seen, and it will be one which will give peace to the world for centu- ries. All it's interests will make for peace, and it will be able to dictate terms to the rest of the world. Amer-E ica has very little to gain by an open door to China That country Is an in- dustrial one; and whatever we may now be able to sell to them, the Chinese will soon be able to make for themselves. One day, and that day is near at hand, whatever China buys from the rest of the world will reach her through Rus sia and Central Asia Russia in the last three years has done more to open the doors to China than England and all the rest of the world has done in fifty years. No one who has not seen it with his own eyes can have the faint- est conception of what Russia has done and is still doing in Central Asia.
 I have travelled over 1,200 miles of railway, which she has built from the Caspian Sea to Tashkend, in Turkestan, over a branch of this line which runs to the northern frontier of India, over another branch which goes from Merv to the border of Afghanistan. This last branch was not completed when I was there, but it will be open to traf- fic next week. There are also Russian lines all along the Persian frontier and penetrating into that country, either completed or rapidly approaching com pletion. All the work on these lines has been done by soldiers, who, in this way, are not in Russia as elsewhere, non-producers. All this tremendous Asiatic railway system is owned and operated by the government All the lines are admirably built and splendidly equipped. Why, I saw bridge across the Amhdaria in Central Asia, at a point where the river is three miles wide, that cost 20,000,000 roubles and it is the greatest piece of engineering work ever accomplished. There Is nothing like it anywhere else in the world, the celebrated Forth bridge, near Edinburgh, not excepted.
 Wherever I went I saw cities and towns springing up, such as Askobad, in Turkomania, for example which al- ready has 25,000 inhabitants. Near Merv, the czar is building a magnifi- cent palace. New Bokhara, twelve miles from old Bokhara, has 12000 in- habitants. The Russian policy in Cen tral Asia is not to bring the new and the old into a close contact and so she builds her railway stations a few miles away from the old centers of population, thus forming new and en- tirely modern centers.
 Where do the people come from to in- habit these towns? Why, from Euro pean Russia. The government is turn ing her surplus European population into Central Asia, just as the United States turned the surplus population of her Atlantic states into her great west ern territories. What I have just seen in Central Asia is almost an exact re- production of what I witnessed years ago in Illinois, Indiana and Missouri, when the emigrants from the east were pouring into the west. No human power can stay the onward march of the Slav through Russia. which will be the feat ure of the twentieth century, just as the march of the Anglo-Saxon through America has been the feature of the nineteenth. Already, thanks to her railways. Russia can at any time pour her armies across the frontiers of In- dia by the same routes that Alexander. Tanerlane and Kubla Khan marched to fho conn1reef of eastarn Sio Drec;-