own resignation of office. Russia's alleged breach of faith must, therefore, have been committed during the Viceroyalty of Lord Lytton. And, indeed, the apologists of the new policy admit as much. The flagrans delictum in which they have caught Russia is the mission to Cabul. But the question arises, Was that mission unprovoked? or was it a counter-check to a previous move on our part? Let us see. It has been stated that the Russian mission started for Cabul after the signing of the Treaty of Berlin-that is, after the 13th of last July. But this cannot be true, for the following reasons. The starting-point of the mission was Samarkand; and there is no controversy as to the fact of its arrival in Cabul on the 22nd of July. When did it leave Samarkand? That can be ascertained to within a day or two; supposing, that is, that the mission travelled by the direct route, and was not delayed on the way. The two recognised-I may say officialauthorities are Sir A. Burnes and Lieutenant Wood. By their reckoning the distance from Samarkand to Karshi in Bokhara is about 60 miles, or four marches; and from Karshi to Cabul 532 miles, or 35 marches. That makes 39 days. It follows that the Russian mission must have left Samarkand not later than the 13th of June (a month before the Berlin Treaty was signed). But this is supposing that the mission went straight on, without any interruption. Did it? In the Times of the 25th of last October there is a telegram from its well-informed Berlin correspondent, stating that the mission was stopped "on the left bank of the Oxus for a whole month." This telegram receives remarkable independent confirmation from an article in the Pioneer of India of the 12th of October. "As early as the 18th of July," says the article, "the Viceroy and the Home Government were in active communication about the affair"—namely, the Russian mission-"and every incident in it, including the ineffectual attempt of the Ameer's officials to stop it at the Oxus." The Pioneer is an inspired semi-official organ of the Viceroy's Government, and therefore its information may be considered authentic. It follows that the Russian mission must have left Samarkand not later than the 13th of May-that is, a month before the meeting of the Congress of Berlin, when the relations between England and Russia were such that war was possible at any moment.

But what was the object of the Russian mission? Let the following facts answer. In a letter to the Times of the 5th of last October, Colonel Brackenbury says that "the Russian Government had information" that "a column of 10,000 men had been organised" by the Indian Government "to raise Central Asia against" the Russians. With this agrees in substance the following extract from

a letter, dated August 28, from the inspired Simla correspondent of the semi-official Pioneer ::

I believe it is no longer a secret that had war broken out we should not have remained on the defensive in India. A force of 30,000 men, having purchased its way through Afghanistan, thrown rapidly into Samarkand and Bokhara, would have had little difficulty in beating the scattered Russian troops back to the Caspian; for coming thus as deliverers the whole population must have risen in our favour. In the feasibility of such a programme the Russians fully believed.

The object of the Russian mission, therefore, was to ascertain on the spot whether Shere Ali intended to allow a British force to pass through his territories for the purpose of raising Central Asia against Russia. The Indian Government, according to the Pioneer, had early information that the Russian mission was intended to “clear up in one way or other the relations of Russia with Afghanistan— that is, make it assume a friendly or hostile aspect."

With these data before him, the reader may decide for himself which was the first to break the engagement about Central Asia agreed upon, with such happy results, between Mr. Gladstone's Government and Lord Mayo on the one hand, and the Russian Government and General von Kauffman on the other. The result is that, having driven Shere Ali, much against his will, to choose between the alternative of a Russian mission or Russian hostility, we have now begun to wage a cruel and ruinous war against him and his innocent people for the crime of having preferred what naturally appeared to him the less of two evils.

This would be bad enough if it stood alone. But worse remains to be told. In plain truth, the Russian mission to Cabul was the pretext, not the cause, of Lord Lytton's mission. This is not my accusation; it is the frank confession of the Pioneer of August 21. The following is from its first leading article:

The Cabul mission about to set forth from India is the complement of the Cyprus occupation. It is a measure for which the way has been carefully paved by the policy of the Indian Government during the last two or three years, and it should begin the establishment of our relations with the most important State on our northern frontier on a satisfactory basis. Everything that Lord Lytton has done in connection with the north-west frontier hitherto has been directed towards undoing the blunders of the past. That work has been one of time, because the way had to be picked rather carefully. There has been a powerful though wrongheaded opposition at home to circumvent. Old-fashioned theories of masterly inactivity have still maintained their tyranny over many minds. . . . Nor can we hope that the new theory of our relations with Central Asia has yet been finally grasped by the rank and file of writers on the subject. . . . There are politicians of the parochial school in India as well as in England, and we cannot hope to see a spirited progressive policy accepted with unanimous approval in reference to Indian any more than to Turkish affairs.

The article ridicules the notion of any actual danger to India from the advance of Russia in Central Asia. The object to be aimed at is not security, but glory. All Asia must see how superior we are to Russia.

...

There has never been a moment at which the dread of Russian advance as something that might overwhelm the British régime in this country has been otherwise than absurd. . . . But Government may sometimes be put in a position in which they are called upon to take notice of a menace which they are very far from fearing. It is eminently desirable, for the maintenance of a proper feeling among the people of India, that the Government of the country should not merely be, but show itself, in a position to warn Russia off from any impertinent familiarities with the minor States on our frontier. A Central Asian policy may not be a matter of vital necessity to the welfare of India even now. Afghanistan itself might become a second Khiva, and still the British flag would be perfectly secure at Peshawur. But the people of India, instead of being proud of their Government, would be justly ashamed of it under such conditions. And if they were not proud of us the whole position would be ignominious. mission possible is not a growth of the present season. matured for the last three years, it now happens that a sensational step forward may be taken at a moment when the action of Russia, arising from the incidents of the late war, renders this step peculiarly appropriate. The negotiations at the Peshawur Conference prepared the way for the present mission by giving the Government a clear field of operations.

The policy which now makes the Cabul
But having been patiently

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At the Peshawur Conference, the article goes on to say, sponge had been passed over the mistakes previously made," the "mistakes" in question being simply the previous policy of England. In short, "the present mission is the complement of Lord Beaconsfield's great coup," the occupation of Cyprus.

The particulars of Sir Lewis Pelly's conference with Shere Ali's Minister at Peshawur have been kept studiously secret; but Sir Lewis stated on his return that if the Ameer had accepted them, the inevitable result would have been a rebellion in Afghanistan which would have driven him from his throne. This is not surprising if the terms proposed by Sir Lewis Pelly are substantially the same as those of which Sir Neville Chamberlain was to have been the bearer. These have been revealed to us by the gentleman who acts avowedly, once a week, the part of telephone between Lord Lytton and the Times newspaper. In the communication which appeared from him on the 13th of last September we have a tolerably frank apocalypse of the policy which Lord Lytton was sent to India to develop, and for the consummation of which the exhaustion of Russia is supposed to offer a tempting opportunity. The following extract will suffice:

It is indispensable that we should possess commanding influence over the triangle of territory formed on the map by Cabul, Ghuznee, and Jellalabad, together with power over the Hindoo-Koosh. This triangle we may hope to command with Afghan concurrence if the Ameer is friendly. The strongest frontier

line which could be adopted would be along the Hindoo-Koosh, from Pamir to Bamian, thence to the south by the Helmund, Girish, and Candahar to the Arabian Sea. . . . The chief object of the mission will be to make the Ameer understand that we have only one motive, and that is to protect ourselves by preserving for him his absolute independence. We must be prepared to subsidise him and at the same time grant territorial and dynastic guarantees. But these would of course be subject to specific reservations. The several points upon which it would be necessary to lay the greatest stress will be permission to establish agents at Balkh, Herat, and other frontier towns; an understanding by the Ameer not to enter into diplomatic relations with any other Power without the consent of the Indian Government, and unrestricted access for the British mission to Cabul when deemed necessary; and, finally, the dismissal of the Russian mission and the exclusion of Russian agents in future.

A very original method truly for "preserving for him his absolute independence!" We should have more respect for the originators and advocates of this brutal policy if they had the manly honesty to put it into brutal language instead of veiling it in transparent terms of sickening hypocrisy.

The policy thus plainly revealed in the Times and the Pioneer was more guardedly shadowed forth in a despatch from Lord Lytton to the Indian Secretary, dated the 23rd of March, 1877. In consequence of a consultation with the Home Government, before leaving England, on the subject of our frontier relations, Lord Lytton had been "strongly impressed by the importance of endeavouring to deal with them simultaneously, as indivisible parts of a single Imperial question, mainly dependent for its solution on the foreign policy of Her Majesty's Government, which is the ultimate guardian of the whole British Empire, rather than as isolated local matters." "The highest and most general interests of the Empire are no longer local, but Imperial."

The last link in the chain of evidence is the Prime Minister's speech at Guildhall on the 9th of November. "Her Majesty's Government," said Lord Beaconsfield on that occasion, "is not apprehensive of any invasion of India by our north-western frontier. The base of operations of any possible foe is so remote, the communications are so difficult, the aspect of the country is so forbidding, that we do not believe, under these circumstances, any invasion of our north-western frontier is practicable. But our north-western frontier is a haphazard and not a scientific frontier." This is an exposition in miniature of what is set forth with more frankness and fulness in the passage which I have quoted from the Pioneer. Our present frontier is perfectly safe, but it is not "scientific." And by a "scientific frontier" is meant, as the Pioneer has obligingly explained to us, a frontier which, or the acquisition of which, will strike the imaginations of our Eastern subjects; a frontier of which they shall "be proud;" a frontier, in

one word, which shall be "sensational." The mask is dropt at last. The Russian mission to Cabul has had nothing to do with the new policy. We have been authoritatively assured that it has been in process of gestation for the last three years, and the exhaustion of Russia is supposed to offer a fit opportunity for its safe parturition.

This is no speculative opinion, no inference drawn from premisses of which the application may be disputed. I have but stated in epitome the frank explanations of the organs of the Government. Shere Ali has taken great pains to publish to the world the cause of his hostility. That hostility manifested itself after Sir Lewis Pelly's mission; and the occupation of Quetta justified the Ameer's worst anticipations. "If an armed man places himself at the back door of your house, what can be the motive, unless he wants to find his way in when you are asleep?" Such was Shere Ali's explanation to the Sultan's envoy last year for declining to regard England as his friend; and it shatters to pieces the special pleading of those who ransack the archives of previous Administrations for a key to what puzzles them in the Ameer's present conduct.

And this, forsooth, is the way to check Russian aggression in Central Asia! Will the Afghans be less ready to welcome a Russian alliance when we have desolated their country, vanquished their sovereign, and humiliated the whole nation? But we do not dwell on that aspect of the question; nor yet on the probability, vouched for by eminent military authority, that the "scientific frontier" which the Government seems to aim at will require 40,000 additional troops in India, chiefly European, and at a cost of £10,000,000 annually, in addition to the expense of the preliminary war. What I wish to press on the attention and conscience of the English reader is the shocking immorality rather than the portentous folly of this unprovoked war. "Tell it out by your vote, in terms neither vague nor indistinct, to the people of India, that the war we wage is the war of nations, and not the war of freebooters." So spoke the present Lord Chancellor twenty years ago in the speech which made his reputation in the House of Commons. He is now one of a Cabinet whose chosen advocates cast scorn upon the law of nations in our dealing with the populations of Asia, and claim the right, in the name of Christian England, to wage "the war of freebooters" against a prince and people who have done us no wrong. England is indeed fallen from her high estate if she condones this last development of Imperialism.

MALCOLM MACCOLL.

This is admitted in Lord Cranbrook's despatch (par. 16): "The language and conduct of Shere Ali, which had so long been dubious, became openly inimical."