Are we to have justice or not?--not that justice which executes the sentence, but which points the historical verdict, and distributes the proportions of guilt. The government must now be convinced, by the unceasing succession of books on this subject, which sleeps at intervals, but continually wakens up again to new life, that it has not died out, nor is likely to do so. And for _that_ there is good reason: a sorrow which is past decays gradually, and hushes itself to sleep; not so a sorrow which points too ominously to the future. The last book on this horrible tragedy is that of Mr Lushington;[1] and in point of ability the best; the best in composition; the best for nobility of principle, for warning, for reproach. But, for all that, we do not agree with him: we concede all his major propositions; we deny most of his minors. As for the other and earlier discussions upon this theme, whether by boots, by pamphlets, by journals, English and Indian, or by Parliamentary speeches, they now form a library; and, considering the vast remoteness of the local interest, they express sublimely the paramount power of what is moral over the earthy and the physical. A battle of Paniput is fought, which adds the carnage of Leipsic to that of Borodino, and, numerically speaking, heaps Pelion upon Ossa; but who cares? No principle is concerned: it is viewed as battle of wolves with tiger-cats; and Europe heeds it not. But let a column of less than 5000, from a nation moving by moral forces, and ploughing up for ever new soils of moral promise, betray itself, by folly or by guilt, into the meshes of a frightful calamity, and the earth listens for the details from the tropics to the arctic circle. Not Moscow and Smolensko, through all the wilderness of their afflictions, ever challenged the gaze of Christendom so earnestly as the Coord Cabool. And why? The pomp, the procession of the misery, lasted through six weeks in the Napoleon case, through six days in the English case. Of the French host there had been originally 450,000 fighting men; of the English, exactly that same amount read as the numerator of a fraction whose denominator was 100. Forty-five myriads had been the French; forty-five hundreds the English. And yet so mighty is the power of any thing moral, because shadowy and illimitable, so potent to magnify and unvulgarize any interest, that more books have been written upon Cabool, and through a more enduring tract of time, than upon Moscow. Great was the convulsion in either case; but that caused by Cabool has proved the less transitory. The vast _anabasis_ to Moscow had emanated from a people not conspicuously careful of public morality. But that later _anabasis_, which ascended to the shining pinnacles of Candahar, and which stained with blood of men the untrodden snows of the Hindoo Koosh, was the work of a nation--no matter whether more moral in a practical sense, upon that we do not here