cantonments, the city and citadel again fell within the hands of the invaded people, reinforcements were urgently demanded, and all India, including the Presidencies of Bombay and Madras, was called upon to contribute its quota of forces for the field. Great exertions were made hurriedly, and at vast expense, to do all that had been left undone in the beginning of the operations. A special organisation, with Sir Michael Kennedy at its head, was undertaken for the transport; the orders for the retirement from Candahar were at last countermanded; the Secretary to the Punjab Government, an official of more than ordinary ability, was invested with the chief Political authority at Cabul; reinforcements were hurried up on the line of the Khyber; Sir Donald Stewart was ordered to move from Candahar on Ghazni, and thence to the capital to assume the supreme command; in short, awake at last to the realities of the military position upon which he had been previously signally ill-advised, Lord Lytton threw himself heart and soul into the vigorous redemption of the error into which he had been misled. This had arisen in great part from the inexperience in the special field of Asiatic warfare which caused the minds of his advisers to misconceive the position. Sir Pomeroy Colley, the Viceroy's Private Secretary, upon whose opinion Lord Lytton greatly relied, was deceived by the apparent ease with which Afghan troops were dispersed

when they came in the open field into contact with our own, into the idea that disciplined troops, in howsoever small bodies, would invariably defeat the Afghan armies. But he forgot to reckon, in his prevision, the elasticity which enabled the enemy, however broken and dispersed one day, to re-appear in the field the next. He disregarded the prodigious disproportion of odds, in the case of a country wherein every adult male was practically a soldier. He underrated the fanatical enthusiasm which made conquest by no means the certain corollary of victory, submission by no means the certain result of defeat. The hasty opinions formed at Head-quarters were too faithfully reflected by certain of the general officers at the frontier, and the loss of actions wherein British guns were left in the hands of the despised Afghans, followed by the retirement of General Roberts within the defences of Sherpur, demonstrated only too clearly the faults of strategy based upon an undue disparagement of the enemy. The uneasiness created in England by the events of November and December in Cabul, had a large share in undermining the faith of the British public in the wisdom of the Government, and in discrediting its measures. Succeeding, as this uneasy feeling did, so soon upon the catastrophe of Cavagnari's murder, the general public impression of mismanagement in Afghanistan greatly strengthened the hands of the Opposition, whose strenuous attacks

upon the Government upon the question of Indian policy were thus made to appear of considerable force and of reasonable foundation. The result has been the transfer of power to the hands of the party which formerly pushed the policy of 'Masterly Inactivity' to the dangerous extremes we have witnessed, at the very moment when a more distinct discernment of the means in proportion to the end appears to have dawned on the Cabinet which had always understood and acknowledged the necessity for vigorous action. Lord Lytton left the helm just as he perceived the breakers ahead, and the false reckoning which brought him so close to them. His successor is an instrument in the hands of a party pledged to renew a policy of non-intervention, unless it had chosen to reverse the decision of all its own chief orators, as reiterated in their speeches for years past. As for any hope of a successful issue, by the arrangements of any terms of settlement with Afghanistan, which can give us any of the original objects of the war, it seems to us wholly unfounded and vain.

Lord Lytton left his Government, therefore, surrounded by difficulties. We give him full credit for intellectual capacity of a very high order. We are fully convinced of his political sagacity in directions with which he is familiar. We believe him to be earnestly sincere, and full of energy in carrying out

measures of the prudence and propriety of which he has assured himself.

But, in the military administration, he never fully grappled with the problems which he had to solve simply because he had not known their conditions ; and the mediocrities, by whom he was surrounded, possessed neither the experience which could have advised him aright or the genius which stands sometimes in the stead of experience.

CHAPTER VI.

THE WEAKNESS WITHIN.

THERE is an affectation amongst a certain class that believes in peace parties, that the loss of our colonies and great dependencies, acquired with a vast expenditure of life and treasure, and which have conferred on Great Britain the wealth, rank, and power she enjoys, would be the cause of no serious nor lasting injury to the nation. This has been said with regard to the loss of Canada, and it has been said also of the loss of India. The people who say it are not generally accustomed to carry argument to a logical conclusion; yet it is not very difficult to comprehend the consequences which insult and spoliation unchecked might bring upon their victim, nor hard to imagine that, when a man's limbs are lopped off, the subsequent process of cutting his throat or bleeding him to death becomes greatly simplified.

Or, to drop metaphor, it is intelligible that should next year's national income fall short of this year's by twenty millions sterling, should many thousands of