This was the rock on which we split. Had we restrained the king from
levying taxes, all might have gone well. Had we restrained ourselves
from enforcing his levies, all might have gone decently. And had we
prompted the king to inaugurate some great public benefit--as, for
instance, by conferring upon the people a simple system of judicial
process and distributive justice--both he and we might have become
popular; for, even in Affghanistan, there must be multitudes of poor
men, peasants and tradesmen in towns, mothers and wives, who sigh for
peace, and curse their endless agitations. Yes, even amongst their
martial spirits, who now live by war and the passions of war, many are
they who would relent from their angry feuds, if it were possible to get
justice without them.

The sum, therefore, of that question; viz. of the _How_ and by what
machinery Lord Auckland proposed to accomplish his not unstatesmanlike
object, is this--that we failed utterly, and chiefly by applying
European principles to Oriental communities; and in particular,

1st, By throwing a prodigious stress on the fancied consecration of
royalty in a country where it would have snapped under the weight of a
L.10 note.

2dly, By enforcing (and even exercising in our own persons as
principals) the odious power of taxation, under the monstrous delusion
that it was the first of a king's privileges, where in fact, and with
some reason, it was viewed as the last of his excesses.

The first was a _negative_ delusion. We fancied a mighty power where
simply there was none; fancied a substance where there was not even a