or is privy to the making of, any false or fraudulent statement,' he is liable to imprisonment on conviction. No fair-dealing man can object to underlie provisions which are essential to the well-being of an army in the field. If he does not relish them, he can stay at home with his mother; he cannot reasonably expect to be the chartered libertine of the force.

No. 5 has excited great wrath in the Indian press; to my thinking causelessly. An officer is defined by his uniform; a badge may be taken as the correspondent's uniform, serving to distinguish him from that most flagrant of all campaigning nuisances, the proverbial T. G. We wore them with the Russian army in Bulgaria, and they were invariably useful, obviating the necessity for the production of papers, and saving a world of preliminary circumlocution. I am not ashamed of my profession, and therefore have no objection to any device that indicates it.

No. 6 is simply self-evident to reasonable men conversant with military exigencies. It has practically been always in force. If an officer chooses to stop a correspondent, what can the correspondent do? My advice to him is to keep his temper.

With No. 7 the correspondent may put up without feeling greatly aggrieved. It is a bore to get shot, especially to your editor, and the outposts are likely places for that dispensation. Besides they are mostly uninteresting, and generally when they become interesting they cease to be outposts, and the right of way is free if there haply be stomach for the journey. I would not have the correspondent captious.

No. 8. No honest man needs to resort to a cypher in newspaper correspondence, which, further, all experience shows to be abortive and unpurposeful. A press censor cannot be expected to know foreign languages.

Nos. 9, 10, 13, and 14, are the degrading and intolerable paragraphs. No general in the field has the right thus, vicariously, to 'supervise the intelligence sent by correspondents to their newspapers.' He can shoot them, or send them to prison, if they transgress, but the despotism of burking is not to be tholed. But to burke their work is not the limit of the powers of his creature, the press censor. To that functionary is accorded the right to alter' that work, if he thinks that to pass it would be detrimental to the good of the army.' In other words, it is in his power, if the correspondent perversely declines to lie, nevertheless to make a liar of him! Why not prescribe the torture till he lie at first hand? Why descend to the nefarious baseness of authorised forgery?-for virtual forgery it is thus to alter, to warp, to overturn. Who, among my colleagues, could those who ' provisionally authorised' this Jesuitical code, have imagined so lost to honour as to bow their necks to a yoke so insulting and so ignoble? I will not retort insult on them by regarding it as possible that they expected to find any man base enough to have the literary offspring, for which he stands responsible to his fellow-countrymen, thus sur

reptitiously changed at nurse. I prefer to hold that they desired to make the position of a war correspondent untenable by a gentleman. At all events they have done so. Against No. 14 I may perhaps be allowed to entertain a special grudge. I have not uniformly been in the habit of tarrying for the despatch of posts; and a variety of personages, from the Emperor of Russia to Sir Garnet Wolseley, have declined quite to give expression to disappointment that I have not been thus supine.

The four paragraphs specified are conceived not only in an insulting but an erroneous spirit. The field telegraph wire is the property of the military authorities. No man can claim to use it. No man can reasonably object to the stipulation of the military authorities that by it shall be transmitted only what they choose to pass, and he will regard it as a privilege that they allow anything to pass at all. Thus they are masters of the items of intelligence to be instantaneously transmitted; and it is open for them to fence or to supervise telegraph offices other than military for a certain distance in their rear. These measures would amply suffice to prevent the only real danger that indiscreet disclosures can give rise to, the risk of giving information to an enemy. Conditions change so rapidly in warfare that the fresh news of to-day is dead, stale and useless to an enemy two days later. Thus no injury can be wrought by leaving individual enterprise open to correspondents in a rayon outside the limits indicated. The Russians allowed scarcely any press telegraphy from Bulgaria, exercised a censorship at Bucharest, whither converged all telegrams from Roumanian out-offices, but left enterprise free to devise courier systems to Kronstadt and Orsova, inside the Hungarian frontiers. Their expressed view was that intelligence so retarded could not well hurt them with the enemy, whatever its nature. With correspondence by post they never interfered. They regarded that species of leverage as too remote. It has been reserved for English functionaries to provisionally authorise' regulations which chastise correspondents with scorpions, whereas the Russians but tickled them with whips.

It remains to be said, if, indeed, it did not go without saying, that any correspondent who chose could drive a coach and four through these rules, and indeed through any rules. The authorities may accept the assurance that any man so destitute of self-respect as to take service under them would promptly utilise his convenient lack of that commodity, in devising schemes for their facile circumvention. It is curious that the present people will not recognise that straightforwardness is wiser than wriggle, that it is better policy to be honourable than Jesuitical. It has been hinted that these rules are intended for show rather than for use, and that there is no intention of their being systematically enforced. If this be so, the insult is only the more gratuitous.

ARCHIBALD FORBES.

THE

NINETEENTH

CENTURY.

No. XXXVI.-FEBRUARY 1880.

THE SITUATION IN AFGHANISTAN.

Ir is certain that great anxiety prevails at present throughout the country respecting our position in Afghanistan, and the probable issue of events in that quarter. The unreasoning scare, indeed, which arose last month both in India and at home, in consequence of the interruption for a few days of telegraphic communication with General Roberts's force, testifies to the feverish state of public feeling. Prophets of evil, on one side, alarm the country with their weekly homilies of curse and commination. Political orators, on the other, improve the occasion by magnifying the dangers of the situation for party purposes. If I venture, then, under such circumstances, to appear again, pen in hand, before the public, I think it right to explain that I do not come forward as a controversialist or a prophet. I make no claim to be the apologist of the Government, or the exponent of an occult policy. I write simply as an independent observer who, by applying his long experience of Central Asian affairs-extending now over a period of fifty years to passing events, is able to form an opinion on the present crisis at least as worthy of attention as that of the amateur critics of the public press, and who is desirous, at a period of great national interest, to place that opinion before the public, to be taken for what it may be worth.

I shall not revive the vexed question as to which party in the State is to be held responsible for the Afghan war, though some new light has been thrown upon the subject by recent discoveries at Cabul. It is asserted, for instance, in the Indian papers, and apparently on VOL. VII.-No. 36.

P

the best authority, that Yacub Khan has been very unreserved in his communications with our officers, and has made disclosures of some moment with regard to his father's dealings with the British and Russian Governments respectively. He is said to have described Shir Ali as having left Amballa in 1869 in some degree disappointed, but not to have been offended or hopeless till 1873, when, on the return of his messenger from Simla, he resolved to throw in his lot. with Russia, and accordingly formed an alliance with that Government, which continued uninterrupted till the final catastrophe in 1878. Now, although this explanation contains to me no unexpected revelation of Shir Ali's feelings, but is, on the contrary, a mere confirmation of the views which, in common with many others, I had always taken of the respective results of the Amballa and the Simla conference, it does, I confess, suggest some important considerations in stating that the Amir's alliance with Russia was continued uninterrupted from 1873 to the termination of his career: an alliance, as I understand the statement, not dependent on strict treaty engagements, but cultivated and maintained by the constant interchange of friendly and confidential correspondence, and in evident substitution of a previously existing good understanding with England. The importance of this admission is twofold. It authenticates, in the first place, the charge that has been so often brought against Russia of sustained duplicity in keeping up political relations with Cabul through her most trusted officers in Asia, while in Europe she repudiated any such connection, and asserted over and over again, in the most solemn manner, that Afghanistan was beyond the scope of her political action.' And, in the second place, it points to the conclusion that the Peshawer conference, and the various negotiations which preceded it, were mere shams, encouraged by Shir Ali for no other purpose than that of gaining time, while he matured arrangements with his Russian allies. Yacub Khan's brief explanation, indeed, of his father's policy compared with the provisions of the treaty negotiated by Stolietof at Cabul, which are also given in the Indian papers, as communicated by the subordinates employed in the negotiations, enable us for the first time to comprehend with distinctness and certainty the true position of affairs at the Amir's court at the close of 1878, a position which, in my view, gave to the Afghan war a strictly national character, and rendered it quite independent of the engagements or predilections of parties competing for power in England. I have no wish to waste time in controversy, but as this view of the question, which would raise the Afghan war beyond the sphere of party debate, is, I know, much contested, I would ask leave briefly to state the heads of the argument as it presents itself to my deliberate judgment. I am quite free to admit, then, that the necessity for armed intervention in Afghanistan might have been obviated by better statesmanship in bygone years.

We might probably have attached Shir Ali to our interests as completely as we had attached Dost Mahomed Khan towards the close of his career, by a timely and efficient support against the competitors who, when he first entered on his birthright, challenged his supremacy and for years obstructed his path to power; or at a later period—at Amballa, for instance-we might have expiated our previous shortcomings, and secured Shir Ali's loyalty by a personal and dynastic guarantee; or, if we hesitated to commit India to liabilities of this magnitude, we might have reassured the Amir as to his political safety and have at any rate secured his respect, by showing a bolder front to Russia after the Khiva campaign, and arresting, under a threat of war, her further advance towards our Indian frontier. Any one of these lines of policy would, it may be admitted, have rendered the present war unnecessary; but we have now passed beyond such speculations, and any recurrence to the subject is useless, except as an historical lesson for future generations. The only question for present consideration is whether at the close of 1878 it would have been possible with a due regard to the safety of India to avoid declaring war with Cabul. The position at the court of the Amir, as we have learnt from our later experience at Cabul, and from the insight we have gained into Russian proceedings, was simply as follows: -Shir Ali had cultivated for the preceding five years close and confidential relations with Russia; he had deliberately renounced the nope of preserving the friendship of England; in the meantime he had prepared a most formidable armament: he had collected sixtyeight regiments of regular infantry, armed for the most part with serviceable rifles, and sixteen regiments of cavalry; he had at his disposal about 300 guns and an enormous amount of powder, ammunition, and material of war; and, to crown all, his influence over the border tribes, who constitute the chief element of Afghan strength, was at least as powerful as his father's, and was liable at any moment to be employed against us. Under such circumstances, he received with distinction a Russian Envoy and concluded a treaty with the Russian Government which guaranteed to him the protection of the Emperor in regard both to foreign and domestic enemies, and virtually placed the whole resources of the country at the disposal of his Russian ally. Shortly before this critical period our own relations with Russia had been strained to the utmost, and in view of eventualities a considerable Russian force had actually marched from the Turkistan headquarters towards the Afghan frontier, for service beyond the Oxus. It was quite possible, too, though the Treaty of Berlin had been signed, that local misunderstanding or collision might impede its execution, and that we might thus be obliged after all to confront Russia in the field. Let me ask if any British Minister would have ventured under such circumstances to leave Russia in the undisturbed enjoyment of her vantage-ground in Afghanistan. Even without her