RUSSIA IN THE EAST.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 7534, 10 August 1903, Page 4

RUSSIA IN THE EAST.

An Ice-Free Port.

The ice-bound Russian Empire, like a huge plant in the dark, has sent out a creeper to the one speck of light there i was, and has thought tho huge expense of the Siberian railway as nothing compared to the blessings of an open port. Until this year, for four mouths of the twelve, a Bussian might only leave his country or export his goods by courtesy of another nation. On the north crushed by an icecap, on the south barred by other countries, the end and aim of her policy has been nothing but this—an icefree port, an ice-free port! The money she has wasted on Vladivostock is of interest because it proves, as no official assurance of hers could perhaps prove, that she originally had no intention of annexing Manchuria. Yladivostock was a compromise, and noth.ng else. It was merely less bad than other places. From two to three months of each year it is frozen over, and if Russia had ever deliberately planned her psesent holdover Manchuria she would never have thrown away the tens of millions of roubles that are represented by the line from the port to Khabarovsk and the line from Tchita to Sretensk, fragments (joined together by Amur) of an all-Siberian route to \ ladivostock from the west.

The occupation of Manchuria three years ago enabled the Eussians to cut off the huge corner involved by this Siberian route, and yet almost at the same moment destroyed the value of Vladivostock by giving them at last their long-coveted ice-free port in Dalny, which is a few miles north of Pore Arthur. THK FOTURE OF DALNY. Very few atlases as yet mark Dalny. Probably there are not 500 Englishmen in the Bast who are yet quite sure what it is. But in two years' time Vladivostock, with its great railway station and new wharves and warehouses, houses and streets, will be relegated to the pages of geography books, and Dalny—the " Far" part—will have thrust itself among the fulcra and the points of anxiety of the world. It is the entering of such an appearance on the part of Russia among the Powers of the East, as not the presence of a hundred warships could have effected. Germany's " mailed fist" expedition was but the petulant scream of a child compared with tnis sudden and silent entrance upon the stage of the Extreme Orient. And Eussia knows its importance well enough. There is no hurry about Dalny. Three years ago the twelve Chinese villages that occupy its site at Talienwan were swept away and the Governor's house and church built. Then the streets were marked out for a city of a hundred thousand, and the roadways were made. Hard, smooth ways of macadam, kerbed with granite and planted with trees, they as yet delimit rectangular patches of raw Manchurian veldt, grassless, gritty and grey, and they end with a suddenness that takes one's breath away. Then the houses began to rise. LIKE A LONDON SUItDKB. This is the extraordinary part of Dalny. The whole of Siberia's buildings, churches, houses, huts and hovels were probably built at less than half the cost of Dalny. It is no town like Irkutak — flat, a capital of shanties, one-storied and wooden. Here the houses, three-storied stone and brick, red and blue, rise, each one detached in its own little enclosure, each with an iron railing to the street, for all tho world like a London suburb. The architecture here is a mixture of Margate and Manchuria, the roofs being of the characteristic upcurving type of China with a dragon at either end of the ridge-pole. Above that a twelve-foot false gable, below spring blinds, sashes, and villainous little attempts at ornamentatiou in imitation stone. Half the houses are empty, but still they go on building, building 1 There is no doubt as to the earnestness. Four million pounds are being spent on Dalny. Australia will flinch from spending one-third of that sum on its new capital—if it ever builds one. Immense docks are being added to by the building of docks still greater. Dalny is to Port Arthur what Capetown is to Simonstown, and yet there are tew in the East who understand that from unknown Dalny the influence of Bussia will flow seawards till it reaches . If any man could fill in the gap it would be worth a hundred millions to us. SI. DE WITTB'S CONFIDENCE. There has been no haste. The railway company (which is theEuss-Chinese Bank, which is the Russian Government, which, in this matter, is M. de Witte) refuse now to sell the land outright to anyone. Inceed they will refuse to sell to the Japanese at all. In perfect confidence they are building a great city, sure of their estimates, and, of course very sure of the support of the Eussian Government. Privately they believe that Dalny will be found inevitable, and that at the expense of Hong Kong a centre of trade will be formed here which will link China and Europe together with all the strength of seven days' economy of time. Perhaps 1 There are many things to be considered before the question is answered. It must be remembered, however, that whether Dalny ever becomes the commercial centre of the Extreme Orient or not, the political and strategic value of Port Arthur, plus the Trans-Siberian railway, will remain very great, and a permanent menace to our sea power in the East. At present not a twentieth part of Dalny is finished; but the docks grow slowly, and the scaffold-poles of a gigantic hotel near them, quite a mile from the existing town, suggest brave confidence that the empty space between them will soon be filled. And it would be a raeh man indeed who would assert that that confidence is misplaced. Dalny is to-day what Delhi was a month before the Durbar; to-morrow Dalny will have rivalled Shanghai; and the day after — who knows ? But we shall hear much of Dalny in the immediate future.— Daily Mail.