A second attack has been made on the remote Russian
post of Petropaulovski ; but this time the Allied fleet has found itself evaded instead of being repelled. The failure is perhaps far from being so bad as it looked, although it is vexatious, if only for the sake of appearances. Last year there was something unaccountable in the withdrawal of the fleet without making a more decided attack ; but the commander escaped judgment by putting an end to himself. This time the explanation current is plausible. It is said that the earliest ships arrived in the neighbourhood for rendezvous without the Admiral; and that, instead of being " too late," the mischance consisted only in the fact that the ap- proach of the fleet was discovered, on which the Russians de- camped. Petropaulovski was dismantled, and the result is not unimportant. We do not lay much stress on the supposed compact, conjecturally censured by our contemporaries, for sparing Sitka as a consideration for sparing the territory of the Hudson's Bay Com- pany. It is true that the Hudson's Bay Company is purely com- mercial, while the Russian Fur Company, like most Russian enterprises, has a political purpose ; but it had as yet acquired very little political importance, and we doubt whether Sitka has any military or naval strength. On the other hand, Petropaulovski constituted a protection to the Bay of Okotsk, into which debouches the river Saghalin, the waterway from Chinese Tartary, and from the portal of Kiachta, through which the trade between China and Siberia has been car- ried on. The great exile province of Russia, poorer than any part even of that empire in the means of transit, possesses several rivers ; but, with a few exceptions of short' streams running into the Pacific, all its rivers flow into the Arctic Ocean. The Saghalin would have given it a highway direct into the Pacific. Russia appears to be in process of being "crumpled up" in the Crimea, her fleet at all events destroyed; she is shut up in the Baltic; the White Sea, an unimportant haven, has been visited; and now even her far Eastern projects on the North Pacific have been disturbed.
