 CHAPTER IX THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WIG MINISTRY PART II The Stockdale case was a disturbance of ministerial repose which at one time threatened to bring about a collision between the privileges of parliament and the authority of the law courts. The messieurs Hansard, the well-known parliamentary printers, had published certain parliamentary reports on prisons in which it happened that a book published by J. J. Stockdale was described as obscene and disgusting in the extreme. Stockdale proceeded against the Hansards for libel. The Hansards pleaded the authority of parliament. But Lord Chief Justice Denman declared that the House of Commons was not parliament and had no authority to sanction the publication of libels on individuals. Out of this contradiction of authorities arose a long and often a very unseemly squabble. The House of Commons would not give up its privileges. The law courts would not admit its authority. Judgment was given by default against the Hansards in one of the many actions for libel which arose out of the affair and the sheriffs of London were called on to seize and sell some of the Hansards' property to satisfy the demands of the plaintiff. The unhappy sheriffs were placed as the homely old saying would describe it between the devil and the deep sea. If they touched the property of the Hansards they were acting in contempt of the privilege of the House of Commons and were libel to be committed to Newgate. If on the other hand they refused to carry out the orders of the Court of Queen's Bench that Court would certainly send them to prison for the refusal. The reality of their dilemma was in fact very soon proved. The amount of the damages was paid into the sheriffs' Court in order to avoid the scandal of a sale but under protest the House of Commons ordered the sheriffs to refund the money to the Hansards. The Court of Queen's Bench was moved for an order to direct the sheriffs to pay it over to Stockdale. The sheriffs were finally committed to the custody of the Sargent-at-Arms for contempt of the House of Commons. The Court of Queen's Bench served a writ of habeas corpus on the Sargent-at-Arms calling on him to produce the sheriffs in court. The House directed the Sargent-at-Arms to inform the Court that he held the sheriffs in custody by order of the Commons. The Sargent-at-Arms took the sheriffs to the Court of Queen's Bench, made his statement there. His explanation was declared reasonable and sufficient, and he marched his prisoners back again. A great deal of this ridiculous sort of thing went on, which it is not now necessary to describe in any detail. The House of Commons, what with the arrest of the sheriffs and of agents acting on behalf of the pertinacious Stockdale, had on their hands batches of prisoners with whom they did not know in the least what to do. The whole affair created immense popular excitement, mingled with much ironical laughter. At last the House of Commons had recourse to legislation, and Lord John Russell brought in a bill, on March 3, 1840, to afford summary protection to all persons employed in the publication of parliamentary papers. The preamble of the measure declared that whereas it is essential to the due and effectual discharge of the functions and duties of Parliament, that no obstruction should exist to the publication of the reports, papers, votes or proceedings of either House, as such House should deem fit. It is to be lawful, for any person or persons against too many civil or criminal proceedings shall be taken on account of such publications, to bring before the Court a certificate under the hand of the Lord Chancellor or the Speaker, stating that it was published by the authority of the House, and the proceedings should had once be stayed. This bill was run quickly through both Houses, not without some opposition or at least murmur in the upper House, and it became law on April 14. It settled the question satisfactorily enough, although it certainly did not define the relative rights of Parliament and the courts of law. No difficulty of the same kind has since arisen. The sheriffs and the other prisoners were discharged from custody after a while and the public excitement went out in quiet laughter. The question, however, was a very serious one, and it is significant that public opinion was almost entirely on the side of the law courts and the sheriffs. The Ministry must have so fallen in public favour as to bring the House of Commons into disrepute along with them, or such a sentiment could not have prevailed so widely out of doors. The public seemed to see nothing in the whole affair but a tyrannical House of Commons wielding illimitable powers against a few humble individuals, some of whom, the sheriffs, for instance, had no share in the controversy except that imposed on them by official duty. Surely the sheriffs were the heroes of the hour and were toasted and applauded all over the country. Assuredly it was an awkward position for the House of Commons to be placed in when it had to vindicate its privileges by committing to prison men who were merely doing a duty which the law courts imposed on them. It would have been better, probably, if the government had more firmly asserted the rights of the House of Commons at the beginning and thus allowed the public to see the real question which the whole controversy involved. Nothing can be more clear now than the paramount importance of securing to each House of Parliament an absolute authority and freedom of publication. No evil that can possibly arise out of the misuse of such a power could be anything like that certain to come of a state of things which restricted by libel laws or otherwise the right of either House to publish whatever it thought proper for the public good. Not a single measure for the reform of any great grievance from the abolition of slavery to the passing of the factory acts but might have been obstructed and perhaps even prevented if the free exposure of existing evils were denied to the Houses of Parliament. In this country Parliament only works through the power of public opinion. A social reform is not carried out simply by virtue of the decision of a cabinet that something ought to be done. The attention of the legislature and of the public has to be called to the grievance again and again by speeches, resolutions, debates and divisions before there is any chance of carrying a measure on the subject. When public opinion is ripe and is strong enough to help the government through with a reform in spite of prejudices and vested interests, then and not till then the reform is carried. But it would be hardly possible to bring the matter up to this stage of growth if those who are interested in upholding a grievance had the power of worrying the publishers of the parliamentary reports by legal proceedings in the earlier stages of the discussion. Nor would it be of any use to protect merely the freedom of debate in Parliament itself. It is not through debate but through publication that the public opinion of the country is reached. In truth the poorer a man is, the weaker and the humbler. The greater need is there that he should call out for the full freedom of publication to be vested in the hands of Parliament. The factory child, the climbing boy, the apprentice under colonial systems of modified slavery, the seamen sent to see in the rotten ship. The woman clad in unwomanly rags who sings her song of a shirt. The other woman, almost literally unsexed in form, function and soul, who in her filthy trousers of sacking, dragged on all fours the coal trucks in the mines. These are the tyrants and the monopolists for whom we assert the privilege of parliamentary publication. The operations which took place about this time in Syria, belong perhaps rather to the general history of the Ottoman Empire than to that of England. But they had so important a bearing on the relations between this country and France, and are so directly connected with subsequent events in which England bore a leading part, that it would be impossible to pass them over without some notice here. Muhammad Ali, Pasha of Egypt, the most powerful of all the sultans' feudatories, a man of iron will and great capacity both for war and administration, had made himself for a time master of Syria. By the aid of the warlike qualities of his adopted son, Ibrahim Pasha, he had defeated the armies of the port, wherever he had encountered them. Muhammad's victories had for the time compelled the port to allow him to remain in power in Syria, but the sultan had long been preparing to try another effort for the reduction of his ambitious vassal. In 1839 the sultan again declared war against Muhammad Ali. Ibrahim Pasha again obtained an overwhelming victory over the Turkish army. The energetic sultan, Mahmud, a man not unworthy to cope with such an adversary as Muhammad Ali, died suddenly, and immediately after his death the Kapitan Pasha or Lord High Admiral of the Ottoman fleet went over to the Egyptians with all his vassals, an act of almost unexampled treachery even in the history of the Ottoman Empire. It was evident that Turkey was not able to hold her own against the formidable Muhammad and his successful son, and the policy of the western powers of Europe and of England especially had long been to maintain the Ottoman Empire as a necessary part of the common state system. The policy of Russia was to keep up that Empire as long as it suited her own purposes, to take care that no other power got anything out of Turkey, and to prepare the way for such a partition of the spoils of Turkey as would satisfy Russian interests. Russia therefore was to be found now defending Turkey and now assailing her. The course taken by Russia was seemingly inconsistent, but it was only inconsistent as the course of assailing ship may be which now taxed to this side and now to that, but has a clear object in view and a port to reach all the while. England was then and for a long time after steadily bent on preserving the Turkish Empire, and in a great measure as a rampart against the schemes and ambitions imputed to Russia herself. France was less firmly set on the maintenance of Turkey and France moreover had got it into her mind that England had designs of her own on Egypt. Austria was disposed to go generally with England. Prussia was little more than a nominal share in the alliance that was now tinkered up. It is evident that such an alliance could not be very harmonious or direct in its action. It was however effective enough to prove too strong for the Pasha of Egypt. A fleet made up of English, Austrian, and Turkish vessels bombarded Akker. An allied army drove the Egyptians from several of their strongholds. Ibrahim Pasha, with all his courage and genius, was not equal to the odds against which he now saw himself forced to contend he had to succumb. No one could doubt that he and his father were incomparably better able to give good government and the chances of development to Syria than the port had ever been. But in this instance, as in others, the odious principle was upheld by England and her actual allies that the Turkish Empire must be maintained at no matter what cost of suffering and degradation to its subject peoples. Muhammad Ali was deprived of all his Asiatic possessions but was secured in his government of Egypt. A convention signed in London on July 15, 1840 arranged for the imposition of those terms on Muhammad Ali. The convention was signed by the representatives of Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia on the one part and the Ottoman port on the other. The name of France was not found there. France had drawn back from the alliance and for some time seemed as if she was likely to take arms against it. Monsieur Thiers was then her prime minister, he was a man of quick fancy, restless, and ambitious temperament and what we cannot help calling a vulgar spirit of national self-sufficiency. We are speaking now of the Thiers of 1840, not of the wise and capable statesmen tempered and tried by the fire of adversity who reorganized France out of the ruin and welter of 1870. Thiers persuaded himself and the great majority of his countrymen that England was bent upon driving Muhammad Ali out of Egypt as well as out of Syria and that her object was to obtain possession of Egypt for herself. For some months it seemed as if war were inevitable between England and France, although there was not in reality the slightest reason why the two states should quarrel. France was just as far away from any thought of a really disinterested foreign policy as England. England on the other hand had not the remotest idea of becoming the possessor of Egypt. Unfortunately Louis-Philippe and Monsieur Guiseau were both strongly in favor of peace. Monsieur Thiers resigned and Monsieur Guiseau became minister of foreign affairs and virtually head of the government. Thiers defended his policy in the French chamber in a scream of passionate and almost hysterical declamation. Again and again he declared that his mind had been made up to go to war if England did not at once give way and modify the terms of the Convention of July. It cannot be doubted that Thiers carried with him much of the excited public feeling of France. But the King and Monsieur Guiseau were happily supported by the majority in and out of the chambers, and on July 13, 1841 the Treaty of London was signed, which provided for the settlement of the affairs of Egypt on the basis of the arrangement already made, and which contained moreover the stipulation to be referred to more than once hereafter, by which the sultan declared himself firmly resolved to maintain the ancient principle of his empire, that no foreign ship of war was to be admitted into the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, with the exception of light vessels for which a firmen was granted. The public of this country had taken but little interest in the controversy about Egypt, at least until it seemed likely to involve England in a war with France. Some of the episodes of the war were indeed looked upon with a certain satisfaction by people here at home. The bravery of Charles Napier, the hot-headed, self-conceited Commodore was enthusiastically extolled, and his feats of successful audacity were glorified as though they had shown the genius of a Nelson or the clever resource of a Cochrane. Not many of Napier's admirers cared a rush about the merits of the quarrel between the port and the Pasha. Most of them would have been just as well pleased if Napier had been fighting for the Pasha and against the port. Not a few were utterly ignorant as to whether he was fighting for port or for Pasha. Those who claimed to be more enlightened had a sort of general idea that it was in some way essential to the safety and glory of England, that whenever Turkey was in trouble we should at once become her champions, tame her rebels, and conquer her enemies. Unfounded as were the suspicions of Frenchmen about our designs upon Egypt, they can hardly be called very unreasonable. Even a very cool and impartial Frenchman might be led to the conclusion that free England would not, without some direct purpose of her own, have pledged herself to the cause of a base and decaying despotism. Steadily meanwhile did the ministry go from bad to worse. They had greatly damaged their character by the manner in which they had again and again put up with defeat and consented to resume our retain office on any excuse or pretext. They were remarkably bad administrators. Their finances were wretchedly managed. In later times we have come to regard the Tories as especially weak in the matter of finance. A well-managed revenue and a comfortable surplus are generally looked upon in some way or other as the monopoly of a liberal administration, while lavish expenditure, deficit and increased taxation counted among the necessary accompaniments of a Tory government. So nearly does public opinion on both sides go to accepting these conditions that there are many Tories who take it rather as a matter of pride, that their leaders are not mean economists and who regard a free-handed expenditure of the national revenue as something peculiarly gentlemen-like and in keeping with the honourable traditions of a great country-party. But this was not the idea which prevailed in the days of the Melbourne Ministry. Then the universal conviction was that the Whigs were incapable of managing the finances. The budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Bering, showed a deficiency of nearly two millions. This deficiency he proposed to meet in part by alteration in the sugar duties. But the House of Commons, after a long debate, rejected his proposals by a majority of thirty-six. It was then expected, of course, that ministers would resign, but they were not yet willing to accept the consequences of defeat. They thought they had another stone in their sling. Lord John Russell had previously given notice of his intention to move for a committee of the whole House to consider the state of legislation with regard to the trade in corn, and he now brought forward an announcement of his plan, which was to propose a fixed duty of eight shillings per quarter on wheat, and proportionately diminished rates on rye barley and oats. Except for its effect on the fortunes of the Melbourne Ministry, there is not the slightest importance to be attached to this proposal. It was an experiment in the direction of the free traders who were just beginning to be powerful. Although they were not nearly strong enough yet to dictate the policy of a government, we shall have to tell the story of free trade hereafter. This present incident is no part of the history of a great movement. It is merely a small party dodge. It deceived no one. Lord Melbourne had always spoken with the uttermost contempt of the free trade agitation. With characteristic oaths he had declared that of all the mad things he had ever heard suggested free trade was the maddest. Lord John Russell himself, although far more enlightened than the Prime Minister, had often condemned and sneered at the demand for free trade. The conversion of the ministers into the official advocates of a moderate fixed duty was all too sudden for the conscience for the very stomach of the nation. Public opinion would not endure it. But harm came to the wigs from the attempt. Instead of any new adherence or fresh sympathy being won for them by their proposal, people only asked, will nothing then turn them out of office? Will they never have done with trying new tricks to keep in place? Sir Robert Peel took in homely phrase the bull by the horns. He proposed a direct vote of want of confidence, a resolution declaring that ministers did not possess the confidence of the House sufficiently to enable them to carry through the measures which they deemed of essential importance to the public welfare and that their continuance in office under such circumstances was at variant with the spirit of the Constitution. On June 4, 1841 the division was taken and the vote of no confidence was carried by a majority of one. Even the wigs could not stand this. Lord Melbourne at last began to think that things were looking serious. Parliament was dissolved and the result of the general election was that the Tories were found to have a majority even greater than they themselves had anticipated. The moment the new parliament was assembled, amendments to the address were carried in both houses in a sense hostile to the government. Lord Melbourne and his colleagues had to resign and Sir Robert Peel was entrusted with the task of forming an administration. We have not much more to do with Lord Melbourne in this history. He merely drops out of it. Between his expulsion from office and his death which took place in 1848 he did little or nothing to call for the notice of anyone. It was said at one time that his closing years were lonesome and melancholy, but this has lately been denied and indeed it is not likely that one who had such a genial temper and so many friends could have been left to the dreariness of a not self-sufficing solitude and to the bitterness of neglect. He was a generous and kindly man. His personal character, although often assailed, was free of any serious reproach. He was a failure in office, not so much from want of ability as because he was a politician without convictions. The Peel Ministry came into power with great hopes. It had Lord Lindhurst for Lord Chancellor. Sir James Graham for Home Secretary. Lord Aberdeen at the Foreign Office. Lord Stanley was Colonial Secretary. The most remarkable man, not in the Cabinet, soon to be one of the foremost statesmen in the country was Mr. W. E. Gladston. It is a fact of some significance in the history of the Peel Administration that the elections which brought the new ministry into power brought Mr. Cobden for the first time into the House of Commons. End of Section 20. Section 21 of a History of Our Own Times, Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Negami. Chapter 10. Movements in the Churches, Part 1. While Lord Melbourne and his weak colleagues, still in office, were fiddling away their popularity on the pleasant assumption that nobody was particularly in earnest about anything, the Vice Chancellor and heads of houses held a meeting at Oxford and passed a censure on the celebrated number 90 of Tracks for the Times. The movement of which some important tendencies were formerly censured in the condemnation of this tract was one of the most momentous that had stirred the Church of England since the Reformation. The author of the tract was Dr. John Henry Newman and the principle ground for its censure by voices claiming authority was the principle it seemed to put forward, that a man might honestly subscribe all the articles and formularies of the English Church while yet holding many of the doctrines of the Church of Rome against which those articles were regarded as a necessary protest. The great movement which was thus brought into sudden question and publicity was in itself an offspring of the immense stirring of thought which the French Revolution called up, and which had its softened echo in the English Reform Bill. The centre of the religious movement was to be found in the University of Oxford. When it is in the right, and when it is in the wrong, Oxford has always had more of the sentimental and of the poetic in its cast of thought than its rival or colleague of Cambridge. There were two influences than in operation over England, both of which alike aroused the alarm and the hostility of certain gifted and enthusiastic young Oxford men. One was the tendency to rationalism drawn from the German theologians. The other was the manner in which the connection of the Church with the State in England was beginning to operate to the disadvantage of the Church as a sacred institution and teacher. The Reform Party everywhere were assailing the rights and property of the Church. In Ireland especially, experiments were made which every practical man will now regard with approval, whether he be Churchmen or not, but which seemed to the devoted Ecclesiast of Oxford to be fraught with danger to the freedom and influence of the Church. Out of the contemplation of these dangers sprang the desire to revive the authority of the Church, to quicken her with a new vitality, to give her once again that place as guide and inspirer of the national life which her ardent votaries believed to be hers by right, and to have been forfeited only by the carelessness of her authorities and their failure to fulfill the duties of her heaven assigned mission. No movement could well have had a purer source. None could have had more disinterested and high-minded promoters. It was borne in upon some earnest unresting souls, like that of the sweet and saintly Keeble, souls without haste and without rest, like Girtus Star, that the Church of England had higher duties and nobler claims than the business of preaching harmless sermons and the power of enriching bishops. Keeble could not bear to think of the Church taking pleasure since all is well. He urged on some of the more vigorous and thoughtful minds around him, or rather he suggested it by his influence in his example, that they should reclaim for the Church the place which ought to be hers as the true successor of the apostles. He claimed for her that she and she alone was the real Catholic Church and that Rome had wandered away from the right path and foregone the glorious mission which she might have maintained. Among those who shared the spirit and purpose of Keeble were Richard Hurle Frude, the historian's elder brother, who gave early promise of a splendid career, but who died while still in comparative youth. Dr. Pusey, afterwards leader of the School of Ecclesiasticism which bears his name, and most prominent of all Dr. Newman. Keeble had taken part in the publication of a series of treatises called Tracks for the Times, the object of which was to vindicate the real mission, as the writers believed, of the Church of England. This was the Tractarian movement which had such various and memorable results. Newman first started the project of the Tracks and wrote the most remarkable of them. He had up to this time been distinguished as one of the most unsparing enemies of Rome. At the same time he was, as he has himself said, fierce against the instruments and the manifestations of the liberal cause. While he was at Algiers once a French vessel put in there, flying the tricolor, Newman would not even look at her. On my return, though forced to stop twenty-four hours at Paris, I kept indoors the whole time, and all that I saw of that beautiful city was what I saw from the diligence. He had never had any manner of association with Roman Catholics, had in fact known singularly little of them. As Newman studied and wrote concerning the best way to restore the Church of England to her proper place in the national life, he kept the thought before him that there was something greater than the established Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and the organ. She was nothing unless she was this. She must be dealt with strongly or she would be lost. There was need of a second reformation. At this time the idea of leaving the Church never, Mr. Newman himself assures us, had crossed his imagination. He felt alarmed for the Church between German rationalism and man of the world liberalism. His fear was that the Church would sink to be the servile instrument of a state and a liberal state. The abilities of Dr. Newman were hardly surpassed by any contemporary in any department of thought. His position and influence in Oxford were almost unique. There was in his intellectual temperament a curious combination of the mystic and the logical. He was at once a poetic dreamer and a sophist, in the true and not the corrupt and ungenerous sense of the latter word. It has often been said of him and of another great Englishman that a change in their early conditions and training would easily have made of Newman a Stuart Mill and of Mill a Newman. England in our time has hardly had a greater master of argument and of English prose than Newman. He is one of the keenest of dialecticians, and like Mill has the rare art that dissolves all the difficulties of the most obstruc or perplexed subject and shows it bare and clear, even to the least subtle of readers. His words dispel mists, and whether they who listen agree or not, they cannot fail to understand. A penetrating poignant satirical humor is found in most of his writings, an irony sometimes piercing suddenly through it like a darting pain. On the other hand, a generous vein of poetry and of pathos informs his style, and there are many passages of his works in which he rises to the height of a genuine and noble eloquence. In all the arts that make a great preacher or orator, Newman was strikingly deficient. His manner was constrained, ungraceful, and even awkward. His voice was thin and weak. His bearing was not at first impressive in any way. A gaunt emaciated figure, a sharp and eagle face, a cold meditative eye rather repelled than attracted those who saw him for the first time. Singularly devoid of affectation, Newman did not always conceal his intellectual scorn of men who made loud pretense with inferior gifts, and the men must have been few indeed whose gifts were not inferior to his. Newman had no scorn for intellectual inferiority in itself. He despised it only when it gave itself airs. His influence while he was the vicar of St. Mary's at Oxford was profound. As Mr. Gladston said of him in a recent speech, without ostentation or effort, but by simple excellence, he was continually drawing undergraduates more and more around him. Mr. Gladston in the same speech gave a description of Dr. Newman's pulpit style which is interesting. Dr. Newman's manner in the pulpit was one which, if you considered it in its separate parts, would lead you to arrive at very unsatisfactory conclusions. There was not very much change in the inflection of the voice. Action there was none. His sermons were red and his eyes were always on his book. And all that, you will say, is against efficiency in preaching. Yes, but you take the man as a whole, and there was a stamp and a seal upon him. There was a solemn music and sweetness in his tone. There was a completeness in the figure, taken together with the tone and with the manner, which made even his deliveries such as I have described it, and though exclusively, with written sermons, singularly attractive. The stamp and seal were indeed those which are impressed by genius, piety and earnestness. No opponent ever spoke of Newman but with admiration for his intellect and respect for his character. Dr. Newman had a younger brother, Francis W. Newman, who also possessed remarkable ability and earnestness. He too was distinguished at Oxford and seemed to have a great career there before him. But he was drawn one way by the wave of thought before his more famous brother had been drawn the other way. In 1830 the younger Newman found himself prevented by religious scruples from subscribing the 39 articles for his master's degree. He left the university and wandering for years in the east, endeavouring not very successfully, perhaps to teach Christianity on its broadest base to Mohammedans, and then he came back to England to take his place among the leaders of a certain school of free thought. It had dealt with those brothers as with the two friends in Richter's story. It seized their bleeding hearts and flung them different ways. When Dr. Newman wrote the famous track number 90 for which he was censured, he bowed to the authority of his bishop, if not to that of the heads of houses, and he discontinued the publication of such treatises. But he did not admit any change of opinion, and indeed soon after he edited a publication called The British Critic in which many of the principles held to be exclusively those of the Church of Rome were enthusiastically claimed for the English Church. Yet a little and the gradual working of Newman's mind became evident to all the world. The brightest and most penetrating intellect in the Church of England was withdrawn from her service, and Newman went over to the Church of Rome. His secession was described by Mr. Disraeli a quarter of a century afterwards as having dealt a blow to the Church of England under which she still reels. To this result had the inquiry conducted him which had led his friend Dr. Pusy merely to endeavor to incorporate some of the mysticism and the symbols of Rome with the ritual of the English Protestant Church, which had brought Kiebel only to seek a more liberal and truly Christian temper for the faith of the Protestant, and which had sent Francis Newman into radicalism and rationalism. CHAPTER 10. MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCHES, PART II In truth it is not difficult now to understand how the elder Newman's mind became drawn toward the ancient Church which won him at last. We can see from his own candid account of his early sentiments how profoundly mystical was his intellectual nature and how long before he was conscious of any such tendency he was drawn toward the very symbolisms of the Catholic Church. Pascal's early and unexplained mastery of mathematical problems which no one had taught him is not more suggestive in its way than those early drawings of Catholic symbols and devices which, done in his childhood, Newman says surprised and were inexplicable to him when he came on them in years long after. No place could be better fitted to encourage and develop this tendency to mysticism in a thoughtful mind than Oxford, with all its noble memories of scholars and of priests, with its picturesque and poetic surroundings, and its never fading meta-evilism. Newman lived in the past, his spirit was with meta-evil England. His thoughts were of a time when one Church took charge of the souls of a whole united devoted people and stood as the guide and authority appointed for them by heaven. He thought of such a time until first he believed in it as a thing of the past, and next came to have faith in the possibility of its restoration as a thing of the present and the future, when once he had come to this point the rest followed as by lot, God-what. No creature could for a moment suppose that the ideal Church was to be found in the English establishment, submitted as it was to state-made doctrine and to the decision of the Lord Chancellor, who might be an infidel or a free-liver. The question which Cardinal Manning tells us he asked himself years after at the time of the Gorham case must often have presented itself to the mind of Newman. Suppose all the bishops of the Church of England should decide unanimously on any question of doctrine. Would anyone receive the decision as infallible? Of course not. Such is not the genius or the principle of the English Church. The Church of England has no pretension to be considered the infallible guide of the people in matters even of doctrine. Were she seriously to put forward any such pretension it would be rejected with contempt by the common mind of the nation. We are not discussing questions of dogma or the rival claims of churches here. We are merely pointing out that to a man with Newman's idea of a church, the Church of England could not long afford a home. That very logical tendency which in the mind of Newman, as of that of Pascal, contended for supremacy with the tendency to devotion and mysticism, only impelled him more rigorously on his way. He could not put up with compromises and convince himself that he ought to be convinced. He dragged every compromise and every doctrine into the light and insisted on knowing exactly what it amounted to and what it meant to say. The doctrines and compromises of his own church did not satisfy him. There are minds which in this condition of bewilderment might have been content to find no footing so solid as doubt. Newman had not a mind of that class. He could not believe in a world without a church or a church without what he saw to be inspiration, and accordingly he threw his whole soul, energy, genius and fame into the cause of the Church of Rome. This however did not come all at once. We are anticipating by a few years the passing over of Dr. Newman, Cardinal Manning and others, to the ancient church. It is clear that Newman was not himself conscious for a long time of the manner in which he was being drawn, surely though not quickly in the direction of Rome. He used to be accused at one time of having remained a conscious Roman Catholic in the English Church, laboring to make new converts. Apart from his own calm assurances and from the singularly pure and candid nature of the man, there are reasons enough to render such a charge absurd. Indeed that simple and childish conception of human nature, which assumes that a man must always see the logical consequences of certain admissions or inquiries beforehand, because all men see them afterwards, is rather confusing and out of place, when we are considering such a crisis of thought and feeling as that which took place in Oxford, and such men as those who were principally concerned in it. For the present it is enough to say that the object of that movement was to raise the Church of England from apathy, from dull, easy-going acquiescence, from the perfunctory discharge of formal duties, and to quicken her again with the spirit of a priesthood, to arouse her to the living work, spiritual and physical, of an ecclesiastical sovereignty. The impulse overshot itself in some cases and was misdirected in others. It proved a failure on the whole as to its definite aims, and it sometimes left behind it only the ashes of a barren symbolism. But in its source it was generous, beneficent and noble, and it is hard to believe that there has not been throughout the Church of England on the whole a higher spirit at work, since the famous Oxford movement began. Still greater was the practical importance, at least in defined results, of the movement which went on in Scotland about the same time. A fortnight before the decision of the heads of houses at Oxford on Dr. Newman's tract, Lord Aberdeen announced in the House of Lords that he did not see his way to do anything in particular with regard to the dissensions in the Church of Scotland. He had tried a measure, he said the year before, and half the Church of Scotland liked it, and the other half denounced it, and the government opposed it, and he therefore had nothing further to suggest in the matter. The perplexity of Lord Aberdeen only faintly typified the perplexity of the ministry. Lord Melbourne was about the last man in the world likely to have any sympathy with the spirit which animated the Scottish reformers, or any notion of how to get out of the difficulty which the whole question presented. Differing as they did in so many other points there was one central resemblance between the movement in the Kirk of Scotland and that which was going on in the Church of England. In both cases alike the effort of the reforming party was to emancipate the Church from the control of the state in matters involving religious doctrine and duty. In Scotland was soon to be presented the spectacle of a great secession from an established Church, not because the secedars objected to the principle of a Church, but because they held that the establishment was not faithful enough to its mission as a Church. One of the secedars pithily explained the position of the controversy when he said that he and his fellows were leaving the Kirk of Scotland not because she was too churchy, but because she was not churchy enough. The case was briefly this. During the reign of Queen Anne an act was passed which took from the Church courts in Scotland the free choice as to the appointment of pastors by subjecting the power of the Presbytery to the control and interference of the law courts. Harley, Bollingbrook and Swift, not one of whom cared a rush about the supposed sanctity of an ecclesiastical appointment, were the authors of this compromise, which was exactly of the kind that sensible men of the world everywhere might be supposed likely to accept and approve. In an immense number of scotch parishes the minister was nominated by a lay patron, and if the Presbytery found nothing to condemn in him as to life, literature and doctrine they were compelled to appoint him, however unwelcome he might be to the parishioners. Now it is obvious that a man might have a blameless character, sound religious views, and an excellent education, and nevertheless be totally unfitted to undertake the charge of a Scottish parish. The Sotherk congregation who appreciate and delight in the ministrations of Mr. Spurgeon might very well be excused if they objected to having a perfectly moral Charles Honeyman, even though his religious opinions were identical with those of their favorite, forced upon them at the will of some aristocratic lay patron. The effect of the power conferred on the law courts and the patron was simply in a great number of cases to send families away from the Church of Scotland and into voluntarism. The scotch people are above all others impatient of any attempt to force on them the services of unacceptable ministers. One clung to the National Church as long as it was national, that is as long as it represented and protected the sacred claims of a deeply religious people. The sent or rather voluntarism began to make a progress in Scotland that alarmed thoughtful churchmen. To get over the difficulty the General Assembly, the highest ecclesiastical court in Scotland, in likewise a sort of church parliament, declared that a veto on the nomination of the pastor should be exercised by the congregation, in accordance with the fundamental law of the church that no pastor should be intruded on any congregation contrary to the will of the people. The veto act, as this declaration was called, worked well enough for a short time, and the highest legal authorities declared it not incompatible with the act of Queen Anne. But it diminished far too seriously the power of the lay patron to be accepted without a struggle. In the celebrated Achter Arter case, the patron won a victory over the church in the courts of law, for having presented a minister whose appointment was vetoed by the congregation, he obtained an order from the civil courts deciding that the Presbytery must take him on trial in obedience with the act of Queen Anne. As he was qualified by life, literature, and doctrine. This question, however, was easily settled by the General Assembly of the church. They left to the patron's nominee his stipend in his house, and took no further notice of him. They did not recognize him as one of their pastors, but he might have, if he would, the mans and the money which the civil courts had declared to be his. They merely appealed to the legislature to do something which might make the civil law in harmony with the principles of the church. A more serious question, however, presently arose. This was the famous Strathbogie case, which brought the authority of the church and that of the state into irreconcilable conflict. A minister had been nominated in the parish of Marnock, who was so unacceptable to the congregation that 261 out of 300 heads of families objected to his appointment. The General Assembly directed the Presbytery of Strathbogie, in which the parish lay, to reject the minister, Mr. Edwards. The Presbytery had long been noted for its leaning toward the claims of the civil power, and it very reluctantly obeyed the command of the highest authority and ruling body of the church. Another minister was appointed to the parish. Mr. Edwards fought the question out in the civil court, and obtained an interdict against the new appointment, and a decision that the Presbytery was bound to take himself on trial. Seven members constituting the majority of the Presbytery determined without consulting the General Assembly to obey the civil power, and they admitted Mr. Edwards on trial. The seven were brought before the bar of the General Assembly, and by an overwhelming majority were condemned to be deposed from their places in the ministry. Their parishes were declared vacant. A more complete antagonism between church and state is not possible to imagine. The church expelled from its ministry seven men, for having obeyed the command of the civil laws. It was on the motion of Dr. Chalmers that the seven ministers were deposed. Dr. Chalmers became the head of the movement, which was destined within two years from the time we are now surveying to cause the disruption of the ancient Kirk of Scotland. No man could be better fitted for the task of leadership in such a movement. He was beyond comparison the foremost man in the Scottish church. He was the greatest pulpit orator in Scotland, or indeed in Great Britain. As a scientific writer, both on astronomy and on political economy, he had made a great mark. From having been in his earlier days the minister of an obscure Scottish village congregation, he had suddenly sprung into fame. He was the lion of any city which he happened to visit. If he preached in London, the church was crowded with the leaders of politics, science, and fashion eager to hear him. The effect he produced in England is all the more surprising, seeing that he spoke in the broadest Scottish accent conceivable, and as one admirer admits, mispronounced almost every word. We have already quoted what Mr. Gladston said about the style of Dr. Newman. Let us cite also what he says about Dr. Chalmers. I have heard, said Mr. Gladston, Dr. Chalmers preach and lecture. Being a man of Scotch blood I am very much attached to Scotland, and like even the Scotch accent, but not the Scotch accent of Dr. Chalmers. Undoubtedly the accent of Dr. Chalmers in preaching and delivery was a considerable impediment to his success, but notwithstanding all that, it was overborn by the power of the man in preaching, overborn by his power which melted into harmony with all the adjuncts and incidents of the man as a whole, so much so, that although I would have said that the accent of Dr. Chalmers was distasteful, yet in Dr. Chalmers himself I would not have had it altered in the smallest degree. Chalmers spoke with a massive eloquence in keeping with his powerful frame and his broad brow and his commanding presence. His speeches were a strenuous blending of argument and emotion. They appealed at once to the strong common sense into the deep religious convictions of his Scottish audiences. His whole soul was in his work as a leader of religious movements. He cared little or nothing for any popularity or fame that he might have won. Some strong and characteristic words of his own have told us what he thought of passing renown. He called it a popularity which rifles home of its suites and by elevating a man above his fellows places him in a region of desolation, where he stands a conspicuous mark for the shafts of malice, envy, and detraction. A popularity which with its head among storms and its feet on the treacherous quicksands has nothing to lull the agonies of its tottering existence but the hozzanas of a driveling generation. There is no reason to doubt that these were Chalmers' genuine sentiments, and scarcely any man of his time had come into so sudden and great an endowment of popularity. The reader of today must not look for adequate illustration of the genius and the influence of Chalmers in his published works. These do indeed show him to have been a strong reasoner and a man of original mind. But they do not show the Chalmers of Scottish controversy. That Chalmers must be studied through the traces lying all around of his influence upon the mind and the history of the Scottish people. The Free Church of Scotland is his monument. He did not make that church. It was not the work of one man, or strictly speaking of one generation. It grew naturally out of the inevitable struggle between church and state. But Chalmers did more than any other man to decide the moment and the manner of its coming into existence, and its success is his best monument. For we may anticipate a little, in this instance, as in that of the Oxford Movement, and mention at once the fact that on May 18, 1843 some five hundred ministers of the Church of Scotland, under the leadership of Dr. Chalmers, seceded from the Old Kirk, and set about to form the Free Church. The Government of Sir Robert Peale had made a weak effort at compromise by legislative enactment, but had declined to introduce any legislation which should free the Kirk of Scotland from the control of the civil courts, and there was no course for those who held the views of Dr. Chalmers, but to withdraw from the Church, which admitted that claim of state control. Opinions may differ as to the necessity, the propriety of the secession, as to its effects upon the history and the character of the Scottish people since that time, but there can be no difference of opinion as to the spirit of self-sacrifice in which the step was taken. Five hundred ministers on that memorable day went deliberately forth from their positions of comfort and honour, from home and competence, to meet an uncertain and apparelous future, with perhaps poverty and failure to be the final result of their enterprise, and with misconstruction and misrepresentation to make the bitter bread of poverty more bitter still. In these pages we have nothing to do with the merits of religious controversies, and it is no part of our concern to consider even the social and political effects produced upon Scotland by this great secession. But we need not withhold our admiration from the men who risked and suffered so much in the cause of what they believed to be their church's true rights, and we are bound to give this admiration as cordially to the poor and nameless ministers, the men of the rank and file, about whose doings history so little concerns herself, as to the leaders like Chalmers, who whether they sought it or not found fame shining on their path of self-sacrifice. The history of Scotland is illustrated by many great national deeds. No deed it tells of surpasses indignity and immoral grandeur that secession, to cite the words of the protest, from an establishment which we loved and prized through interference with conscience the dishonour done to Christ's crown and the rejection of his soul and supreme authority as king in his church. CHAPTER XI. The earliest days of the Peel Ministry fell upon trouble, not indeed at home but abroad. At home the prospect still seemed bright. The birth of the Queen's eldest son was an event welcomed by national congratulation. There was still great distress in the agricultural districts, but there was a general confidence that the financial genius of Peel would quickly find some way to make burdens light, and that the condition of things all over the country would begin to mend. It was a region far removed from the knowledge and the thoughts of most Englishmen that supplied the news, now beginning to come into England day after day, and to thrill the country with the tale of one of the greatest disasters to English policy and English arms to be found in all the record of our dealings with the East. There are many still living who can recall, with an impression as keen as though it belonged to yesterday, the first accounts that reached this country of the surrender at Kabul and the gradual extinction of the army that tried to make its retreat through the terrible pass. This grim chapter of history had been for some time in preparation. It may be said to open with the rain itself. News traveled slowly then, and it was quite in the ordinary course of things that some part of the empire might be torn with convulsion for months, before London knew that the even and ordinary condition of things had been disturbed. In this instance, the rejoicings at the accession of the young queen were still going on, when a series of events had begun in Central Asia, destined to excite the profoundest emotion in England and to exercise the most powerful influence upon our foreign policy down to the present hour. On September 20, 1837, Captain Alexander Burns arrived at Kabul, the capital of the state of Kabul, in the north of Afghanistan, and the ancient capital of the Emperor Babur, whose tomb is on a hill outside the city. Burns was a famous orientalist and traveller, the Burton, or Burnaby of his day. He had conducted an expedition into Central Asia, had published his travels in Bulkhara, and had been sent on a mission by the Indian government, in whose service he was to study the navigation of the Indus. He was, it may be remarked, a member of the family of Robert Burns, the poet himself, having changed the original spelling of the name which all the other members of the family retained. The object of the journey of Captain Burns to Kabul in 1837 was in the first instance to enter into commercial relations with Dost Mohammad, then ruler of Kabul, and with other chiefs of the western regions. But events soon changed his business from a commercial into a political and diplomatic mission, and his tragic fate would make his journey memorable to Englishmen forever, even if other events had not grown out of it, which give it a place of more than personal importance in history. The great region of Afghanistan, with its historical boundaries as varying and difficult to fix at certain times as those of the old dukedom of Furgendi, has been called the land of transition between eastern and western Asia. All the great ways that lead from Persia to India pass through that region. There is a proverb which declares that no one can be king of Hindustan without first becoming Lord of Kabul. The Afghans are the ruling nation, but among them have long been settled Hindus, Arabs, Armenians, Abyssinians, and men of other races and religions. The Afghans are Mohammedans of the Shunite sect, but they allowed Hindus, Christians, and even the Persians, who are of the hated dissenting sect of the Shiites, to live among them, and even to rise to high position and influence. The founder of the Afghan Empire, Ahmad Shah, died in 1773. He had made an empire which stretched from Herat on the west to Sir Hind on the east, and from the Axis and Kashmir on the north to the Arabian Sea and the Maldes of the Indus on the south. The death of his son Timur Shah delivered the kingdom up to the hostile factions, intrigues, and quarrels of his sons. The leaders of a powerful tribe, the Borusky Ace, took advantage of the events that arose out of this condition of things to dethrone the descendants of Ahmad Shah. When Captain Burns visited Afghanistan in 1832, the only part of all their great inheritance which yet remained with the descendants of Ahmad Shah was the Principality of Herat. The remainder of Afghanistan was parceled out between Dost Mohammed and his brothers. Dost Mohammed was a man of extraordinary ability and energy. He would probably have made a name as a soldier and a statesman anywhere. He had led a stormy youth, but had put away with maturity and responsibility the vices and follies of his earlier years. There seems no reason to doubt that although he was a usurper, he was a sincere lover of his country, and on the whole a wise and just ruler. When Captain Burns visited Dost Mohammed he was received with every mark of friendship and favour. Dost Mohammed professed to be and no doubt at one time was a sincere friend of the English government and people. There was however at that time a quarrel going on between the Shah of Persia and the Prince of Herat, the last enthroned representative as has been already said of the great family on whose fall Dost Mohammed and his brothers had mounted into power. So far as can now be judged, there does seem to have been serious and genuine ground of complaint on the part of Persia against the ruler of Herat. But it is probable too that the Persian Shah had been seeking for and in any case would have found a pretext for making war, and the strong impression at the time in England and among the authorities in India was that Persia herself was but a puppet in the hands of Russia. A glance at the map will show the meaning of this suspicion and the reasons which at once gave it plausibility and would have rendered it of grave importance. If Persia were merely the instrument of Russia and if the troops of the Shah were only the advance guard of the Tsar, then undoubtedly the attack on Herat might have been regarded as the first step of a great movement of Russia toward our Indian dominion. There were other reasons too to give this suspicion some plausibility. Mysterious agents of Russia, officers in her service and others, began to show themselves in Central Asia at the time of Captain Burns' visit to Dost Mohammed. Undoubtedly Russia did set herself for some reason to win the friendship and alliance of Dost Mohammed, and Captain Burns was for his part engaged in the same endeavor. All considerations of a merely commercial nature had long since been put away and Burns was freely and earnestly negotiating with Dost Mohammed for his alliance. Burns always insisted that Dost Mohammed himself was sincerely anxious to become an ally of England, and that he offered more than once on his own free part to dismiss the Russian agents, even without seeing them, if Burns desired him to do so. But for some reason Burns' superiors did not share his confidence. In Downing Street and in Simla the profoundest distrust of Dost Mohammed prevailed. It was again and again impressed on Burns that he must regard Dost Mohammed as a treacherous enemy and as a man playing the part of Persia and of Russia. It is impossible now to estimate fairly all the reasons which may have justified the English and the Indian government in this conviction, but we know that nothing in the policy afterwards followed out by the Indian authorities exhibited any of the judgment and wisdom that would warrant us to take anything for granted on the mere faith of their dictum. The story of four years, almost to a day the extent of this sad chapter of English history, will be a tale of such misfortune, blunder, and humiliation as the annals of England do not anywhere else present. Blunders which were indeed worse than crimes, and a principle of action which it is a crime and any rulers to sanction, brought things to such a pass with us, that in a few years from the accession of the Queen we had in Afghanistan soldiers who were positively afraid to fight the enemy, and some English officials who were not ashamed to treat for the removal of our most formidable foes by purchased assassination. It is a good thing for us all to read in cold blood this chapter of our history. It will teach us how vain is a policy founded on evil and ignoble principles, how vain is the strength and courage of men when they have not leaders fit to command. It may teach us also not to be too severe in our criticism of other nations. The failure of the French invasion of Mexico under the Second Empire seems like glory when compared with the failure of our attempt to impose a hated sovereign on the Afghan people. Captain Burns then was placed in the painful difficulty of having to carry out a policy of which he entirely disapproved. He believed in Dost Mohamed as a friend, and he was ordered to regard him as an enemy. It would have been better for the career and for the reputation of Burns if he had simply declined to have anything to do with a course of action which seemed to him at once unjust and unwise. But Burns was a young man, full of youth's energy and ambition. He thought he saw a career of distinction opening before him, and he was unwilling to close it abruptly by setting himself an obstinate opposition to his superiors. He was, besides, of a quick mercurial temperament over which mood followed mood and rapid succession of change, a slight contradiction sometimes threw him into momentary despondency, a gleam of hope elated him into the assurance that all was won. It is probable that after a while he may have persuaded himself to acquiesce in the judgment of his chiefs. On the other hand, Dost Mohamed was placed in a position of great difficulty and danger. He had to choose. He could not remain absolutely independent of all the disputants. If England would not support him, he must for his own safety find alliances elsewhere, in Russian statecraft, for example. He told Burns of this again and again, and Burns endeavored without the slightest success to impress his superiors with his own views as to the reasonableness of Dost Mohamed's arguments. Ranjit Singh, the daring and successful adventurer who had annexed the whole province of Kashmir to his dominions, was the enemy of Dost Mohamed and the faithful ally of England. Dost Mohamed thought the British government could assist him in coming to terms with Ranjit Singh, and Burns had assured him that the British government would do all it could to establish satisfactory terms of peace between Afghanistan and the Punjab, of which Ranjit ruled. Burns wrote from Kabul to say that Russia had made substantial offers to Dost Mohamed, Persia had been lavish in her biddings for his alliance, Volkara and other states had not been backward. Yet in all that has passed, or is daily transpiring, the chief of Kabul declares that he prefers the sympathy and friendly offices of the British to all these offers, however alluring they may seem, from Persia or from the Emperor, which places his good sense in a light more than prominent, and in my humble judgment proves that by an earlier attention to these countries we might have escaped the whole of these intrigues and held long since a stable influence in Kabul. The government, however, was unable to impress his superiors with any belief, either in Dost Mohamed or in the policy which he himself advocated, and the result was that Lord Auckland, the Governor-General of India, had linked Resolve to treat Dost Mohamed as an enemy and to drive him from Kabul. Lord Auckland therefore entered into a treaty with Ranjit Singh and Shah Suja Ul Mulk, the exiled representative of what we may call Legitimist rulers of Afghanistan, for the restoration of the latter to the throne of his ancestors, and for the destruction of the power of Dost Mohamed. It ought to be a waste of time to enter into any argument and condemnation of such a policy in our days, even if its results had not proved in this particular instance its most striking and exemplary condemnation. It is so grossly and flagrantly opposed to all the principles of our more modern statesmanship that no one among us now ought to need a warning against it. Dost Mohamed was the accepted, popular, and successful ruler of Kabul. No matter what our quarrel with him, we had not the slightest right to make it an excuse for forcing on his people a ruler whom they had proved before as they were soon to prove again that they thoroughly detested. Perhaps the nearest parallel to our policy in this instance is to be found in the French invasion of Mexico, and the disastrous attempt to impose a foreign ruler on the Mexican people. Each experiment ended in utter failure, and in the miserable death of the unfortunate puppet prince, who was put forward as the figurehead of the enterprise. But the French emperor could at least have pleaded in his defense that Maximilian of Austria had not already been tried and rejected by the Mexican people. Our protege had been tried and rejected. The French emperor might have pleaded that he had actual and substantial wrongs to avenge. We had only problematical and possible dangers to guard against. In any case, as has already been said, the calamities entailed on French arms and councils by the Mexican intervention read like a page of brilliant success when compared with the immediate result of our enterprise in Kabul. Before passing away from this part of the subject it is necessary to mention the fact that among its many unfortunate incidents the campaign led to some peculiarly humiliating debates and some lamentable accusations in the House of Commons. Years after Burns had been flung into his bloody grave it was found that the English government had presented to the House of Commons his dispatches in so mutilated and altered a form that Burns was made to seem as if he actually approved and recommended the policy which he especially warned us to avoid. It is painful to have to record such a fact, but it is indispensable that it should be recorded. It would be vain to attempt to explain how the principles and the honour of English statesmanship fell for the hour under the demoralising influence which allowed such things to be thought legitimate. An oriental atmosphere seemed to have gathered around our official leaders. In Afghanistan they were entering into secret and treacherous treaties. In England they were garbling dispatches. When, years after, Lord Palmerston was called upon to defend the policy which had thus dealt with the dispatches of Alexander Burns, he did not say that the documents were not garbled. He only contended that as the government had determined not to act on the advice of Burns they were in no eyes bound to publish those passages of his dispatches in which he set forth assumptions which they believed to be unfounded and advised a policy which they looked upon as mistaken. Such a defence is only to be read with wonder and pain. The government were not accused of suppressing passages which they believed rightly or wrongly to be worthless. The accusation was that by suppressing passages and sentences here and there Burns was made to appear as if he were actually recommending the policy against which he was at the time most earnestly protesting. Burns was himself the first victim of the policy which he strove against and which all England has since condemned. No severer word is needed to condemn the mutilation of his dispatches than to say that he was actually made to stand before the country as responsible for having recommended that very policy. It should never be forgotten, says Sir J.W.K., the historian of the Afghan War, by those who would form a correct estimate of the character and career of Alexander Burns, that both have been misrepresented in those collections of state papers which are supposed to furnish the best materials of history, but which are often in reality only one-sided compilations of garbled documents, counterfeits which the ministerial stamp forces into currency, defrauding a present generation and handing down to posterity a chain of dangerous lies. CHAPTER 11 THE DISASTERS AT KABOUL, PART II Even while the Persian attack on Herat had practically failed, owing mainly to the skill and spirit of a young English officer, Eldred Pottinger, who was assisting the prince in his resistance to the troops of the Persian Shah, Lord Auckland, however, ordered the assemblage of a British force for service across the Indus and issued a famous manifesto dated from Simla, October 1, 1838, in which he set forth the motives of his policy. The Governor-General stated that Dost Mohammed had made a sudden and unprovoked attack upon our ancient ally, Ranjit Singh, and that when the Persian army was besieging Herat, Dost Mohammed was giving undisguised support to the designs of Persia. The chiefs of Kandahar, the brothers of Dost Mohammed, had also, Lord Auckland declared, given in their adherence to the plans of Persia. Great Britain regarded the advance of Persian arms in Afghanistan as an act of hostility towards herself. The Governor-General had therefore resolved to support the claims of the Shah's Suja Ul Mulk, whose dominions had been usurped by the existing rulers of Kabul, and who had found an honourable asylum in British territory, and whose popularity throughout Afghanistan, Lord Auckland wrote in words that must afterwards have read like the keenest and cruelest satire upon his policy, had been proved to his lordship by the strong and unanimous testimony of the best authorities. This popular sovereign, this favourite of his people, was at the time living in exile without the faintest hope of ever again being restored to his dominions. We pulled the poor man out of his obscurity, told him that his people were yearning for him, in that we would set him on his throne once more. We entered for the purpose into the tripartite treaty already mentioned. Mr. afterwards, Sir W. H. McNaughton, Secretary to the Government of India, was appointed to be envoy and Minister at the Court of Shah's Suja, and Sir Alexander Burns, who had been recalled from the Court of Dost Mohammed and rewarded with a title for giving the advice which his superiors thought absurd, was deputed to act under his direction. It is only right to say that the policy of Lord Auckland had the entire approval of the British Government. It was afterwards stated in Parliament on the part of the Ministry that a dispatch recommending to Lord Auckland exactly such a course as he pursued, crossed on the way, his dispatch announcing to the Government at home that he had already undertaken the Enterprise. We conquered Dost Mohammed and dethroned him. He made a bold and brilliant sometimes even a splendid resistance. We took Ghazni by blowing up one of its gates with bags of powder and thus admitting the rush of a storming party. It was defended by one of the sons of Dost Mohammed who became our prisoner. We took Jalalabad which was defended by Akbar Khan, another of Dost Mohammed's sons, whose name came afterwards to have a hateful sound in all English ears. As we approached Kabul, Dost Mohammed abandoned his capital and fled with a few horsemen across the Indus. Shah's Suja entered Kabul, accompanied by the British officers. It was to have been a triumphal entry. The hearts of those who believed in his cause must have sunk within them when they saw how the Shah was received by the people Lord Auckland was assured were so devoted to him. The city received him in sullen silence. Few of its people condescended even to turn out to see him as he passed. The vast majority stayed away and disdained even to look at him. One would have thought that the least observant eye must have seen that his throne could not last a moment longer than the time during which the strength of Britain was willing to support it. The British army however withdrew, leaving only a contingent of some 8,000 men besides the Shah's own hirelings to maintain him for the present. Sir W. McNaughton seems to have really believed that the work was done and that Shah's Suja was as safe on his throne as Queen Victoria. He was destined to be very soon and very cruelly undeceived. Dost Mohammed made more than one effort to regain his place. He invaded Shah's Suja's dominions and met the combined forces of the Shah and their English ally in more than one battle. On November 2nd, 1840, he won the admiration of the English themselves by the brilliant stand he made against them. With his Afghan horse he drove our cavalry before him and forced them to seek the shelter of the British guns. The native troopers would not stand against him. They fled and left their English officers who vainly tried to rally them. In this battle of Puroandura, victory might not unreasonably have been claimed for Dost Mohammed. He won at least his part of the battle. No tongues have praised him louder than those of English historians. But Dost Mohammed had the wisdom of a statesman as well as the genius of a soldier. He knew well that he could not hold out against the strength of England. A savage or semi-barbarous chieftain is easily puffed up by a seeming triumph over a great power and is led to his destruction by the vain hope that he can hold out against it to the last. Dost Mohammed had no such ignorant and idle notion. Perhaps he knew well enough too that time was wholly on his side, that he had only to wait and see the sovereignty of Shah's Suja tumble into pieces. The evening after his brilliant exploit in the field, Dost Mohammed rode quietly up to the quarters of Sir W. McNaughton, met the envoy, who was returning from an evening ride, and to McNaughton's utter amazement, announced himself as Dost Mohammed, tendered to the envoy the sword that had flashed so splendidly across the field of the previous day's fight, and surrendered himself a prisoner. His sword was returned, he was treated with all honour, and a few days afterwards he was sent to India, where a residence and a revenue was assigned to him. But the withdrawal of Dost Mohammed from the scene did nothing to secure the reign of the unfortunate Shah Suja. The Shah was hated on his own account. He was regarded as a traitor who had sold his country to the foreigners. Insurrections began to be chronic. They were going on in the very midst of Kabul itself. Sir W. McNaughton was warned of danger but seemed to take no heed. Some fatal blindness appears to have suddenly fallen on the eyes of our people in Kabul. On November 2nd, 1841 an insurrection broke out. Sir Alexander Burns lived in the city itself. Sir W. McNaughton and the military commander, Major General Elphinstone, were in Cantonments at some little distance. The insurrection might have been put down in the first instance with hardly the need even of Napoleon's famous whiff of grapeshot, but it was allowed to grow up without attempted control. Sir Alexander Burns could not be got to believe that it was anything serious, even when a fanatical and furious mob was besieging his own house. The fanatics were especially bitter against Burns because they believed that he had been guilty of treachery. They accused him of having pretended to be the friend of Dost Muhammad, deceived him, and brought the English into the country. How entirely innocent of this charge Burns was we all now know, but it would be idle to deny that there was much in the external aspect of events to excuse such a suspicion in the mind of an infuriated Afghan. To the last Burns refused to believe that he was in danger. He had always been a friend to the Afghans, he said, and he could have nothing to fear. It was true, he had always been the sincere friend of the Afghans. He had now to pay a heavy penalty for the errors and the wrongdoing of others. He harangued the raging mob and endeavored to bring them to reason. He does not seem to have understood up to the very last moment that by reminding them that he was Alexander Burns, their old friend, he was only giving them a new reason for demanding his life. He was murdered in the tumult. He and his brother and all those with them were hacked to pieces with Afghan knives. He was only in his thirty-seventh year when he was murdered. He was the first victim of the policy which had resolved to intervene in the affairs of Afghanistan. Fate's seldom showed with more strange and bitter malice her proverbial irony than when she made him the first victim of the policy adopted in despite of his best advice and his strongest warnings. The murder of Burns was not a climax, it was only a beginning. The English troops were quartered in Cantonments outside the city and at some little distance from it. These Cantonments were in any case of real difficulty practically indefensible. The popular monarch, the darling of his people whom we had restored to his throne, was in the Balahisar, or Citadel of Kabul. From the moment when the insurrection broke out he may be regarded as a prisoner or a besieged man there. He was as utterly unable to help our people as they were to help him. The whole country threw itself into an insurrection against him and us. The Afghans attacked the Cantonments and actually compelled the English to abandon the forts in which all our commissariat was stored. We were thus threatened with famine even if we could resist the enemy in arms. We were strangely unfortunate in our civil and military leaders. Sir W. McNaughton was a man of high character and good purpose but he was weak and credulous. The commander, General Elphin Stone, was old and firm, tortured by disease, broken down both in mind and body, incapable of forming a purpose of his own or of holding to one suggested by anybody else. His second in command was a far stronger and abler man, but unhappily the two could never agree. They were both of them, says Sir J.W.K., brave men. In any other situation, though the physical infirmities of the one and the cankered vanity, the dogmatical perverseness of the other, might have in some measure detracted from their efficiency as military commanders, I believe they would have exhibited sufficient courage and constancy to rescue an army from utter destruction and the British name from indelible reproach. But in the Kabul Cantonments they were miserably out of place. They seemed to have been sent there by superhuman intervention to work out the utter ruin and prostration of an unholy policy by ordinary human means. One fact must be mentioned by an English historian, one which an English historian has happily not often to record. It is certain that an officer in our service entered into negotiations for the murder of the insurgent chiefs who are our worst enemies. It is more than probable that he believed in doing so, he was acting as Sir W. McNaughton would have had him do. Sir W. McNaughton was innocent of any complicity in such a plot and was incapable of it. But the negotiations were opened and carried on in his name. A new figure appeared on the scene, a dark and a fierce apparition. This was Akbar Khan, the favorite son of Dost Mohammad. He was a daring, clever, and unscrupulous young man. From the moment when he entered Kabul he became the real leader of the insurrection against Shah Suja and us. McNaughton, persuaded by the military commander that the position of things was hopeless, consented to enter into negotiations with Akbar Khan. Before the arrival of the latter the chiefs of the insurrection had offered us terms which made the ears of our envoy tingle. Such terms had not often been even suggested to British soldiers before. They were simply unconditional surrender. McNaughton indignantly rejected them. Everything went wrong with him, however. We were beaten again and again by the Afghans. Our officers never vaulted in their duty but the melancholy truth has to be told that the men, most of whom were Asiatics, at last began to lose heart and would not fight the enemy. So the envoy was compelled to enter into terms with Akbar Khan and the other chiefs. Akbar Khan received him at first with contemptuous insolence, as a haughty conqueror received some ignoble and humiliated adversary. It was agreed that the British troops should quit Afghanistan at once, that Dost Mohammed and his family should be sent back to Afghanistan, that on his return the unfortunate Shah Suja should be allowed to take himself off to India or where he would, and that some British officers should be left at Kabul as hostages for the fulfillment of the conditions. The evacuation did not take place at once, although the fierce winter was setting in and the snow was falling heavily, ominously. Vignatin seems to have had still some lingering hopes that something would turn up to relieve him from the shame of quitting the country, and it must be owned, that he does not seem to have had any intention of carrying out the terms of the agreement if by any chance he could escape from them. On both sides there were daliings and delays. At last Akbar Khan made a new and startling proposition to our envoy. It was that they too should enter into a secret treaty, should unite their arms against the other chiefs, and should keep Shah Suja on the throne as nominal king, with Akbar Khan as his vizier. Mignatin caught at the proposals. He had entered into terms of negotiation with the Afghan chiefs together. He now consented to enter into a secret treaty with one of the chiefs to turn their joint arms against the others. It would be idle and shameful to attempt to defend such a policy. We can only excuse it by considering the terrible circumstances of Mignatin's position, the manner in which his nerves and moral fiber had been shaken and shattered by calamities, and his doubts whether he could place any reliance on the promises of the chiefs. He had apparently sunk into that condition of mind which Mokali tells us that Clive adopted so readily in his dealings with Asiatics, and under the influence of which men naturally honorable and high-minded come to believe that it is right to act treacherously with those whom we believe to be treacherous. All this is but excuse, and rather poor excuse. When it has all been said and thought of, we must still be glad to believe that there are not many Englishmen who would under any circumstances have consented even to give a hearing to the proposals of Akbar Khan. Whatever Mignatin's error it was dearly expiated. He went out at noon next day to confer with Akbar Khan on the banks of the neighboring river. Three of his officers were with him. Akbar Khan was ominously surrounded by friends and retainers. These kept pressing round the unfortunate envoy. Some remonstrance was made by one of the English officers, but Akbar Khan said it was of no consequence, as they were all in the secret. Not many words were spoken. The expected conference had hardly begun, when a signal was given or an order issued by Akbar Khan, and the envoy and the officers were suddenly seized from behind. A scene of wild confusion followed in which hardly anything is clear and certain but the one most horrible incident. The envoy struggled with Akbar Khan, who had himself seized Mignatin. Akbar Khan drew from his belt one of a pair of pistols which Mignatin had presented to him a short time before, and shot him through the body. The fanatics who were crowding round hacked the body to pieces with their knives. Of the three officers, one was killed on the spot, the other two were forced to mount Afghan horses and carried away as prisoners. At first this horrid deed of treachery and blood, shows like that to which Klayarkis and his companions, the chiefs of the famous ten thousand Greeks, fell victims at the hands of Tissa Ferenes, the Persian satrap. But it seems certain that the treachery of Akbar, base as it was, did not contemplate more than the seizure of the envoy and his officers. There were jealousies and disputes among the chiefs of the insurrection. One of them in a special had got his mind filled with the conviction inspired no doubt by the unfortunate and unparalleled negotiation already mentioned, that the envoy had offered a price for his head. Akbar Khan was accused by him of being a secret friend of the envoy and the English. Akbar Khan's father was a captive in the hands of the English, and it may have been thought that on his account and for personal purposes Akbar was favouring the envoy and even intriguing with him. Akbar offered to prove his sincerity by making the envoy a captive and handing him over to the chiefs. This was the treacherous plot which he strove to carry out by entering into secret negotiations with the easily deluded envoy. On the fatal day the latter resisted and struggled. Akbar Khan heard a cry of alarm that the English soldiers were coming out of Cantonments to rescue the envoy and while with passion he suddenly drew his pistol and fired. This was the statement made again and again by Akbar Khan himself. It does not seem an improbable explanation for what otherwise looks a murder as stupid and purposeless as it was brutal. The explanation does not much relieve the darkness of Akbar Khan's character. It is given here as history, not as ex-call-patient. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that Akbar Khan would have shrunk from any treachery or any cruelty which served his purpose. His own explanation of his purpose in this instance shows a degree of treachery which could hardly be surpassed even in the East. But it is well to bear in mind that the suspicion of perfidy under which the English envoy labored and which was the main impulse of Akbar Khan's movement had evidence enough to support it in the eyes of suspicious enemies and that poor McNaughton would not have been murdered had he not consented to meet Akbar Khan and treat with him on a proposition to which an English official should never have listened. A terrible agony of suspense followed among the little English force in the Cantonments. The military chiefs afterwards stated that they did not know until the following day that any calamity had befallen the envoy. But a keen suspicion ran through the Cantonments that some fearful deed had been done. No step was taken to avenge the death of McNaughton even when it became known that his hacked and mangled body had been exhibited in triumph all through the streets and bazaars of Kabul. A paralysis seemed to have fallen over the councils of our military chiefs. On December 24, 1841 came a letter from one of the officers seized by Akbar Khan accompanying proposals for retreating from the Afghan chiefs. It is hard now to understand how any English officers could have consented to enter into terms with the murderers of McNaughton before his mangled body could well have ceased to bleed. It is strange that it did not occur to most of them that there was an alternative, that they were not ordered by fate to accept whatever the conquerors chose to offer. We can all see the difficulty of their position. General Elphinstone and his second-in-command Brigadier Shelton were convinced that it would be equally impossible to stay where they were or to cut their way through the Afghans. But it might have occurred to many that they were nevertheless not bound to treat with the Afghans. They might have remembered the famous answer of the father in Cornet's immortal drama, who is asked what his son could have done but yield in the face of such odds and exclaims in generous passion that he could have died. One English officer of Mark did counsel his superiors in this spirit. This was Major Eldred Pottinger, whose skill and courage in the defence of Herat we have already mentioned. Pottinger was for cutting their way through all enemies and difficulties as far as they could and then occupying the ground with their dead bodies. But his advice was hardly taken into consideration. It was determined to treat with the Afghans, and treating with the Afghans now meant accepting any terms the Afghans chose to impose on their fallen enemies. In the negotiations that went on some written documents were exchanged. One of these drawn up by the English negotiators contains a short sentence which we believe to be absolutely unique in the history of British dealings with armed enemies. It is an appeal to the Afghans conquerors not to be too hard upon the vanquished, not to break the bruised reed. In friendship, kindness and consideration are necessary, not overpowering the weak with sufferings. In friendship, we appeal to the friendship of McNaughton's murderers, to the friendship in any case of the man whose father we had dethroned and driven into exile, not overpowering the weak with sufferings, the weak with the English. One might fancy he was reading the plaintive and piteous appeal of some forlorn and feeble tribe of helpless half-breeds for the mercy of arrogant and overmastering rulers. Suffolk's imperious tongue is stern and rough, says one in Shakespeare's pages, when he is bitten to ask for consideration at the hands of captors whom he is no longer able to resist. The tongue with which the English force at Kabul addressed the Afghans was not imperious or stern or rough. It was baited, mild and plaintive. Only the other day it would seem these men had blown up the gates of Guzny and rushed through the dense smoke and the falling ruins to attack the enemy hand-to-hand. Only the other day our envoy had received and surrendered the bright sword of Dost Muhammad. Now the same men who had seen these things could only plead for a little gentleness of consideration and had no thought of resistance and did not any longer seem to know how to die. We accept that the terms of treaty offered to us. Nothing else could be done by men who were not prepared to adopt the advice of the heroic father in Qochne. The English were at once to take themselves off, out of Afghanistan, giving up all their guns except six, which they were allowed to retain for their necessary defense in their mournful journey home. They were to leave behind all the treasure and to guarantee the payment of something additional for the safe conduct of the poor little army to Peshawar or to Jalalabad, and they were to hand over six officers as hostages for the due fulfillment of the conditions. It is, of course, understood that the conditions included the immediate release of Dost Muhammad and his family and their return to Afghanistan, when these should return the six hostages were to be released. Only one concession had been obtained from the conquerors. It was at first demanded that some of the married ladies should be left as hostages, but on the urgent representations of the English officers this condition was waived, at least for the moment. When the treaty was signed, the officers who had been seized when McNaughton was murdered were released. It is worth mentioning that these officers were not badly treated by Akbar Khan while they were in his power. On the contrary, he had to make strenuous efforts and did make them in good faith to save them from being murdered by bans of his fanatical followers. One of the officers has himself described the almost desperate efforts which Akbar Khan had to make to save him from the fury of the mob, who thronged, thirsting for the blood of the Englishmen up to the very stirrup of their young chief. Akbar Khan says this officer at length drew his sword and laid about him right manfully in defence of his prisoner. When however he had got the latter into a place of safety, the impetuous young Afghan chief could not restrain as sneer at his captive and the cause his captive represented. Turning to the English officer, he said more than once, in a tone of triumphant derision, some words such as these. So, you are the man who came here to seize my country. It must be owned that the condition of things gave bitter meaning to the taunt, if they did not actually excuse it. At a later period of this melancholy story it is told by Lady Sayle that crowds of the fanatical gilzies were endeavouring to persuade Akbar Khan to slaughter all the English and that when he tried to pacify them, they said that when Burns came into the country they entreated Akbar Khan's father to have Burns killed or he would go back to Hindustan and on some future day return and bring an army with him to take our country from us and all the calamities had come upon them because Dost Mohamed would not take their advice. Akbar Khan either was or pretended to be moderate. He might indeed safely put on an air of magnanimity. His enemies were doomed. It needed no command from him to decree their destruction. The withdrawal from Kabul began. It was the heart of a cruel winter. The English had to make their way through the awful pass of Kord Kabul. This stupendous gorge runs for some five miles between mountain ranges so narrow, lofty and grim that in the winter season the rays of the sun can hardly pierce its darkness even at the noontide. Down the center dashed a precipitous mountain torrent so fiercely that the stern frost of that terrible time could not stay its course. The snow lay in masses on the ground. The rocks and stones that raised their heads above the snow in the way of the unfortunate travelers were slippery with frost. Soon the white snow began to be stained and splashed with blood. Fearful as this Kord Kabul pass was, it was only a degree worse than the road which for two whole days the English had to traverse to reach it. The army which set out from Kabul numbered more than four thousand fighting men, of whom Europeans it should be said formed but a small proportion, and some twelve thousand camp followers of all kinds. There were also many women and children. Lady McNaughton, widow of the murdered envoy, Lady Sayle, whose gallant husband was holding Jalalabad at the near end of the Khyber Pass towards the Indian frontier. Mrs. Sturt, her daughter soon to be widowed by the death of her young husband, Mrs. Trevor and her seven children and many other pitiable fugitives. The winter journey would have been cruel and dangerous enough in time of peace, but this journey had to be accomplished in the midst of something far worse than common war. At every step of the road, every opening of the rocks, the unhappy crowd of confused and heterogeneous fugitives were beset by bands of savage fanatics, who with their long guns and long knives were murdering all they could reach. It was all the way, a confused constant battle between a guerrilla enemy of the most furious and merciless temper, who were perfectly familiar with the ground and could rush forward and retire exactly as suited their tactics. The English soldiers, weary, weak and crippled by frost, could make but a poor fight against the savage Afghans. It was no longer, says Sir JWK, a retreating army, it was a rabble in chaotic flight. Men, women and children, horses, ponies, camels, the wounded, the dying, the dead, all crowded together in most intractable confusion among the snow and amid the relentless enemies. The massacre, to quote again from Sir JWK, was fearful in this cruel Kabul pass. Three thousand men were said to have fallen under the fire of the enemy, or to have dropped down, paralyzed and exhausted to be slaughtered by the Afghan knives. And amidst these fearful scenes of carnage, through a shower of matchlock balls, rode English ladies on horseback or in camel-paniers, sometimes vainly endeavouring to keep their children beneath their eyes and losing them in the confusion and bewilderment of the desolating march. Was it for this, then, that our troops had been induced to capitulate? Was this the safe conduct which the Afghan chiefs had promised in return for their accepting the ignominious conditions imposed on them? Some of the chiefs did exert themselves to their utmost to protect the unfortunate English. It is not certain what the real wish of Akbar Khan may have been. He protested that he had no power to restrain the hordes of fanatical gilzies whose own immediate chiefs had not authority enough to keep them from murdering the English whenever they got a chance. The force of some few hundred horsemen whom Akbar Khan had with him were utterly incapable, he declared, of maintaining order among such a massive infuriated and lawless savages. Akbar Khan constantly appeared on the scene during this journey of terror. At every opening or break of the long straggling flight he and his little band of followers showed themselves on the horizon, trying still to protect the English from utter ruin, as he declared, come to gloat over their misery and to see that it was surely accomplished some of the unhappy English were ready to believe. Yet his presence was something that seemed to give a hope of protection. Akbar Khan at length startled the English by a proposal that the women and children who were with the army should be handed over to his custody to be conveyed by him in safety to Peshawar. There was nothing better to be done. The only modification of his request or command that could be obtained was that the husbands of the married ladies should accompany their wives. With this agreement the women and children were handed over to the care of this dreaded enemy and Lady McNaughton had to undergo the agony of a personal interview with the man whose own hand had killed her husband. Few scenes in poetry or romance can surely be more thrilling with emotion than such a meeting as this must have been. Akbar Khan was kindly in his language and declared to the unhappy widow that he would give his right arm to undo if it were possible the deed that had been done. The women and children and the married men whose wives were among this party were taken from the unfortunate army and placed under the care of Akbar Khan. As events turned out this proved to be a fortunate thing for them, but in any case it was the best thing that could be done. Not one of these women and children could have lived through the horrors of the journey which lay before the remnant of what had once been a British force. The march was resumed, new horrors set in, new heaps of corpses stained the snow, and then Akbar Khan presented himself with a fresh proposition. In the treaty made at Kabul between the English authorities and the Afghan chiefs there was an article which stipulated that the English force of Jalalabad shall march for Peshawar before the Kabul army arrives and shall not delay on the road. Akbar Khan was especially anxious to get rid of the little army at Jalalabad at the near end of the Khyber Pass. He desired above all things that it should be on the march home to India, either that it might be out of his way or that he might have a chance of destroying it on its way. It was in great measure as a security for its moving that he desired to have the women and children under his care. It is not likely that he meant any harm to the women and children. It must be remembered that his father and many of the women of his family were under the control of the British government as prisoners in Hindustan. But he fancied that if he had the English women in his hands the army at Jalalabad could not refuse to obey the conditions set down in the article of the treaty. Now that he had the women in his power, however, he demanded other guarantees with openly acknowledged purpose of keeping these latter until Jalalabad should have been evacuated. He demanded that General Elphinstone, the commander, with his second in command, and also one other officer, should hand themselves over to him as hostages. He promised if this were done to exert himself more than before to restrain the fanatical tribes and also to provide the army in the court Kabul Pass with provisions. There was nothing for it but to submit, and the English general himself became, with the women and children, a captive in the hands of the inexorable enemy. Then the march of the army without a general went on again. Soon it became the story of a general without an army. Before very long there was neither general nor army. It is idle to lengthen a tale of mere horrors. The straggling remnant of an army entered the jug-delug pass, a dark, steep, narrow, ascending path between crags. The miserable toilers found that the fanatical, implacable tribes had barricaded the pass. All was over. The army of Kabul was finally extinguished in that barricaded pass. It was a trap. The English were taken in it. A few mere fugitives escaped from the scene of actual slaughter and were on the road to Jalalabad, where sale and his little army were holding their own. When they were within sixteen miles of Jalalabad the number was reduced to six. Of these six, five were killed by straggling marauders on the way. One man alone reached Jalalabad to tell the tale. Literally, one man, Dr. Brighton, came to Jalalabad out of a moving host which had numbered in all some sixteen thousand when it set out on its march. The curious eye will search through history or fiction in vain for any picture more thrilling with the suggestions of an awful catastrophe than that of this solitary survivor, faint and reeling on his jaded horse as he appeared under the walls of Jalalabad to bear the tidings of our thermopoly of pain and shame. This is the crisis of the story. With this, at least, the worst of the pain and shame were destined to end. The rest is all so far as we are concerned reaction and recovery. Our successes are common enough. We may tell their tale briefly in this instance. The garrison at Jalalabad had received before Dr. Brighton's arrival an intimation that they were to go out and march towards India in accordance with the terms of the treaty extorted from Elphinstone at Kabul. They very properly declined to be bound by a treaty which, as General Sale rightly conjectured, had been forced from our envoy and military commander with the knives at their throats. General Sale's determination was clear and simple. I proposed to hold this place on the part of government until I receive its order to the contrary. This resolve of Sale's was really the turning point of the history. Sale held Jalalabad. Not was it Kandahar. Akbar Khan besieged Jalalabad. Nature seemed to have declared herself emphatically on his side for a succession of earthquake shocks shattered the walls of the place and produced more terrible destruction than the most formidable guns of modern warfare could have done. But the garrison held out fearlessly. They restored the parapets, re-established every battery, retrenched the whole of the gates, and built up all the breaches. They resisted every attempt of Akbar Khan to advance upon their works and at length, when it became certain that General Pollock was forcing the Khyber Pass to come to their relief, they determined to attack Akbar Khan's army. They issued boldly out of their forts, forced a battle on the Afghan chief and completely defeated him. Before Pollock, having gallantly fought his way through the Khyber Pass had reached Jalalabad, the beleaguering army had been entirely defeated and dispersed. General Khandahar was ready now to cooperate with General Sale and General Pollock for any movement on Kabul, which the authorities might advise or sanction. Meanwhile, the unfortunate Shah Suja, whom we had restored with so much pomp of announcement to the throne of his ancestors, was dead. He was assassinated in Kabul soon after the departure of the British by the orders of some of the chiefs who detested him, and his body, stripped of its royal robes and its many jewels, was flung into a ditch. Historians quarrel a good deal over the question of his sincerity and fidelity in his dealings with us. It is not likely that an oriental of his temperament and his weakness could have been capable of any genuine and unmixed loyalty to the English strangers. It seems to us probable enough that he may, at important moments, have wavered and even faltered, glad to take advantage of any movement that might safely rid him of us, and yet on the whole preferring our friendship and our protection to the tender mercies which he was doomed to experience when our troops had left him. But if we ask concerning his gratitude to us, it may be well also to ask what there was in our conduct towards him which called for any enthusiastic display of gratitude. We did not help him out of any love for him, or any concern for the justice of his cause. It served us to have a puppet, and we took him when it suited us. We also abandoned him when it suited us. As Lady Tiesel proposes to do with honour in her conference with Joseph's surface, so we ought to do with gratitude, in discussing the merits of Shazuja. Leave it out of the question. What Shazuja owed to us was a few weeks of idle pomp and absurd dreams, a bitter awakening, and a shameful death. End of section 25