phenomena were rather of the 'bogey' character; how much so to-day shows
when the Afghan frontier is still beyond Herat, and when a descendant of
Dost Mahomed still sits in the Cabul _musnid_. But neither England nor
India scrupled to make the Karrack counter-threat which arrested the
siege of Herat; and the obvious policy as regarded Afghanistan was to
watch the results of the intrigues which were on foot, to ignore them
should they come to nothing, as was probable, to counteract them by
familiar methods if serious consequences should seem impending. Our
alliance with Runjeet Singh was solid, and the quarrel between Dost
Mahomed and him concerning the Peshawur province was notoriously easy of
arrangement.

On whose memory rests the dark shadow of responsibility for the first
Afghan war? The late Lord Broughton, who, when Sir John Cam Hobhouse, was
President of the Board of Control from 1835 to 1841, declared before a
House of Commons Committee, in 1851, 'The Afghan war was done by myself;
entirely without the privity of the Board of Directors.' The meaning of
that declaration, of course, was that it was the British Government of
the day which was responsible, acting through its member charged with the
control of Indian affairs; and further, that the directorate of the East
India Company was accorded no voice in the matter. But this utterance was
materially qualified by Sir J. C. Hobhouse's statement in the House of
Commons in 1842, that his despatch indicating the policy to be adopted,
and that written by Lord Auckland, informing him that the expedition had
already been undertaken, had crossed each other on the way.

It would be tedious to detail how Lord Auckland, under evil counsel,
gradually boxed the compass from peace to war. The scheme of action
embodied in the treaty which, in the early summer of 1838, was concluded
between the Anglo-Indian Government, Runjeet Singh, and Shah Soojah, was