we retained the friendship and the confidence of the people who dwell among them. Consequently, to quote the language of Sir Henry Rawlinson, “our main object has ever been, since the date of Lord Auckland’s famous Simla Manifesto of 1838, to obtain the establishment of a strong, friendly, and independent Power on the North-Western frontier of India, without, however, accepting any crushing liabilities in return.” We all know the manner in which Lord Auckland set about obtaining the “strong, friendly, and independent Power,” and the “crushing liabilities” we had to accept in consequence. Tutored by experience, we adopted a wiser and more righteous policy, which was producing admirable results.

The difficulty of establishing a stable friendship with Afghanistan arises from the character of the people. It is the habitation, not of a nation, but of a collection of tribes, and the nominal ruler of Afghanistan is never more than the ruler of a party which, for the time, chances to be strongest. Consequently there never existed an authority, recognized as legitimate throughout the country, with which we could enter into diplomatic relations. At the same time, their divided condition crippled the Afghans for all offensive purposes. We had, therefore, nothing to fear in the way of unprovoked aggression, and our obvious policy was to win the confidence of these wild tribes and their chiefs, by carefully abstaining from encroachments on their independence. Such, in fact, has been the policy which every Governor-General has pursued in the interval which divides the “plundering and blundering” of Lord Auckland from the like achievements of Lord Lytton. And it had been attended with the greater success, because under the firm guidance of two remarkable men, Afghanistan had progressed considerably towards the status of an organized kingdom. Shere Ali had diligently trod in the footsteps of his father, the Dost, and it is in these terms that the Government of India describes the rule and policy of the Ameer in the year 1876:

This “strong, friendly, and independent Power”—this edifice of order and increasing stability—the British Government deliberately destroyed in the insane expectation of finding a “Scientific Frontier” hidden somewhere in the ruins. It is difficult to conceive of an action more impolitic or more cruel. In a month the labours of forty years were obliterated, old hatreds rekindled, and the wounds of 1838, which the wise and gentle treatment of former Viceroys had almost healed, were opened afresh.

We come next to the inquiry as to what this “Scientific Frontier” is, in order to obtain which this act of vandalism was perpetrated. This is a question involved in some obscurity. The Times is the great champion of the “Scientific Frontier,” but in its columns, as also in Ministerial speeches, it changes colour like a chameleon. Sometimes it is called the “possession of the three highways leading to India,” thereby rendering the Empire “invulnerable.” At other times it is recommended to us because it protects the trade through the Bolan Pass, and enables us to threaten Kabul. The fact is that the (so-called) “Scientific Frontier”—meaning thereby the frontier we acquired by the Treaty of Gundamuck—is a make-believe, an imposture. It is not the “Scientific Frontier” in pursuit of which we “hunted the Ameer to death” and reduced his territories to a condition of anarchy.

Those who have followed the history of the war with attention will remember that in September of last year the Calcutta correspondent of the Times was smitten with a really marvellous admiration for Lord Lytton. “India,” he wrote, “is fortunate in the possession at the present time of a Viceroy specially gifted with broad statesmanlike views, the result partly of most vigilant and profound study, partly of the application of great natural intellectual capacity to the close cultivation of political science and the highest order of statecraft.” Here we have the portrait of the lion painted by himself; and it is not surprising that this superb creature should have regarded with considerable scorn the policy of his predecessors who never claimed to be “specially gifted” for the exercise of “the highest order of statecraft.” “The present measure,” the correspondent went on to say, “for the despatch of a mission to Kabul forms but a single move in an extensive concerted scheme for the protection of India, which is the outcome of a long-devised and elaborately worked-out system of defensive policy.” Here we have a fine example of the “puff preliminary.” In the issue of the Times for the 10th September this “extensive concerted scheme for the protection of India” is detailed at length, and is there plainly set forth as intended for a barrier against Russia:—

Such were the moderate designs entertained by the Indian Government when they dispatched what they called a “friendly mission” to the Court of the Ameer. If Lord Lytton imagined that “friendly negotiations” would obtain these tremendous concessions from the Ameer, it would show that a training in “the