winning Shere Ali's heart by being cordial to him-we should have secured and retained that potentate's friendship, and have had freely granted to us the run of his country, which_impending complications made so essential. As it was, while Lord Mayo lived the Ameer lay under the spell of his genial mastery. But Russia was looming large over against him, and he felt himself between the hammer and the anvil. Some real assistance and firm assurance from us would have even then bound him to us. But to Lord Mayo had succeeded Lord Northbrook, an honourable and upright man, but cold, stiff, unsympathetic, and bound by antecedents and personal conviction to the jelly-fish policy of the Gladstone Government. To the Ameer's pleading for effective backing up by us against Russian aggression Lord Northbrook's chilling response was, that in certain eventualities, and on certain conditions, "probably the British Government would afford the Ameer assistance in repelling an invader. This, to use a slang phrase. was "not good enough. The Ameer saw further and clearer into the Russian designs than did Lord Northbrook and his Council. So late as the beginning of 1876 that worshipful sanhedrim remained besotted with incredulity that " Russian interference was a probable or near contingency," and saw no reason to "anticipate that the Russian Government would deviate from the policy of non-interference so recently declared." The Ameer knew better three years earlier. In 1873 he already had recognised the imminent prospect of Russian aggression; and whether he was right let any one judge who has read Sir H. Rawlinson's article in the Nineteenth Century of December last, in which the projects of Russia from 1873, and her actual movements in 1877, are detailed.

We had sickened him at last by dint of our repellent policy; and, recognising his inability to hold his own for himself, Shere Ali went over to the other side, whose emissaries had for years been whispering at his elbow. He is no dodger, this poor shuttlecock of successive Viceroys. Having thrown himself into the other camp, he did not dissemble his disgust and alienation. There was something of kingliness in his contemptuous refusal to touch the money we offered to him at the end of a very long pole. He ignored alike Lord Northbrook's proposal to send a surveying officer into Afghanistan—a slight which that Viceroy accepted without a murmur of remonstranceand his piteously limp suggestion that, although the Ameer had not expressed it, he no doubt felt regret at "his inability to welcome servants of the Queen." Shere Ali, in fine, had "cut us."

Lord Salisbury became Secretary of State for India. Now Lord Salisbury is a statesman, and yet further he is a Briton. There is no flabbiness about him. He saw the imbecility of allowing Afghanistan to remain a sealed book to us. He ordered Lord Northbrook to "procure the assent of the Ameer" to the establishment of British residents in Afghanistan. Lord Northbrook pro

tested in a letter that is a masterpiece of bigoted purblind fatuity. By arguments that are as contemptible as the deprecation of the Ameer's disaffection is abject, the Viceroy's letter urges that the time was unsuitable ;" they were "mere vague rumours" only as to the Ameer's dalliance with Russia; and Sir Richard Pollock's keenness of insight was happily exemplified in his quoted "conviction that no unfavourable change whatever had occurred in the disposition of his Highness." Lord Salisbury read the signs of the times better; he brushed away Lord Northbrook's remonstrances, and peremptorily instructed him “to find some occasion for sending a mission to Cabul." Lord Northbrook's conduct now was, in plain lau guage, insubordinate. A victim to the double hallucination that the Ameer had not been made our enemy, and that a Russian pledge to a non-extension policy was not a grim joke, he repeated his expostulations, and in perhaps the weakest document ever printed in a Bluebook he pleaded that the whole question might be reconsidered.

But his time was up, and his successor chosen. Lord Salisbury let Lord Northbrook slide; and the instructions which Lord Lytton took out with him directed the new Viceroy to find occasion for a temporary mission as a prelude to permanent British agents. If Lord Hartington meant in any other than a political sense his remark that "Lord Lytton was everything that a Viceroy ought not to be,” he achieved a miracle of succinct definition. Aiming seemingly at the proud role of petit maitre, Lord Lytton only succeeds in being a petit creve, with a dash of the satyr and a mild infusion of the secondhand Jesuit. In his public capacity he is frequently ridiculous; he is crude, rash, and impulsive; but he is laudably under discipline to the orders of his superior, and has the faculty of writing extremely able depatches. His communication of May 1877 is the model of a modern state paper. It recapitulates the negotiations, or rather failure of negotiations, with the Ameer since his accession to office, and brings the history of events down to the abrupt arrestment of the Peshawur Conference, on the death of the Ameer's envoy.

When it was written the Ameer was almost undisguisedly our enemy. He had not, indeed, wholly thrown off the mask, or altogether interrupted relations; but he was arming, and he was lie with Kaufmann up to the hilt. Pacific efforts had been exhausted, and there remained but the expedient of threatening the Ameer with actual hostilities, as the consequence of continued refusal on his part to receive a mission. But Lord Salisbury doubtless felt that there is a time for everything under the sun. Europe was in the throes of a difficulty, the likeliest outcome of which, in the opinion of very many people, would be a European war. England was temporising, if not vacillating; and Lord Beaconsfield had not hardened his heart to confront and confound Russia. I think, speaking for myself, that the Secretary of State was wrong in the line he took. He accepted the status quo. The Ameer was to be

left for a time "to reflect on the knowledge he had gained." We let him rest; but we also left unattained the safety and serenity of India. For the attainment of these, a knowledge of events in Afghanistan was surely more essential now than ever previously; to the acquisition of that knowledge the establishment of envoys was essential; the consent of the ruler of Afghanistan was essential to that establishment. Was it not, then, an error of judgment to leave the Ameer in a distinctly and increasingly dangerous attitude of "isolation and scarcely veiled hostility," at a time when, not having fallen entirely under the spell of Russian encouragement, plain speaking, to be followed by acts, would probably have led him to reconsider his decision?

A year elapsed: a Russian mission reached Cabul. With the consent of the Secretary of State, Lord Lytton had commissioned Sir Neville Chamberlain to be the head of an opposition mission, and was hurrying forward his preparations. This haste was a grave error; and another and yet graver error underlay it. There was every reason to believe that the Ameer would refuse to accept the mission. He had declined a mission already, when as yet he had not been hand and glove with the Russians. It was the conviction of most sagacious Anglo-Indians that Shere Ali was prepared to go the length of affronting us. Sir Neville Chamberlain from the first was almost destitute of hope. Now in the event of such a positive affront as the refusal to admit the mission, the bolt of retribution should have sped swift, sure, decisive. But Lord Lytton would have no bolt ready to his hand. The carrying out of the projected camp of exercise at Hassun-Abdul, only three marches behind Peshawur, would have furnished no ground for the charge that he was holding out an olive-branch with one hand while the other held a club behind his back. But, whether out of over-confidence or out of quioxtry I know not, he had the strongest faith in the acceptance of the mis sion. Lord Lytton countermanded the Hassun-Abdul gathering of

soldiers.

Thus it fell out that, when the mission was ignominiously stopped, our condition in India resembled that of a turtle suddenly turned over on its back. Then it was that Lord Lytton and his advisers lost their heads. Lord Lytton is a civilian pure and simple; the effort to rise to the conception of him in uniform is frustrated by a sense of the ridiculous. But there were soldiers in council with him-or whose council was at his disposal-who could scarcely have been ignorant of the abyss of unpreparedness into which anxiety for economy had plunged the Indian military establishments on their peace footing. There is no evidence that he submitted his projects to the home authorities, or, indeed, that to this day do these know anything of them. He had, in fact, pledged himself to "no hostile action without full previous communication." What he actually did was this:

Immediately after the repulse of Sir Neville Chamberlain's mission in the beginning of September last, the Viceroy issued orders through the regular channel, the Commander-in-Chief, to BrigadierGeneral Ross, commanding at Peshawur, to go and drive the Ameer's garrison out of Ali Musjid, and hold that place. Peshawur is the most important cantonment on the north-western frontier of India; its normal garrison consists of some six battalions of infantry, three regiments of cavalry, and three batteries of artillery. It summer Peshawur is a pestilential station, the demon of fever has full sway, and last year he was more than ordinarily fell. It is customary during that period to send away from it to healthier outlying places all the troops that can be spared. Brigadier-General Ross is a soldier who has shown his capacity again and again, and special circumstances made him now exceptionally eager to distinguish himself yet further. He got his orders, and he promptly mustered his available strength. He found that, when he left behind only three hundred men, chiefly convalescents, to overawe the most turbulent city of Upper India, in which disaffection was known to be rife, there was forthcoming for the prescribed enterprise a force barely one thousand strong, in whose ranks were many men whose efficiency fever had deteriorated. Not less morally than physically brave, General Ross rightly thought it his duty to represent the great risk of disaster which offensive operations of an indefinite character, with this handful of virtually unequipped soldiers, would entail. His arguments were too cogent to be disregarded, and the crazy scheme was abandoned.

Yet the Viceroy-"in Council," as is the technical, though mostly empty, term—still hankered after a coup. In the expectation that the home authorities, as the outcome of the impending Cabinet Council, would pronounce for immediate hostilities, orders from Simla were issued in the third week of October to the principal commissariat officer of Peshawur, that he should have ready by the first week of November supplies for six thousand men for seven days, and adequate transport for the advance of the detachment to Dakka. The rashness of a design to launch six thousand men forty miles into a difficult and disturbed region with but seven days' supply in hand needs no exposure; but death was dealt it, not from remorse at the folly of it, but by orders from home of a contrary tenor, and by the report of the commissariat officer that adequate transport could not be procured on such short notice.

These fortunately abortive struggles to compass premature hostilities are now for the first time made public. The Indian Government has a positive genius for unscrupulous contradiction; but I am prepared to prove the truth of what I have written.

While working after this fashion on his account, Lord Lytton was pleading vehemently with Lord Cranbrook for sanction for an immediate declaration of war. The Blue-book contains but a selection

666

from the telegraphic correspondence; but the Blue-book furnishes convincing proof of the Viceroy's urgency. His messages contain such expressions as these: Any demand for apology would, now, in my opinion, be useless, and only expose us to fresh insult, while losing valuable time." "We urgently request immediate sanction to measures stated above," viz. immediate active offensive steps. Nor did he confine his urgency to the official and constitutional channel. It is not generally known, but it is nevertheless true, that the Viceroy of India, following the example of Colonels Mansfield and Wellesley in the recent Russo-Turkish war, has maintained direct communication on the Anglo-Afghan imbroglio with her Majesty the Queen. How copious and detailed this must have been may be judged from the fact that a single telegram from the Viceroy to the Queen, at an important and difficult crisis, was so long that the cost of it was eleven hundred rupees. Who paid for it-whether the Sovereign or the Viceroy, England or India— I know not; but I do know that it cost what I have stated.

At this momentous conjecture, Lord Beaconfield's Cabinet displayed statecraft of a very high, because very difficult, character. The Viceroy was clamouring for an immediate declaration of war. Behind him stood ranged the chief military authorities of our Indian Empire; men who might well be assumed to know that subject which was par excellence their own-the condition of India's military establishments. A poor paper-stainer like myself need feel no shame that he followed the lead of experts so eminent. But if the Viceroy had got his way, there would have ensued an ignoble interval of abstract inoperative hostility, while the army was daubing on its war paint, and, like Mr. Winkle, getting ready to begin. For it is not to be deemed that, even on the expiry of the time which the presentation of the ultimatum gave for preparation, the columns were so deficient of complete equipment, that, for instance, the chief commissariat office of the Peshawur column put on record a demi-official repudiation of responsibility if the end of the term of grace given should be the signal for immediate advance. That state of unpreparedness, in the consciousness of which the authorities in India had light hearts, the Cabinet at home was most solemnly sensible of. How, I know not; whether of their own knowledge, or because of the counsels of wise and conversant soldiers that were doubtless at their disposal. To make time for getting ready they prescribed the expedient of the ultimatum; and so brought about the valuable result, that our nakedness was not uncovered before a jibing world. The ultimatum was simply a device to gain time; the locus poenitentia a mere facon de parler. But there was a fine ring of magnanimity in the expedient; and there was the off-very off-chance that the Ameer would realise the situation, and save us the cost of a war. In the actual issue, it achieved for us the eclat-a little hollow, it is true -under the appearance of dashing promptness, of beginning war on the very stroke of the clock. Of the conduct and results of that war, the time has not come to speak. ARCHIBALD FORBES, in Time.