The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 1905. THE WAR AND THE CZAR.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVI, Issue 66, 18 March 1905, Page 4

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 1905. THE WAR AND THE CZAR.

For the cause that lacJea assistance. For the icrong that needs resistance. For the future in the distance. And the good that we con do.

The occupation of Tiding by the Japanese follows as the logical consequence of their triumph at Mukden. Worn out by lack of food and sleep the remnant of the Russian army was in no condition to make a stand at Tieling; and when the Japanese flanking columns threatened to converge upon them again, Kuropatkin's disheartened troops abandoned their defences at night and fled northward once more. Oyama reports that large numbers of prisoners and quantities of stores have been captured at Tieling; and this means that the scattered relics of Kuropatkin's armies have very little chance of finding food or munitions of war before they reach Harbin. But the great railway centre of Northern Manchuria is more than three hundred miles away, and' the Japanese are following hard jupon the fugitives. If the Japanese or the Ghunchuses can cut the railway anywhere north of Tieling so as to check the Russian retreat for a day or two, we may expect to see realised the gloomy prediction of certain continental strategists that not a man of Kuropatkin's forces will reach Harbin. For all effective purposes indeed the immense army of more than 300,000 men and 1400 guns, which Kuropatkin commanded at Mukden two weeks ago, has ceased to exist. Most of its remaining guns have been abandoned at Tieling, and the Commander in-Chief cannot have more than 50,000 men now under his immediate control. But the most significant proof of the complete collapse of the Russian plan of campaign in Manchuria is the intelligence cabled to-day that Kuropatkin has been superseded and recalled. For many years he has been regarded even by his foes as Russia's ablest t general, and even the bitter enmity of Alexeieff. and the Grand Dukes failed to prevent his appointment to the command of the Russian armies. But though nominally in control of the campaign Kuropatkin has found himself hampered, and thwarted at every turn by the machinations of his rivals, and the impracticable suggestions of the Czar. Possibly a Napoleon might have made headway against the Japanese in Manchuria. But Kuropatkin is no Napoleon, and he has never enjoyed the absolute independence and freedom of action which are essential to the successful conduct ef a great campaign. What he might have done if he had been given a free hand in Manchuria it is now idle to conjecture. But it is only too clearly manifest that the interference ol

the Czar and his favourites in the management of the war along with Kuropatldn's loyal subservience to his master's will, has brought upon Russia irredeemable and overwhelming disaster.

When once the magnitude of this catastrophe is realised in Russia, we may expect that momentous consequences will ensue. Already even courtiere and high officials of State are demanding that the war shall cease and that the Czar shall turn his attention to

his own distracted kingdom. But so far none of the Russian losses and reverses

appear to make much impression upon the obstinate fatalism of Czar Nicholas. The ruler of Russia, like many another absolute monarch, is a "megalomaniac," an egoist who has exaggerated to monstrous proportions the importance of his own opinions and his own rights. In his eyes his will is all powerful, it is the privilege of his subjects to wait upon it and fulfil it, and under no circumstances is it their duty or their right to criticise or to control his actions. Few mediaeval tyrants seem ever to have been believed in absolutism with more fervour than this nervous hypochondriac whose misfortune it is to rule Russia. For there can be no doubt that the Czar is absolute ruler of his country in a sense which is possible nowhere else in the civilised world. Nor is it easy to reject the accumulated evidence that goes to show that the Czar, and he alone, was personally responsible for the outbreak of the war, and the policy that made it inevitable. It was once the fashion to regard Nicholas 11. as a well-intentioned hut weak young man, wholly at the mercy of unscrupulous advisers. But it is impossible to reconcile this view of the case with the fact that the Czar has dismissed and rejected all advisers in turn, and that his policy maintains its steady consistency. When every responsible minister in turn urged him that Russia's action in the Far East would cause war with Japan he is said to have replied, "War is impossible; my Empire is peace." Even to the last moment he refused to allow preparations to be made against the war which he had provoked; and on the day on which Togo made his first dash at Port Arthur, the Czar wired to the Russian Minister at Tokyo that war would still be avoided. Nicholas 11., says a Russian critic, is "cause blind" —he cannot see the necessary connection between events and their consequences. Moreover, his devotion to his own ideal of autocratic power renders him oblivious of any harm that his actions can inflict upon his country. By hampering, Kuropatkin, says a Russian writer in the "National Review," the Czar did more for the Japanese than all the spies

that the Russians have shot or hanged since the war began.

Just as the Czar believes that he can do no wrong in the exercise -of his sovereign power, so he appears to feel that everybody connected with royalty is through him privileged, and even sanctified. Hence his consideration for the Grand Dukes, of whom it has been written that probably no such greedy and unscrupulous hangers-on of royalty have ever been known to history. "One has but to rake any money scandal well enough." says a-keen Russian observer, "in order to come upon a Grand Duke at the bottom of it. We are neither puritanical nor hypocritical in Russia, and we can make great allowance for our Imperial family. But we object to a numerous caste of mere blood-sucking parasites, some of whose lives are made up of unpunished crimes, mean shifts, colossal frauds, and outlandish vices." And amid this throng of corrupt sycophants and titled criminals, the Czar goes on his way unmoved, serenely confident in his divine mission, to rule his people according to his own absolute will. The author of the now notorious "Quarterly Review" article on the Czar declares that the endurance of the Russians has at last reached its limit, and that the collapse of the war may prove the downfall of the autocracy. They have borne with the Czar while he made laws which he would not respect, convoked councils to which he paid no heed, appointed ministers whom he forbade to speak or act; but now that he is forcing the nation to bleed itself to death for himself and "a parasitic brood of human blood-suckers," even the loyalty of his loving people for 'the Little Father" has been strained to breaking point. When Grand Duke Vladimir shot down helpless men, women and children by the thousand a few weeks ago in the streets of the •iipital, because his faithful subjects Jared to petition the Czar, the Russians \t last began to realise what the auto■racy meant to them; and possbily the return of Kuropatkin, the sign and proof if Russia's overthrow in the Far East, nay bring home even to the Czar the errible truth that unless Russia is to ose her rank among the great nations, he autocracy must either transform itself or fall.