was called the "Order of the Douraunee Empire ;" and if our readers wish for a laugh, in the midst of serious matters, they may read Dr. Kennedy's account of the institution of that burlesque upon chivalry, the most amazing absurdity, one should think, ever perpetrated under the sun;-how their decorations were successively inflicted upon the chief military and political authorities, Colonel Pottinger alone escaping-an escape, in the Doctor's opinion, only to be explained "by the unparalleled good fortune which has attended that gentleman through life;"-and how Sir John Keane, on receiving his " Grand Cross" from the hands of a Mahomedan sovereign, made a long speech "about hurling an usurper from the throne." Well, allowance must be made for the infirmity of human nature, when a speech is expected of it; and Sir John Keane, in 1839, had done something. But we have felt surprise, and something more than surprise, to see it solemnly announced in 1843, thathas applied for, and received, gracious permission to wear the insignia of some class or other of the Order of the Douraunee Empire. Flebile ludibrium! The Order of the Douraunee Empire! Where is the Douraunee Empire? Buried in the bloody defiles of Khoord Cabool, and Jugdulluk! Like a straw on the top of a flood which has swept away bridges and buildings, this miserable Order comes floating by. Let us cease, in common sense, to exhibit with pride a memorial of miserable and unparalleled disasters, which could only be worn rationally as a mark of penance.

The memoir-writers of the campaign give us but little from which to judge of the general state and government of the country, during the two years, from the autumn of 1839 to November 1841, of Shah Soojah's precarious dominion. The real ruler of the country, of course, was Sir W. Macnaghten-the "lord sahib," as the insurgents at Khelât styled him, refusing, with contempt, to hold any communication with the puppet set up by the Feringees, but willing to write to the "lord sahib." We should be glad to believe, that his government was, in any material respect, wise or beneficial to the country. In the Asiatic Journal, for October and November last, we find a letter, written by Sir Alexander Burnes, in August 1840, descriptive of the then state of the country, with remarks upon it by Sir William Macnaghten. The following appears to us a very singular instance of unwisdom. Sir Alexander Burnes has represented, among many other sources of danger, the unpopularity arising from the presence of

"A body of Sikhs, in the costume of their country, as the king's guard in this Mahometan capital. A few evenings ago, I was saluted by several of them with the Sikh war-cry, in the very streets of Cabool. I assert, without fear of contradiction, that no Sikh ever durst, in the time of the Affghan monarchy, appear thus in this city; and further assert, that their presence here is odious to the people, and to the last degree injurious."

Could there be a doubt of it? A guard of Prussians, or English, in the year succeeding Waterloo, would have added something, we think, to the French hatred of the Bourbons; something to the difficulties of their difficult position. Conceive Talleyrand meeting a representation of the danger which might arise from such a circumstance, with a truism to the effect that surely it was not desirable to perpetuate this exclusive spirit!" Such, however, is the remark of Sir W. Macnaghten, upon the statement of Sir Alexander Burnes.

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That a statesman, sitting in Cabool, a city of sixty thousand inhabitants, every house of which might, on provocation, turn out an armed warrior, with the hot ashes of insurrection smouldering beneath his very feet, and in different parts of the country the unextinguished fire still burning, holding, by such a tenure, the security of the empire he had only just begun to organize, the lives of thousands and his own, should receive a representation of the danger of offending, in the tenderest point, the prejudices of a fierce and exasperated people, and put it aside with a clap-trap of the platform!

A conqueror, who renounces the harmlessness of the dove, should at least try to have a little more of the wisdom of the serpent. "Surely it is time that this exclusive spirit should cease”—not a doubt of it. It was time-it is always time that any evil should cease, if it can. Was it, therefore, wise to hold up before the eyes of the Affghans a perpetual memorial of their conquest? to take pains to make them connect us, and our king, with a people whom they hated? The encouraged presence of Sikh soldiers in Cabool, felt, as it would be, as an insult, may, perhaps, have been a heavy item in the long account between the people of Cabool and the Envoy.

"The great error of Sir William Macnaghten," says the Edinburgh Reviewer, from whom we quoted in our former article,

appears to us to have been the attempt to bestow too soon, and without sufficient means of coercing those who had hitherto lived at the expense of their weaker neighbours, the unappreciated blessings of an organized and powerful government upon the people of Affghanistan."

It might have been so. We know how much injustice, how much tyranny has been perpetrated, under the pretence-sometimes with the sincere hope, of improvement, even when the improvers were countrymen of those whose institutions they undertook to reform. It might perhaps have been, in the opinions of some, a good deed to bring the Affghans to exchange for the tranquillity of despotism, their fierce, struggling, illregulated freedom. It is doubtful whether the Affghans would have received with gratitude even good government at our hands; but it is still more doubtful whether good government was offered them. We find, in this same letter of Sir Alexander Burnes, the Shah's chief minister dragging the peasantry from

their homes in hundreds, at seed-time, to labour without pay; unpaid troops demanding their arrears of this same minister, with the threat of cutting off his nose! and receiving it accordingly; the population of districts driven to the hills by the demand of obsolete taxes -a chief employed in the collection of tribute, living at free quarters in the country, for five months, with 1800 men. Sir William Macnaghten, denying none of these charges, replies that these things were old abuses, and could not be altered at once: he does not notice Sir Alexander Burnes' remark, that we, backing this infinite misgovernment with resistless power, enabled Shah Soojah to do these things to any extent with impunity.

In one respect, our conduct seems to have been marked with singular and obvious impolicy; we mean the encouragement which we appear to have given to Shah Soojah's childish passion for form and ceremony. Courteous, though formal and strict in his adherence to etiquette towards English officers, to his own subjects he was difficult of access, haughty and cold. His sense of his own unapproachable dignity, his contempt for all meaner men, appears to have been rooted in him like a principle. During his march into Affghanistan, with his kingdom yet to win, he received every adherent who presented himself, with a manner cold and repulsive even to rudeness. His actual possession of power did not increase his condescension. His friends left his presence with chilled affection: his enemies, fresh from the compulsory oath of allegiance, swore a sincerer oath to devote their lives and fortunes to his destruction.* In the course of the last struggle at Cabool, with his throne and life at stake, he clung with the tenacity of insanity to his royal state; when the chiefs offered him their allegiance on two conditions, that of intermarrying his daughters with them, and of relinquishing the practice of keeping them waiting at his gate for hours before his levées, ("The Affghans," says Lieutenant Eyre, "hate ceremony," he gave a most reluctant consent, which he afterwards withdrew.

It is evident that the king was upheld in this tone by the profound and almost ludicrously affected respect shown to him by the English. In the works of the writers before us, in the despatches of Sir John Keane and the Envoy, "his Majesty Shah Soojah-ool-Moolkh" is introduced with a pompous flourish of reverence, "his gracious commands" are received with a solemn and deferential gravity, obviously acted and over-acted. In all probability, the fiction was seen through by the Affghans, though not by the unhappy king himself; but at any rate it is clear that this course, adopted as a profound piece of state-craft, was the very madness of impolicy. It was, in fact, doing our best to provoke, where sufficient provocation was quite certain

* Atkinson, p. 343.

to be given at any rate. Such conduct would have made any king unpopular; but what must it have been in a king, who could hardly be popular at any rate- a king restored and supported by foreigners? The Affghans hated us; but for the golden image whom we had set up for them to worship, him they hated and despised.

The surrender of Dost Mahomed," said Sir Alexander Burnes, "has made the country as quiet as Vesuvius after an eruption: how long it will continue so, God only knows." One thing was certain, that it could not continue so for ever. The country hardly ever was quite pacified. As in a volcanic country new craters were perpetually forming-till, at length, at Cabool, came the grand outbreak of the central volcano.

We agree with Lieutenant Eyre's editor, in opposition to the Edinburgh Reviewer, that that outbreak was, to a certain extent, prepared and organized. There is no other way of explaining the simultaneous occurrence of insurrection in different parts of the country, and the warnings we received; nor can we see the difficulty which, in the opinion of the Reviewer, attaches to the formation of such a conspiracy. It needs no very refined organization to combine men who are already united by the freemasonry of a common hatred. Those who plotted the outbreak on a particular day may have been few in number; they knew that, on the first glimpse of success, thousands were ready to follow their lead.

Leaders were not wanting, who had never acknowledged the existing government-such as the chiefs of Nijrow in Kohistan. "Since our first occupation of Cabool," says Lieutenant Eyre, "Nijrow had become a resort for all such restless and discontented characters, as had rendered themselves obnoxious to the existing government." These men, it seems, were guilty of "hatching against the state treasonable designs." Among them were such as "Meer Musjeedee, a contumacious rebel against the Shah's authority, obstinately refusing to make his submission even upon the most favourable terms, openly put himself at the head of a powerful and well-organized party, with the avowed intention of expelling the Feringees, and overturning the existing government."

Contumacious rebellion . . . treasonable designs ... No, no, Lieutenant Eyre. To call these men rebels, and their designs treasonable, was excusable in November 1841; it was then your "métier d'etre royaliste," on behalf of the king whom you were sent there to protect. But it is not so that Englishmen generally will speak of them, even in 1843. The chiefs of Nijrow are in respectable company.

"What want these outlaws, patriots should have?"

There was once a contumacious rebel called Wallace, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered for his treasonable designs. There was once a contumacious rebel called Kosciusko, whose

treasonable designs, though unsuccessful, were only visited with life-long exile. There were, between thirty and forty years since, a great number of contumacious rebels in Spain, whose treason prospered, and so became no treason. As history judges the Scotchmen of the 14th century, the Poles of the 18th, the Spaniards of 1808, so will she judge the Affghan chiefs, who never acknowledged, and ultimately overthrew, the king set up by the Feringees.

The first three pages of Lady Sale's journal, dated September 1841, are most significant of the then state of things. It seems that "a chief, contemptuously designated as a robber"—that is, we presume, an outlaw in arms against the existing government, -appeared in a town where he had no right to appear: that, consequently, a force was sent to apprehend him, who were "fired upon from six forts," whether with any result is not stated. Hereupon a larger force is sent, who reach a pass where (in September,) there was snow, and bitter cold. Beyond this pass the people of the country had fled, abandoning their property, and "their suffering must be severe in the approaching winter." The chiefs are all submission; but the orders were "peremptory to destroy the forts which had fired upon the Shah's troops." Akram Khan-we presume the chief above mentioned--is caught, and then we find the Shah has ordered Akram Khan's execution." Meanwhile, the usual payment to certain chiefs has been discontinued, an act not only impolitic, but bordering upon direct dishonesty: and so, at last, there is "a pretty general insurrection" in Kohistan, Cabool itself is discontented, and "all the country about Tezeen and Bhoodkak in a state of revolt. It is only wonderful that this did not take place sooner." So think we.

The desperate opposition through which, from this time. (October, 1841), General Sale had to fight his way from Cabool to Jellalabad-the assistance given to his assailants, the Eastern Ghilzies, by bodies of men from Cabool itself-the insults and attacks upon individual officers in and near the city,-all these circumstances, detailed as we find them in Lady Sale's or Lieutenant Eyre's works, force us, judging it is true after the event, but with every allowance we can make, to regard the supineness of the political authorities at Cabool as something perfectly wonderful. As Mirabeau said of the St. Domingo planters, they were sleeping on the edge of the volcano, and its first jets were not enough to wake them. At length, in Lady Sale's Journal,

we come to

"Nov. 2. This morning early, all was in commotion in Cabul - the shops were plundered, and the people were all fighting."

An announcement, we think, striking for its simplicity-evidently the real entry of the event, as it then looked, in the