That Power was (1837) engaged in fomenting trouble in the western part of Afghanistan, encouraging an attack by 30,000 Persians, led by Russian officers, upon Herat. Instead of acceding to the request of Dost Mohammed, the British Governor-General--Lord Auckland--declared war against that potentate, alleging in a proclamation that "the welfare of the English possessions in the East rendered it necessary to have an ally on their western frontier who would be in favor of peace, and opposed to all disorders and innovations." This was the beginning of intrigues relating to Afghanistan on the part, alternately, of England and Russia, in which John Bull has had to pay, literally, "the lion's share" of the cost in blood and treasure. In 1850, Sir John Cam Hobhouse, President of the Board of Control in India confessed: "The Afghan war _was done by myself_; the Court of Directors had nothing to do with it." The reason already mentioned was alleged as an excuse for hostilities. They were declared, notwithstanding that the British political agent at the Court of Dost Mohammed reported that ruler as "entirely English" in his sympathies. This report was suppressed. Twenty years later the facts were given to Parliament, Russian letters were found implicating the Czar's ministers, and the English agent, Burnes, was vindicated. The Anglo-Indian army--consisting of twenty thousand troops, fifty thousand followers, and sixty thousand camels--advanced in two columns, one from Bengal, and the other from Bombay by the Indus. Scinde, which had hitherto been independent, like the Punjab and Lahore, was subjugated _en route_, and nine thousand men were left behind to occupy it. On the 23d of February, 1839, a simultaneous advance from Shikarpur, on the Bolan Pass, commenced. Kandahar was occupied April 25th, Ghazni July 23d, and Kabul August 6th, and Shah Sujah was proclaimed Ameer by British authority. By the following September the greater part of the English forces returned to India. Only five regiments of infantry and one of cavalry remained in Afghanistan, where suspicious symptoms of discontent with the new order of things began very soon to show themselves. During the summer of 1840 insurrections had to be put down by force in several places. In November of the same year Dost Mohammed defeated the English in the Perwan Pass. From that time until the autumn of 1841 a sultry calm reigned in the country. The English commanders, although fully aware of the state of mind of the people, neglected to take the most simple measures of precaution.