be taken or destroyed, and his property plundered, his place was filled by a relation, and the order remained unbroken. The Affghan chiefs had thus enjoyed, under their native governments, an amount of independence which was incompatible with the system we introduced--supported as that system was by our military means. These men must have seen that their own power and importance, and even their security against the caprices of their sovereign, could not long be preserved--that they were about to be subjected as well as governed--to be deprived of all power to resist the oppressions of their own government, because its will was enforced by an army which had no sympathy with the nation, and which was therefore ready to use its formidable strength to compel unqualified submission to the sovereign's commands. The British army may not have been employed to enforce any unjust command--its movements may have been less, far less, injurious to the countries through which it passed than those of an Affghan army would have been, and its power in the moment of success may have been far less abused; but still it gave a strength to the arm of the sovereign, which was incompatible with the maintenance of the pre-existing civil and social institutions or condition of the country, and especially of the relative positions of the sovereign and the noble. In the measures we adopted to establish the authority of Shah Shoojah, we attempted to carry out a system of government which could only have been made successful by a total revolution in the social condition of the people, and in the relative positions of classes; and as these revolutions are not effected in a few years, the attempt failed.[17] [17] The system, unpalatable as it was to the nation, might, no doubt, have been carried through by an overwhelming military force, if the country had been worth the cost; but if it was not intended to retain permanent possession of Affghanistan, it appears to us that the native government was far too much interfered with--that the British envoy, the British officers employed in the districts and provinces, and the British army, stood too much between the Shah and his subjects--that we were forming a government which it would be impossible to work in our absence, and creating a state of things which, the longer it might endure, would have made more remote the time at which our interference could be dispensed with. But if the predominance of our influence and of our military power, and the effects of the system we introduced, tended to depress the chiefs, it must have still more injuriously affected or threatened the power of the priesthood.