constantly occurring. It is now positively stated that arrangements to that effect had actually been made, Akbar Khan engaging not only to restore the prisoners in his immediate charge, but to collect the sepoys scattered over the country, and escort them through the passes; the condition being, that the Affghan prisoners in India should be released, and the English withdraw altogether from the country; and that, on the reception of direct orders from the home Government, these arrangements were broken off and hostilities recommenced; upon hearing which, Mahomed Akbar exclaimed, in fierce anger, that "every Affghan chief had been taught to lie and break faith by the Feringees!"

On this subject, we would direct attention to a letter from General Pollock, to the secretary of the Governor-General, quoted from the Parliamentary Papers at p. 394 in the Appendix to Lieut. Eyre's Journal. It proves, we think, that General Pollock's breaking off the negotiations arose, not from any orders he might have received, but from distrust of the sincerity of Mahomed Akbar. A positive engagement to withdraw would, he thought, lead to delay on Akbar's part in the restoration of the prisoners; and our advance be likely to accelerate it. It is clear that the British general treated, as a man treats with another in whom he does not confide, anxious to avoid giving his opponent the advantage of binding himself to anything. We believe General Pollock, therefore, to have considered the advance on Cabool desirable, if not necessary, for the sake of the prisoners.

It

On the other hand, Mahomed Akbar, fully conscious of the hold on the British Government which he derived from the possession of the prisoners, was not in any way blamable for the refusal to restore them till assured of the conditions. appears, however, from much concurrent testimony, that he entered into the negotiation honestly, with a sincere readiness to restore them on such assurance; that the sudden rupture of the negotiations not unnaturally impressed him with the belief that he had been merely played with; and that the advance of our army, under such circumstances, exposed the prisoners to great peril. Though no actual engagement had been broken, Akbar had been at least deliberately led to form expectations which it was never (as he at least must have thought,) intended to fulfil; and had he been the fiend, which many in and out of India thought him, the most terrible results might have followed.

Lieutenant Eyre remarks, that "This negotiation seemed now, by the sudden turn that had taken place, likely to plunge us into a dangerous dilemma; Mahomed Akbar being notorious for stopping at no atrocity, when his angry passions

* Bombay Times, April, 1843.

were once aroused, as we knew they soon would be, when he should hear of the advance of both generals, with their overwhelming forces."

His angry passions were roused, and not without reasonyet he perpetrated no atrocity. The prisoners, withdrawn from the neighbourhood of Cabool, knew not whether to hope or fear most from the progress of our victorious army. At length, in the very crisis of their fate, the adherent to whom Akbar had confided them was brought over, and the prisoners, headed by their jailer, occupied the fort to which they had been sent for custody, in open revolt against the power which had sent them there. It was a curious position in human affairs, and not without its peril; but their proceedings were conducted with spirit and prudence, and all went well with them, until they found themselves once more in an English camp, restored to safety and freedom. The principal immediate agent in their recovery was, appropriately, the same English officer whose name was previously known as connected with a service to humanity more free from alloy, more purely gratifying, than it can have often fallen to the lot of a military man to effect-the rescue and safe conduct to St. Petersburg of the prisoners detained at Khiva. Sir Richmond Shakespeare, to whose lot two such services have fallen, is indeed a man to be envied.

This was the bright spot in the campaign of 1842; we turn from it to the darkest; and we write the name of Istaliff with shame and horror-horror at the atrocities of which that name is the symbol; shame and deep indignation at the feeling, or rather the no feeling, with which their announcement was received in this country. Istaliff, a large town, about forty miles north-east of Cabool, was the refuge resorted to by many of the chiefs and their followers who had failed in opposing our advance upon that city; and a force was consequently sent against it. We say consequently, but we do not yet know why. Intending, as we did, to leave the Affghans to the "anarchy which was the consequence of their crimes," and not their crimes only-it does not appear to have been incumbent upon us to reduce all their strongholds before quitting the country, and even admitting that they had deserved punishment at our hands, who will say that enough had not been exacted, in the slaughter at Tezeen, the slaughter at Ghuznee, the burnt villages and wasted lands which marked the track of our invading army?

:

But to pass from this. Istaliff was attacked, and bravely taken its capture is considered, in a military point of view, equal to any exploit in the war; but what followed on its capture? This:

"For this period (two days) the place was given over to fire and sword; not a living soul was spared, armed or unarmed; the men were hunted down like wild beasts; not a prisoner was taken; mercy was never dreamt of." *

* Indian Papers.

It will be remembered that this statement did, in the House of Commons, give rise to some questioning and some explanation; an explanation not denying, not materially altering the charge; but simply stating that, as Affghan houses were all built and occupied like fortresses, it was impossible that fighting could cease on the entrance of the troops into the town. What then? Look at the charge and the defence, and say whether the one meets the other. The indictment is not traversed. Sir Henry Hardinge's plea would, by any tribunal who wished to do justice, have been set aside as irrelevant. But it sounded like an answer, and every one, of course, was glad of an excuse to escape from the unpopular possibility of an inquiry into the conduct of a brave and successful commander. It was not so, either in or out of the House of Commons, when an unwise, incautious, and unpopular proclamation of the present GovernorGeneral gave a popular handle for a party attack upon the existing government; and the contrast is a disgrace to the nation in which it occurred. The self-styled religious world, which, at the Somnauth proclamation, screamed and yelled out like a man whose gouty foot is trod on, received the news of the slaughter of Istaliff with the calmness of the same man putting a cork leg into boiling water. Both were characteristic; yet, were it not for the unfeigned indifference, we might have made more allowance for the hypocritical and canting clamour. The heathen and unscrupulous Athenians, it is said, once received a general who came to them fresh from the performance of brilliant services, but accused of a great crime against Grecian morality, not with thanks, but a trial, in the course of which, hopeless of a favourable result, he slew himself in the assembly. When we first read this story, we thought-but that was a youthful error -that the time had come at which a state calling itself civilized and christian would not overlook savage cruelty, even in the victorious leaders of its armies.

With this dark, and not single, stain upon their character, the English forces withdrew from a country, in which their presence had, for four years, been the cause of every possible evil that can afflict a nation : war, misgovernment, then war again, foreign and domestic; terminating in utter anarchy, an anarchy which impartial History, when she speaks of the Affghans, will not denominate the "consequence of their crimes." Doubtless, the Affghans, like every other nation that ever was engaged in a similar contest, committed crimes in the struggle for their independence. But in taking away their independence without cause, the English inflicted on them the greatest wrong which nation can inflict on nation. Of all the mutual misery, of their savage and treacherous hatred, of our cruel revenge, our injustice was the origin. Evil would not be so evil, if the very nature of wrong were not to provoke to wrong;-if the

Affghans are now a worse people than they were five years since, is the fault theirs, or ours? "The beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water;" is that a new saying? Is it a recent discovery, that war will necessarily lead to atrocities and crimes? and is it not for this very cause that an unjust war is most criminal? Nations in different stages of civilization must be expected to carry on war upon different principles, and to temper its conduct with different degrees of humanity. But, if we were to enter on the inquiry, which, in the mere conduct of the war, had offended most against their own standard of right and wrong, is it so certain that the answer would be favourable to the English?

We do not think that any candid reader of Lieutenant Eyre's work will lay it down with an impression altogether hostile to the Affghans. If, in the conflict for their independence, they committed many fierce and treacherous actions, they yet, on many occasions, entitled themselves to the praise of truth and mercy. When Lieutenant Eyre refers gratefully to the hand of Providence, as clearly discernible in "restraining the wrath of savage men whose intense hatred of us was only equalled by their unscrupulous cruelty," he conveys, in general terms, a censure which the facts related by him show to be far from universally applicable. An insurrection in any country, and especially such a country as Affghanistan, is no orderly, disciplined, well-conducted thing; the leaders in such a struggle have to make the fiercest passions of their countrymen the instruments of their deliverance: their influence is mainly directed to excite, and not to calm, the hatred which they share: and the history of every popular rising can furnish examples of their want of power to restrain it, when they have the will. Yet, in several instances, we find the chiefs exerting themselves to the utmost, and risking their own lives to preserve the lives of Europeans from their followers. An English officer orders his men to take charge of, and protect a prisoner, and he is obeyed-an Affghan

"Takes off his turban-the last appeal a Mussulman can make-and implores the savage Ghazees, for God's sake, to respect the life of his friend."

"My conductor and Meerza Bàordeen Khan were obliged to press me up against the wall, covering me with their own bodies, and protesting that no blow should reach me but through their persons."

Afterwards

"These drew their swords in my defence, the chief himself throwing his arm round my neck, and receiving on his shoulder a cut aimed by Moollah Momin at my head."

Look, too, at the conduct of the Nawab Zeman Khan, an old chieftain, some time king of the insurgent city of Cabool; in

Captain Mackenzie's Account of the Envoy's Murder.

whose custody we left the hostages given before our army left the cantonments. After protecting them for months against the constant efforts of the Ghazee fanatics to slay them, he at last consigned them to the care of the Meer Wyze, the high priest of Cabool, in whose venerated protection he believed they would be more secure.

"Before sending them to the Meer Wyze, which was done at night, he took the precaution to line the streets with his own followers, with strict orders to fire upon every one who should so much as poke his head out of a window; and he not only accompanied them himself, but sent his own family on a-head.”

It is impossible not to smile at the very decided character of the precaution; but when good faith and plighted protection are at stake, we will not quarrel with strong measures. Noble old Zeman Khan! We read again that

"Hundreds of Hindostanees crowded the streets of Cabool begging for bread, which was daily served out to them by Nawab Jubbar Khan and Zeman Khan."

These Hindostanees were the survivors of an invading and conquering army. We have seen the survivors of a legion, sent out under authority of the English government, reduced to destitution by the nonfulfilment of the promises under which they. were enrolled, meet with less kindness in the streets of London. But Mahomedanism is a charitable religion, and its professors frequently act up to its precepts.

These facts would, we think, be sufficient to redeem the Affghans from the sweeping charge of treachery and inhumanity which has been so frequently made against them. But there is one Affghan whose name, generally regarded as the symbol of every atrocity, is too closely connected with the darkest of our calamities for us to pass the subject without some reference to him in particular-Mahomed Akbar Khan.

This man, the second and favourite son of Dost Mahomed, and the only one, we believe, of the family, who never submitted to our power, was, in his own words, "when an English army entered his country, compelled to become our enemy, and was for three years a wanderer, and returned at the end of the confusion." Not yet (if Dost Mahomed may be believed,) twenty-two years of age, he had seen his father driven from power, to make way for a king set up by, and on behalf of, a set of foreign conquerors. To him it must all have seemed the most utter injustice, and so he returned "at the end of the confusion" our fierce and unscrupulous enemy, with one object at heart,-to rid the country of the English. In Captain Mackenzie's account of the death of the Envoy we find that, after "laying about him manfully" to save Captain Mackenzie from the Ghazees, Akbar Khan turned to the English officer clinging to his stirrup, "and repeatedly said, in a tone of triumphant derision, "You'll seize my country,