Leadenhall Street has preserved in a kind of liberty, as relics and remembrancers of a past régime. But besides these uncertain protégés, we had to look to the natives in our own provinces, who seemed to expect that something would happen—they knew not what, any more than their rulers. 'Among our Mussulman subjects,' says Mr Kaye, 'the feeling was somewhat akin to that which had unsettled their minds at the time when the rumoured advent of Zemaun Shah made them look for the speedy restoration of Mohammedan supremacy in Hindostan. In their eyes, indeed, the movement beyond the Afghan frontier took the shape of a Mohammedan invasion; and it was believed that countless thousands of true believers were about to pour themselves over the plains of the Punjab and Hindostan, and to wrest all the country between the Indus and the sea from the hands of the infidel usurpers. The Mohammedan journals, at this time, teemed with the utterances of undisguised sedition. There was a decline in the value of public securities; and it went openly from mouth to mouth, in the streets and the bazaars, that the Company's Raj was nearly at an end.'

Under these circumstances, it seemed necessary to look to the intervening country, Afghanistan, which in this summary manner was to be made a 'platform of observation' for the Perso-Russian army to prepare for its descent upon Hindostan. The Afghans were tribes of hardy mountaineers, inhabiting a wild and thinly-peopled country. They consisted of soldiers, husbandmen, and shepherds, all convertible, at a moment's notice, into thieves and bandits; and through their formidable defiles flowed an uncertain stream of commerce, connecting India with the distant provinces of Persia and Russia. So little was known of these mountaineers, that in the early part of this century, their prince, Shah Zemaun, was a formidable bugbear to the Indian Council, and nothing was thought of for a time but an invasion of the Afghans. In one of the sudden revolutions, however, so common in semi-barbarous states, this shah was taken captive, and his eyes punctured with a lancet—a summary act of deposition in the East, for a blind man cannot reign. Two of his brothers competed for the vacant throne; and notwithstanding the efforts of a famous king-making vizier, Futteh Khan, the prize fell for a time to the lot of him who is so well known to English readers by the name and style of Shah Soojah. But his incapacity was soon manifest. Sometimes a king, sometimes a bandit, and sometimes a fugitive subsisting by the sale of his jewels, his cause at length became altogether hopeless; and after being robbed of his last treasure, the Koh-i-Noor—as has already been detailed in this Journal[2]—he took refuge in the British territory.

Futteh Khan, the king-making vizier, had twenty brothers; but one of the younger fry he treated with especial neglect. '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 youth is well known in the annals of our time: he was Dost Mahomed, a gay, bold, frank, daring character, who rose from the excesses of his early years into something resembling a hero of romance. One of these excesses was committed when he had taken by assault the Palace of Herat. It consisted in tearing the jewelled waistband from the person of the wife of one of the royal princes—a terrible outrage in the eyes of these barbarous soldiers of the farther East, who, even when covered with blood, and loaded with rapine, cast down their eyes before the females of their enemies' household. In this case, the profaned garment was sent by the lady to her brother, the son of the then Afghan king, and a bloody vengeance followed, not upon the author of the outrage, but on the king-making vizier, who, falling into the hands of the prince whom he had himself placed upon the throne, was literally hacked to pieces. Dost Mahomed now rose like a rocket. The base and feeble remains of legitimacy seemed to die away of its own weakness, and the despised younger son of the king-making vizier soon reigned supreme at Cabool. Let us note that this was in 1826. The new king, says Mr Kaye, 'had hitherto lived the life of a dissolute soldier. His education had been neglected, and in his very boyhood he had been thrown in the way of pollution of the foulest kind. From his youth, he had been greatly addicted to wine, and was often to be seen in public reeling along in a state of degrading intoxication, or scarcely able to keep his place in the saddle. All this was now to be reformed. He taught himself to read and to write, accomplishments which he had before, if at all, scantily possessed. He studied the Koran, abandoned the use of strong liquors, became scrupulously abstemious, plain in his attire, assiduous in his attention to business, urbane and courteous to all.' In 1833, Shah Soojah, issuing from the British territory, made an abortive attempt to recover his kingdom; but Runjeet Singh, the ruler of the Sikhs, was more successful in wresting from him Peshawur, a province of Afghanistan, and Dost Mahomed, both in rage and terror, began to look around him for a foreign alliance. His grand aim was to secure the friendship of the British; but this was scornfully refused. The governor-general, with exquisite irony, replied to his overture: 'My friend, you are aware that it is not the practice of the British government to interfere with the affairs of other independent states!' and a British envoy to Cabool, while refusing everything that was important for him to ask, kindly cautioned him to abstain from connecting himself with any other power.

Such was the position of affairs in Afghanistan when the government of India, in 1838, was roused to a sense of what seemed immediate danger by the movements in Central Asia. On the one hand, there was a de facto king, who had reigned twelve years, who was now struggling in the grasp of the ruler of the Punjab, and eagerly soliciting the alliance of the British; while the Russians and Persians, leagued before Herat, were already negotiating for a footing in his country. On the other hand, there was a deposed exile, who had tried repeatedly, and in vain, to recover his throne, whose whole life had been a tissue of misfortunes and feeblenesses, and who now lived on the charity of the Company in their own territory. The obvious policy was to secure the independence of Afghanistan and aid her resources. How to do this? To embrace the proffered alliance of Dost Mahomed, or force Shah Soojah upon the country, and prepare for the reception of the Persians and Russians, by kindling a civil war? The latter was the course determined on! A league was formed, known in the history of our time as the Tripartite Treaty—including Runjeet Singh, Shah Soojah, and the British government. By this document, it was agreed that certain