This answer, together with a present of L100,000 and 20,000 rifles, was all that the Ameer gained; his own shrewd sense had shown him long before that Britain must in any case defend Afghanistan against Russia.  What he wanted was an official recognition of his own personal position as ruler, while he acted, so to speak, as the “Count of the Marches” of India.  The Gladstone Government held out no hopes of assuring the future of their Mark-graf or of his children after him.  The remembrance of the disaster in the Khyber Pass in 1841 haunted them, as it had done their predecessors, like a ghost, and scared them from the course of action which might probably have led to the conclusion of a close offensive and defensive alliance between India and Afghanistan.

Such a consummation was devoutly to be hoped for in view of events which had transpired in Central Asia.  Khiva had been captured by the Russians.  This Khanate intervened between Bokhara and the Caspian Sea, which the Russians used as their base of operations on the west.  The plea of necessity was again put forward, and it might have been urged as forcibly on geographical and strategic grounds as on the causes that were alleged for the rupture.  They consisted mainly of the frontier incidents that are wont to occur with restless, uncivilised neighbours.  The Czar’s Government also accused the Khivans of holding some Russian subjects in captivity, and of breaking their treaty of 1842 with Russia by helping the Khirgiz Horde in a recent revolt against their new masters.

Russia soon had ready three columns, which were to converge on Khiva:  one was stationed on the River Ural, a second at the rising port of Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea, and a third, under General Kaufmann, at Tashkend.  So well were their operations timed that, though the distances to be traversed varied from 480 to 840 miles, in parts over a waterless desert, yet the three chief forces arrived almost simultaneously at Khiva and met with the merest show of resistance (June 1873).  Setting the young Khan on the throne of his father, they took from him his ancestral lands of the right bank of the Amu Daria (Oxus) and imposed on him a crushing war indemnity of 2,200,000 roubles, which assured his entire dependence on his new creditors.  They further secured their hold on these diminished territories by erecting two forts on the river[291].  The Czar’s Government was content with assuring its hold upon Khiva, without annexing the Khanate outright, seeing that it had disclaimed any such intention[292].  All the same, Russia was now mistress of nearly the whole of Central Asia; and the advance of roads and railways portended further conquests at the expense of Persia and the few remaining Turkoman tribes.

[Footnote 291:  J. Popowski, The Rival Powers in Central Asia, p. 47 (Eng. edit).; A. Vambery, The Coming Struggle for India, p. 21; A.R.  Colquhoun, Russia against India, pp. 24-26; Lavisse and Rambaud, Histoire Generale, vol. xii. pp. 793-794.]