This prayer General Nott would have rejected, and in so doing would have gained the applause of every member of that school by which concession to the feelings of natives in opposition to the requirements of expediency, or the sternest justice, is regarded as a proof of weakness. With this prayer General Pollock complied; and to his doing so may the safety of the ladies and other prisoners, in whose fate the whole civilised world took so deep an interest, be ascribed; for it was through the co-operation of those thus conciliated that the Afghan chief, charged with the custody of the captives, was won over to assist in their escape. General Nott was fortunately the inferior in rank; for had he commanded in chief, we have his own words for the fact, that he would have destroyed the Bala Hissar and the City of Cabool, and marched on with the least possible delay to Jellabad, of course leaving the poor captives to their fate; or, in words which, from the manner of their insertion in the pages of the historian, it is to be feared he must have used, “throwing them overboard.”—(KAYE’S _History of the Afghan War_, vol. i. pp. 617, 631). Incomplete indeed, to use Mr Kaye’s words, would any victory have been, if these brave men and tender women, who had so well endured a long and fearful captivity, had been left behind; and it is well to reflect that we were saved from this reproach by the ascendancy of the milder principles of rule in the mind of the officer upon whom the chief command at this moment, we may almost say providentially, devolved. Many more instances are recorded, in the chapter just quoted, of the influence of a contrary spirit on the closing events of the Afghan war; but we must pass on to what happened in Scinde, where the anti-judicial principle may be said to have reached its climax. The following is Mr Campbell’s short and flippant account of that transaction, reminding us in one passage of a letter from the Empress Catherine to one of her French correspondents, wherein she congratulated herself “qu’il n’y a pas d’honneur à garder avec les Turcs”:— “But though we withdrew from Cabool, our military experiences were not yet over. On invading Afghanistan by the Bolan Pass, Scinde became a base of our operations, and troops were there cantoned. When our misfortunes occurred, it was supposed that the Beloch chiefs would have liked to have turned against us, but dared not—did not.