well-planned and very determined attack on four parts of the city. At three of these they were repulsed. But at the fourth, they had almost carried the breach when the Vizier, Yár Muhammed, accompanied by Pottinger reached the spot. Yár Muhammed was a brave man, but he was cowed by the sight which met his gaze-the sight of the garrison giving way before their advancing foe. He urged them to rally, but he was too overcome himself to give them the example. Then was Pottinger's opportunity. He made a despairing appeal to the Vizïer, inspired him with a portion of his own resolution; then, with his aid, he re-formed the now encouraged defenders and forced back the foe. T

The month of July passed without any renewal of activity on the part of the besiegers. On the 11th of the following month the Shah received in his camp an English officer, Colonel Stoddart, deputed to inform him that the continuance of the siege meant war with England. Little less than one month later the Persian army retired behind its own frontier !

The conclusion that, because the Persians after a siege of ten months' duration were in the end repelled, Herát was therefore impregnable, would be entirely fallacious. Eldred Pottinger deliberately declared that Muhammed Sháh might have taken the city by assault within twentyfour hours after his appearance before its walls if his troops had been efficiently commanded. We may go

further and add-to use the language of the historian of the events of that period-the late Sir John Kaye-that but for the heroism of the young Bombay Artilleryman, Herát would under the actual circumstances have fallen!

With the raising of the siege of Herát the necessity for English intervention in the affairs of Afghánistán had disappeared. The object originally contemplated by Lord

Palmerston had been accomplished. Russia had received a check in her endeavour to use Persia as a cat's paw to filch away the most important of all the positions covering India. If England, on the retirement of the Persian army, had entered into an arrangement with Dost Muhammad, an arrangement for which he was then eager, the relations between India and the mountainous country which is naturally its frontier redoubt, would have been settled on a firm basis. But, unfortunately, before the raising of the siege of Herát had become known, Lord Auckland had pledged himself to Sháh Shuja, and it was determined to carry out the policy of substituting for a ruler of doubtful fidelity a prince who in all his foreign relations would be the tool of England.

It is not necessary here to do more than record the failure of that unfortunate policy. After nearly four years of desperate venture, it resulted in the restoration to supreme sway in Kábul of the prince whom we had expelled. >

Embittered as he naturally was against the 'people who had fexpelled him, Dost Muhammad returned to Kábul with a far higher idea of the resources of the British nation than he had held before his enforced exile. He had visited Calcutta and seen their ships, their arsenals, their fortresses, and, though many years elapsed before he entered into friendly relations with his old enemies, he was resolved from the first moment of his return to do nothing to tempt them to renew their attack upon himself. It is true that in the death-throes of the struggle for the Panjáb, he allowed one of his sons to lead a cavalry brigade to assist the Sikhs in the battle which consummated their overthrow; but after the British frontier had been permanently advanced beyond the Indus, he remained for a time quiescent. The renewed intrigues of Persia for the recovery of Herát forced him at last to renew friendly relations with his old enemy.

In that year, 1854, his son Ghulam Haidar visited Peshawar for that purpose. He was met there by the late Lord Lawrence, at the time plain John Lawrence, Chief Commissioner of the Panjáb. On that occasion the famous agreement was signed in which the Amir of Afghánistán covenanted "to be the friend of the friends, and the enemy of the enemies of the Honble. East India Company."

If we reflect for a moment upon this most important agreement, we shall arrive at the inevitable conclusion that it accomplished little more than the carrying of political relations back to the point at which they were when Burnes visited Kábul in 1837-8. It blotted out the intervening events. The first Afghán war had, in a word, lost for us eighteen years which might have well been employed in cementing relations necessary for the safety of the British empire in India.

Doubtless the political aspect which prompted the Amír to send his son to Peshawar, had many points of similarity with the political aspect of 1837. On both occasions Herát was threatened by the same Asiatic power, stirred up by the same European power. But if the English had grown wiser, so likewise had Dost Muhammad. He no longer talked of recovering Peshawar. He saw the full significance of the movement about Herát, and he wanted the support of the English to baffle it.

In 1854 England was at war with Russia; that power therefore, only exercised a legitimate right when, the barriers of an independent Caucasus still existing, she incited Persia to renew her attempts upon the fortified city which had repulsed her in 1838. "

The incitations of Russia produced corresponding action on the part of Persia. She sent an army in the autumn of 1856 against Herát, and that city, no longer defended by

an Eldred Pottinger, surrendered to her in the month of October of the same year.

But Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister of England; and Lord Palmerston was firmly resolved that Persia should not hold the city, and with the city the province which would constitute a new base for an army hostile to British India. Herát had, I have said, fallen in October 1856. On the 1st November, Lord Palmerston declared war against Persia, and despatched an army to attack her on her most vulnerable side, in the Persian gulf.

Never has an expedition been better planned or better executed. Never certainly has energetic action obtained more promptly the desired result. War was declared, I have said, the 1st November, 1856. Peace was signed the 4th March, 1857. In the interval, Persia had been defeated in two battles. By the terms of the peace she agreed to

restore Herát to the Afgháns!

Before the signature of the Peace, the British acting by the mouth of Mr. John Lawrence, had signed another agreement with the Amír promising him a monthly allowof £10,000 and arranging for the permanent residence of a British agent-a native of India at Kábul. In the course of the years immediately following, Dost Muhammad brought Western Afghánistán, including Herát, more completely under his own personal sway.

On his death, in 1863, a civil war ensued for the succession. That war lasted, with varying fortunes, for five years. It was only in January 1869, that the most capable of the sons of Dost Muhammad, Sher Ali, obtained over his last remaining rival, the present Amír Abdul Rahman, a victory so crushing that from that moment all opposition ceased, and Afghánistán with its borders as they are described in the first two pages of the first chapter became united under one head.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PROGRESS OF RUSSIA TOWARDS INDIA.

IN 1854 Nicholas, Czar of all the Russias, struck his long meditated blow for the possession of Constantinople. He failed, and he died. His successor, Alexander II., made peace with the two great western powers who had baffled his father, and announced ostentatiously that it was his intention to devote himself to domestic reforms. As an earnest of his sincerity he abolished serfdom.

But whilst hoodwinked Europe was praising the sagacity, the prudence, and the moderation of the young Czar, that astute prince was straining his empire to break down the mountain barrier which barred his free access to the steppes of Central Asia. The very year that witnessed the signature of the Peace of Paris (April 1856) saw him hurl an army of 150,000 men against the passes of the Caucasus. Fiercely did the heroic mountaineers resist. But numbers prevailed. At the end of three years the strongholds of the Caucasus had been stormed; the hero who had led the resistance, the illustrious Schamyl, was a prisoner (6 September 1859), and the mountaineers, who had for so many years successfully defied Russia, had abandoned their native fastnesses to seek refuge within the dominions of the Sultan.

The Caucasus conquered, Russia, who for some years had been working her way across the low undulating plains which lie between the Alatan range and the Jaxartes, made