MISCHIEVOUS ACTIVITY.

WHO hath not seen Seville, according to the Spanish proverb, hath not seen a marvel. The same may be said of an Indian Viceroy's Durbar. The scenic splendour of the pageant constitutes its humblest charm. That might be rivalled or surpassed in other lands; but, except perhaps at an imperial coronation in Moscow, nowhere else can be found so harmonious a combination of the distinctive types of Europe and the East, so vivid a revelation of all that can best symbolise the wonders of comprehensive empire. On one side there is the disciplined might of England, represented by a gathering of picked troops-infantry, cavalry, and artillery-capable, as they stand, of making a victorious promenade throughout the length or breadth of India, though half the country should be in arms against them; on the other, the fantastic pomp of Asia, impersonated in an array of luxurious princes, who, by the lustre of their jewels, the bellicose aspect of their motley followers, the bulk of their elephants, and the costly caparisoning of their horses, convert the act of homage to their common master into an occasion of emulous display, each striving to outshine his peer. In some sense, it is an Oriental edition of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The vast plain all round the city of rendezvous is white with innumerable encampments. Every camp clusters round the flag-staff of a separate authority, and at every staff, save one, the drooped flag denotes subordination to a superior power in the vicinity. A long, broad street of marquees, tenanted by the various members and attachés of the supreme Government, leads up to the palatial mass of canvas forming the vice-regal pavilion. The feudatory chief whose turn may have come to approach the "Lord Saheb's" presence, is greeted at the mouth of the street by a salute of guns in number apportioned to his rank. Up the street his cortège slowly moves through lines of British troopers, whose sabres flash welcome in the liquid sunshine. A fanfare of martial music announces his arrival at the entrance of the pavilion ; secretaries and aides-de-camp receive him as he alights, and see him doff his shoes; the infantry guard-of-honour presents arms, and so,. between two rows of clashing weapons his Highness is conducted to his allotted place in the assembly. The throne under the central canopy is vacant for the Viceroy. Right and left of it, in horse-shoe fashion, chairs are arranged; these for the native potentates, and those for British officers. Behind the latter, and drawn aside, as having no proper status in a purely Eastern ceremony, gleams a small and select parterre of English ladies. All present are seated, and a growing

stillness indicates the hour for the Viceroy's advent. All rise as he appears, heralded by a royal salute, and with a brilliant staff around him. Proceeding to the canopy, he stands motionless below it-the whole conclave also standing in silence-until the last of the twentyone guns, which recognise the majesty of India's absent empress, has ceased its thunder. Then he mounts the throne, and the business of the Durbar begins.

Such was the scene at Umballa, in Upper India, under the sun's declining rays, on the 27th March last. Yet in some respects the spectacle on that occasion presented a striking contrast to the usual routine. A truthful sketch of it appeared shortly afterwards in the Illustrated London News. The central personage is, of course, Lord Mayo, and, not far from him, sits Lord Napier of Magdala, both of them bareheaded; below the dais the slipperless figures of half-a-dozen Punjab chieftains, and the bared heads of Sir Donald Macleod, Sir William Mansfield, and Sir Henry Durand are equally familiar to the eye. But who are these, a man and a boy, occupying chairs of equality on the dais with Lord Mayo, their heads covered with the tall black lamb's-wool hat of Persia, and their lower limbs encased in trousers and boots of European pattern? They must be sovereign lords of foreign terrritory, owing no allegiance to the British Crown. The boy is Abdoolia Jan, a younger son of Shere Ali, of Afghanistan; the man is Shere Ali himself. Shere Ali's past history is legible in his externals. In his air there is all the dignity which royal birth, coupled with a long experience of misfortune, seldom fails to confer; and the habitual melancholy of his passion-ravaged countenance is eloquent with the tale of that domestic grief' which four years ago shook his reason with an almost irreparable throe; but the dominant feature is the eye, and its expression cruelty-the practised cruelty of one never known to spare any adversary that might be safely struck. But here, five hundred miles within the British frontier, and parading a precedence co-ordinate with the jealously guarded supremacy of the British Viceroy, how comes Shere Ali here? Fifteen short months ago he was a hopeless fugitive, beaten out of Cabul, beaten out of Candahar, beaten out of Bulkh, and seeking a precarious shelter at Herat. Russia and Persia had alike refused to help him, and the determination of British India to leave him to his fate had been brought home to him by a score of humiliating rebuffs. He appeared sunk in complete and irretrievable ruin. Now his lot is changed indeed. The same English who lately had not an obolus of alms for his destitution are now eagerly courting the honour of his exalted friendship. From grovelling in supplication at their feet he has risen to swagger among them as a patron who can name his own

(1) His favourite son and his full-brother were Loth killed in hand-to-hand combat with each other at the battle of Kujhbaz, on the 6th June, 1865.

terms for some obligation he has agreed to confer. He has already accepted ten thousand stand of muskets, and £120,000 in hard cash. He is to take back with him to Afghanistan a perfectly equipped battery of siege guns; and he has a prospect of many more supplies of money in the years to come. The gifts merely personal to himself, which in the present Durbar strew the carpet before him in one-andfifty trays, are valued at £5,000. See, Lord Mayo takes a jewelled sword, and, offering it to him with his own hand, says: "May you be victorious over your enemies, and with this defend your just rights." And listen to the Ameer's reply: "I will also use it against the enemies of the Queen of England." Never was such a metamorphosis. It beats the caprices of a Christmas pantomime in the "transformation-scene." Spectators may rub their eyes and rack their brains for an explanation. Has the new Governor-General reversed the policy of his predecessor? Is the civil war of Afghanistan at an end? Or has Russian aggression proceeded of late with such intolerable increase of menace as to demand an imposing counterdemonstration in India?

Let us take up these hypotheses separately in their order.

And first, Lord Mayo's share in the business. As might have been expected, the Russian press has attributed to him alone the responsibility of initiating a new policy towards Afghanistan. Yet, on the face of things, it was unlikely that a steady official, within three months of his assuming the government, should of his own judgment have decided to undo all previous arrangements, and strike out a fresh path for himself. All doubts on either side of the question may be set at rest by reference to the declaration contained in Lord Lawrence's maiden utterance in the House of Peers on the 19th

April last. The words of the late Viceroy are: "I believe that Lord Mayo has done no more than act on the principles I suggested." Moreover, another passage in the same speech shows that the subsidy of £120,000, received by Shere Ali for the maintenance of his army, was in part granted and in part promised by Sir John Lawrence before Lord Mayo's arrival. Clearly, therefore, Sir John Lawrence, and not Lord Mayo, is answerable for our embarcation on a voyage of active alliance with Shere Ali.

This being the case, let us investigate the second theory. Over and over again Sir John Lawrence had announced his solemn determination not to take side either with Shere Ali or any one else in the civil war of Afghanistan. When at last he came forward, consenting to interfere in Afghan affairs, there would be a strong presumption that the war must have already terminated. Nevertheless, Lord Lawrence's own description of the circumstances belies this presumption, and proves that his action was taken irrespective of the condition which had been the sine quâ non of all his previous declara

tions. "Each party," he says, in the explanatory statement addressed to the Lords, "was sufficiently strong to maintain itself against the other, but neither party was strong enough to beat down the other and restore order." And, further on, he expressly affirms that the subsidy was given to the Ameer, "with a view of affording him a chance of recovering his power." Or, to put the case briefly, Shere Ali's rivals were still in the field, and could not be suppressed without extraneous assistance.

Remains the third possibility. Undoubtedly the recent capture and occupation of Samarcand by the Russians, and their reduction of the Ameer of Bokhara to a position in which the retention of nominal sovereignty only made him a more pliant vassal of the Czar, were facts of startling sound to many politicians. But they were not so to the Government of India. Sir John Lawrence's scheme of inactivity had been deliberately framed in full view of these very contingencies. It is incredible that their realisation, a few months perhaps sooner than had been anticipated, could have deflected his plans by a hair's-breadth.

Thus, one after another, the several explanations, which, from their simplicity, most readily occur to an inquirer, have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Shere Ali's sudden exaltation to the pinnacle of British favour continues as strange a mystery as before. A more complex method is needed for the right reading of the riddle. The best that I have been able to excogitate is as follows.

I must begin by reverting to the course of events in Afghanistan during the year 1868. At the commencement of that period the Government of Azim Khan, the usurping Ameer, was acknowledged throughout three-fourths of the kingdom. One province, Bulkh, was held for him by his nephew, Abdool Rehman, with a considerable army; and another, Candahar, was administered by his son, Surwur Khan; he himself held his court at Cabul. Herat, the remaining territory, alone stood faithful to Shere Ali. The ill fortune, however, of which Shere Ali had experienced so long and severe a run, was now at its turning-point. In the spring his son, Yakoob Khan, began the new deal by attacking and taking Candahar. Shere Ali followed this lead from Herat, and, after a short pause at Candahar, saw his way to an advance on Cabul. Three previous attempts to recover the capital had been scored against him as ruinous defeats within the last two years; the fourth was launched under better auspices. By this time, in fact, the Afghan people were ripe for a return to their former allegiance. Not that they had forgotten

(1) Samarcand fell, May 2nd, 1868. General Kaufman then advanced towards Bokhara, with the intention of capturing that city also, the metropolis of the Khanate; but when he had accomplished half the distance, he was obliged to hurry back to Samarcand, where a formidable insurrection had broken out in his absence.

aught of their old dislike to Shere Ali, since he was last at Cabul, but that in the interval they had learned to detest his rival far more; any prince of the Barukzye family, whose accession to power would relieve them from the frightful tyranny of Azim Khan, would be more or less of a god-send; and for this purpose Shere Ali seemed as good as another. So the rightful Ameer had really no opposition to contend with. Azim Khan evaded a violent downfall by spontaneously evacuating Cabul, and retiring to Bulkh. After an absence of forty months, Shere Ali found himself reseated in his royal citadel, the Bala Hissar, and repossessed of all his dominionsBulkh only excepted, where Azim Khan and Abdool Rehman still flew the flag of rebellious defiance. The Ameer backed his luck gallantly. Because the Indian Government had hitherto turned a deaf ear to his innumerable entreaties for arms and money, that was no reason why a fresh trial of the Viceroy's temper might not have a happier result now; at any rate, he had nought to lose and much to win by the venture. Accordingly he again wrote to India, urging the old, old request with unabated pertinacity.

This time the application caught the Governor-General in a mood of more than usual anxiety regarding our future relations with Afghanistan. For his own part Sir John Lawrence still believed that the right thing to do was nothing, or next to nothing. Yet on all sides he felt a pressure to do something. He had braved the impatient taunts of the Anglo-Indian press for nearly five years; but now there were signs of restlessness among his own official advisers. Voices began to be heard in the council-chamber, arguing from the analogy of international custom in Europe that British officers should be deputed as diplomatic agents to the principal cities of Central Asia; a course to which Sir John Lawrence entertained deep-seated objections.' He looked to England for guidance, and found cold comfort there. He saw that there existed among some portion of his countrymen at home a craving for action and intervention; but from the stand-point of Simla he had no means of gauging the extent or depth of the sentiment, and his apprehensions magnified its proportions out of all semblance to the reality. He was equally in the dark as to the intentions of the India Office. The Secretary of State's trumpet gave an uncertain sound. Perhaps the

(1) These objections have been often stated. Firstly, whatever we want in the way of political information from such places is already supplied in sufficiency by natives. Secondly, Europeans, conscious of ability and yearning to prove it, have that dangerous tendency to "zeal" which Talleyrand deprecated. Thirdly, white faces, the Christian faith, and her Majesty's uniform, are to the unregulated patriotism and burning fanaticism of Central Asiatics what a red rag is to a bull. And lastly, the person of a British officer embodies so large an emanation of the Government's prestige, that the maintenance or vindication of his dignity and safety may, at any moment, create necessity for war, costly as that of Abyssinia and far more perilous.