THE LOSING GAME.
Once more Mr Gladstone has surrendered. There is no other construction to be placed upon the announcements made in Parliament on the 11th and 12th of last month that her Majesty's Ministers had come substantially to an agreement on the Afghan Frontier controversy which was satisfactory to the Governments of England, Russia, and India, and that the future of the Central Asian question was to be committed to the security of a Convention. For once in her history Great Britain sees the cloud of war roll by without a sense of relief, and with ominous misgivings as to how and when the storm that is sure to follow will break. We now understand that the rôle which our Government has been enacting face to face with Russia, with the Powers of Europe looking scrutinisingly on as spectators, has been strictly a dramatic one. The part of Bob Acres pleases us excellently well on the stage, but when played in real life it produces less agreeable impressions. Introduced into the drama of high politics, upon the dénouement of which the fates of great nations are made to turn, the character altogether loses its humour amid the tragic environments of the situation. "Tell 'em you never saw me in such a rage before – a most devouring rage, – that I am called in the country Fighting Bob – I generally kill a man a week," says Mr Gladstone to the British Ambassador at St Petersburg; and presently we have the usual sequel: "Look'ee, Sir Lucius, 'tisn't that I mind the word coward: but if you had called me a poltroon, odds daggers and balls ––!" We cannot laugh at such a climax; the laugh belongs to the winning side.
Until recent times, at all events, brag and bluster never formed the policy of a British Government. If we erred, it was in the opposite extreme of a word and a blow, and the blow usually first. We certainly have not fallen into the latter mistake on the present occasion: when we have before us in full detail – not in misleading selections – the history of the negotiations that have been recently going on with the Russian Government, we shall be able to judge whether or not we have been practising the meaner expedient.
For nearly two months have England and Russia been facing each other on the brink of war, bandying hostile words, as it were, before the cannon's mouth. So many arguments arose out of the controversy, so many side-issues presented themselves, that both parties have been in danger of losing sight of the original cause of quarrel. Only one thing seemed certain, which was, that so utterly opposed were the aims and interests of the disputants, that a peaceful settlement was beyond possibility; and to support such a belief, the mutual wrangling was carried to the point of placing two great nations in arms, and of unsettling the whole of Europe and three-fourths of Asia. Then when the moment arrived in which a decisive step must be taken, Europe was startled, not by a proclamation of war, but by the announcement that England had made up her mind to accept the situation in which the quarrel was commenced, and to commit the future to the
