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and what was still worse, with different views, being accredited at once from the same government. But a treaty was executed in spite of this singular stumbling-block. The reverses of Napoleon in the Peninsula greatly facilitated the progress of our envoys; and even the Sikhs, at first discourteous and almost contemptuous, entered into a friendly alliance with us on our own terms. In the treaties with Sindh and Caubul, special provision was made for the contingency of a French invasion; but the caution was unnecessary, for while these very instruments were being drawn up, all doubts and fears about France were extinguished in the victories of Wellington.

In the meantime the interior of the Douranee Empire was torn by distractions, out of the fury of which rose Dost Mahomed to supreme power. The life of this man forms a remarkable episode in Indian history, and is strikingly characteristic of the accidents that conduct to eminence amongst Oriental nations, and of the qualities most available for taking advantage of them. The English reader should be apprised, as a key to Dost Mahomed's career, that the Douranee population is mainly divided into two principal clans or tribes the Populzyes and the Barukzyes. The Suddozye, or Royal race, of which the poor blind Zemaun Shah and his insurgent brothers were members, and therefore legitimately entitled in their illegitimate way to ascend the throne, was a branch of the former. These are hard names to read and remember; but he who would understand Indian history must make up his mind to difficulties of this kind. One of the most powerful chiefs, or Sirdars, of the Barukzye tribe, was Futteh Khan, who, after having served and betrayed several masters, occupied at this period the influential post of Wuzeer. With this introduction, the reader will be prepared for what follows:

"Among the twenty brothers of Futteh Khan was one many years his junior, whose infancy was wholly disregarded by the great Barukzye Sirdar. The son of a woman of the Kuzzilbash tribe, looked down upon by the high-bred Douranee ladies of his father's household, the boy had begun life in the degrading office of a sweeper at the sacred cenotaph of Lamech. Permitted, at a later period, to hold a menial office about the person of the powerful Wuzeer, he served the great man with water, or bore his pipe; was very zealous in his ministrations; kept long and painful vigils; saw everything, heard everything in silence; bided his time patiently, and when the hour came, trod the stage of active life as no irresolute novice. A stripling of fourteen, in the crowded streets of Peshawur, in broad day, as the buyers and the sellers thronged the thoroughfares of the city, he slew one of the enemies of Futteh Khan, and galloped home to report the achievement to the Wuzeer. From that time his rise was rapid. The

neglected younger brother of Futteh Khan became the favourite of the powerful chief, and following the fortunes of the warlike minister, soon took his place among the chivalry of the Douranee Empire.

"The name of this young warrior was Dost Mahomed Khan. Nature seems to have designed him for a hero of the true Afghan stamp and character. Of a graceful person, a prepossessing countenance, a bold frank manner, he was outwardly endowed with all those gifts which most inspire confidence and attract affection; whilst undoubted courage, enterprise, activity, somewhat of the recklessness and unscrupulousness of his race, combined with a more than common measure of intelligence and sagacity, gave him a command over his fellows and a mastery over circumstances, which raised him at length to the chief seat in the empire. His youth was stained with many crimes, which he lived to deplore. It is the glory of Dost Mahomed that in the vigour of his years he looked back with contrition upon the excesses of his early life, and lived down many of the besetting infirmities which had overshadowed the dawn of his career. The waste of a deserted childhood and the deficiencies of a neglected education he struggled manfully to remedy and repair. At the zenith of his reputation there was not, perhaps, in all Central Asia a chief so remarkable for the exercise of self-discipline and self-control; but he emerged out of a cloudy morn of vice, and sunk into a gloomy night of folly."

We give this sketch in full, because Dost Mahomed was one of the chief actors in the war that followed, and because our author evidently holds his character in the highest estimation. That Dost Mahomed is well entitled to the honourable vindication he has received at the hands of Mr. Kaye, we entirely believe; judging from the whole tenor of his conduct, so long as it was possible for him to propitiate or secure the British alliance, and also from the regard with which he inspired Sir Alexander Burnes, whose residence at Caubul, under circumstances in the last degree unpropitious for the development of favourable impressions on either side, afforded him the amplest opportunities of studying his temper and disposition. When we find Burnes always ready to proclaim his reliance on Mahomed's integrity, and congratulating himself, at the opening of the war, that he was to be sent in another direction, and that "Dost Mahomed was to be ousted by another hand than his," we may be assured that the Douranee usurper deserved nobler treatment and a better fate than he received, But we are anticipating the course of

events.

We need not trace the steps by which Dost Mahomed rose upon the ruins of his brother Futteh Khan, and finally expelled Shah Soojah from his throne. Such wonderful transitions are common slides in the magic lantern of the East. But in this case there was an element that distinguished the expulsion and usurpation

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from most of the dynastic changes which agitate the phantasmagoria of Indian royalties. In the majority of instances it is a younger brother, or a nephew, or an uncle, or, at least, some remote cousin or relation of the royal family who drives out the possessor of the Crown; but in this instance it was a member of an inferior tribe that had never enjoyed royal privileges, so that the movement was not merely a successful rebellion against the monarch, but the revolution of one clan against another. The Barukzye race was triumphant over Afghanistan in the person of Dost Mahomed, while the Suddozye, or Royal race, were prostrate in the person of Shah_Soojah, who was taken under the protection of the English at Loodhianah, where he had the satisfaction of enjoying the society of his blind brother Zemaun Shah, himself an outcast from the same throne, and a pensioner upon the same liberal power. Shah Soojah, afterwards the antagonist puppet who was to confront Dost Mahomed throughout the war, was a man of a different stamp from his great rival. He was totally unfit for the troublous times in which he was cast, and during the period he held the reins of power, he betrayed an incapacity for government which ought to have operated as a warning against his restoration. "His resources were limited," observes Mr. Kaye, "and his qualities were of too negative a character to render him equal to the demands of such stirring times. He wanted vigour; he wanted activity; he wanted judg ment; and, above all, he wanted money." He wanted money, because he had bribed his way to the throne by promises which it impoverished him to fulfil, and because he had not ability enough to organize a sufficient revenue to enable him to discharge them. Mr. Kaye, speaking in another place of his incompetent royalty, says, "he wanted the art to inspire confidence and to win affection." In short, his character was made up of negations, and was distinguished more by lack of the qualities which his position urgently demanded, than by the presence of their opposite vices or weaknesses. If we may believe the autobiography he left behind him, these defects were associated with an amiable and gentle spirit very rare indeed amongst his countrymen; but we apprehend that he mistook the feebleness of his nature for benevolence, and that, when he takes credit to himself every now and then for pardoning an enemy, he is unconsciously describing the same mental idleness and lethargy of resolution which so often made him neglect his friends, and fail to conciliate his rivals. The conduct he pursued in exile shewed the fatuous folly and shallow vanity of his character in their true colours. Having obtained the perfect ease and security best adapted to a man of his incapacity, he could not be happy unless he was engaged in the dissensions for which nature and

circumstances had so especially disqualified him. Two years of repose were lost upon his uneasy spirit. Again and again, an instrument in the hands of wily politicians, he attempted the recovery of his empire; but the means employed were so inadequate, and the results were invariably so ludicrous, that his efforts and his expectations ceased to excite any other feeling than that of contempt and derision. Yet this was the prince, under the mask of whose cause the Governor-General of India issued a formal manifesto, by which he declared war upon the Douranee Empire! It is unnecessary to speculate about the verdict which future times will pronounce upon this measure. The fiat of posterity is anticipated in the able and lumincus volumes before us, which, written with an impartiality and discrimination that reflect the highest honour on the author, shew that this war was begun without a shadow of justification, that it was carried on through a series of unprecedented disasters, and that it terminated in a loss of life, treasure, and glory, which cannot be otherwise regarded than as the fitting retribution for a proceeding at once impolitic and iniquitous.

The two prominent actors in this war-the Barukzye chief who had discovered a vigour and integrity in his government of the country which had never been imparted to it before, and the exiled Shah, whose inability became more and more evident as the difficulties of his position increased-are now fairly on the stage before us. We are afraid that the attitude of our Government in relation to them was as undignified as it was anomalous. With the internal revolutions of border kingdoms we had no concern, so long as they did not in any way affect our own interests; it was, therefore, a matter properly of no importance to us whether a Barukzye or a Suddozye occupied the throne of Afghanistan. Such, indeed, was the view taken of the subject by the authorities at Calcutta, who suffered the reigning sovereign to be expelled without interference or remonstrance, and received him, with their habitual hospitality, as a pensioner on their bounty. Had we drawn the line at this point, no very serious objection could be taken against our policy. To grant a pension to an unfortunate prince, and allow him to live under our protection, was nothing more than had been done in former cases, in the exercise of a large generosity, which seems to be one of the most graceful functions our civilisation and ascendency in India call upon us to discharge. But we did not stop here. Without espousing the cause of Shah Soojah, or openly exhibiting any interest in him beyond that of compassion, we suffered him to project on our own soil one expedition after another-as contemptible in resources, no doubt, as they were harmless in execution -against the victorious Dost Mahomed. If we did not actually

Sinister Policy of the British Government.

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sanction these acts, we allowed them to derive a certain weight from our tacit acquiescence in them. This sufferance might possibly, however, be set down to our perfect neutrality; and, for our own parts, we should be quite willing to give the Government credit for having been guided throughout by the strict principle of non-interference, if they had not finally assisted Shah Soojah in a shape which admitted of no evasion, while they still professed a course of policy which they indirectly violated by that very proceeding. Looking back dispassionately on the events of that period, we do not hesitate to assert, that the first great error committed by the English Government was that of granting to Shah Soojah, in 1832, an advance of four months of his pension, by which he was enabled to raise a considerable force, and to cross the Indus into Sindh, at its head. The Barukzye king had treated the former hostile spasms of Shah Soojah with ridicule; but this was a more formidable demonstration,so formidable that there was not the vestige of an excuse on the part of the authorities at Loodhianah for affecting ignorance of its object, or of the uses to which the four months' stipend was applied under their eyes. The transaction was every way discreditable to us. It looked exactly as if we had secretly urged Shah Soojah to assert his claims without committing ourselves to support them, so that we might be ready to take advantage of the results let the expedition terminate as it might. That we did not, at that time, consider ourselves called upon to espouse the fallen fortunes of the stipendiary Shah, is sufficiently proved by the fact, that it was not till six years afterwards the British Government made the discovery announced by Lord Auckland, in the famous Simlah manifesto, "that a pressing necessity, as well as every consideration of policy and justice, warranted us in espousing the cause of Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk, whose popularity throughout Afghanistan had been proved to his Lordship by the strong and unanimous testimony of the best authorities!" Notwithstanding the indirect help, however, of the British Government, the expedition failed. Shah Soojah was ignominiously beaten, and made his escape with his life only by the forbearance of Dost Mahomed, who overruled the eager desire of the Candahar chiefs to give chase to the fugitive. He was not long allowed to enjoy the fruits of his clemency and his triumph, and had scarcely succeeded in crushing one enemy when another appeared at his gates. Runjeet Singh, the chief of the Sikhs, who had recently defrauded poor Shah Soojah of the celebrated Koh-i-noor diamond, had penetrated the Douranee Empire, and taken possession of Peshawur. In this extremity, Dost Mahomed proclaimed a religious war against the Sikhs, knowing that upon that pretext he could get together a much

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