Not the less, however, we maintain, that whilst in fact our ruin was self-prepared, come it would, sooner or later, from the necessity of Affghan society, had the actual occasion of that ruin been wanting. You build a palace on the waters, and you complain that a monsoon has overthrown it. True; but had there been no monsoon, equally it would have been supplanted by the _natural_ unsteadiness of the waves. Now, _fourthly_, however, for Cabool, and the crape-bound banners "perituraque castra!" Fourthly and lastly, for the solution of that hideous calamity, whose memory is accursed for ever. But the solution-- is not _that_ plain already? If what we allege be true, if the delusions exposed under the third head are rightly stated, will not _they_ solve the ruin of Cabool? Are not _they_ sufficient? No, nothing will solve it--no causes are sufficient for such a result, unless a strong spirit of delusion had been inflicted from heaven, distraction, frenzy, judicial madness. No dangers from the enemy, no pressure from without, _could_ have accomplished that wreck, had they not been aided by treachery within the counsels of our own hearts. It is an old saying of any subject too vast or too sad to measure by hurried words--that "_de Carthagine satius est silere, quam parcius dicere_." And in this case, where we have left ourselves too narrow a space to turn round in, and where no space would exhaust the infinities of the affliction, it is not our purpose to heighten, or rhetorically to colour, any one feature of the dismal story. Rhetoric, and art of all kids, we forswear in a tragedy so torturing to our national sensibilities. We pass, in sympathy with the burning wrath of our readers, the madness of dallying and moping over the question--to starve or not to starve. We pass the infamy of entertaining a treaty with barbarians, _commenced_ in this foul insult to a British army--that _after_ we should have submitted to indignities past expression, they (the barbarians) would consider at their leisure whether it would please them to spare our necks; a villany that gallant men _could_ not have sanctioned, an which too certainly was not hurled back in their teeth as it ought to have been. We pass the lunacy of _tempting_ barbarians to a perfidy almost systematic in their policy, by consenting to a conference _outside_ the British cantonments, not even within range of the British guns, not even within the overlooking of British eyes. We pass the lunacy of taking out sixteen men as an escort against a number absolutely unlimited of the enemy, and where no restraint, even of honour or mutual understanding, forbade that unlimited enemy to come armed from head to foot. It is a trifle to add--that no instructions were given to the sixteen men as to what they were to do, or in what circumstances to act; and accordingly that one man only, out of the whole sixteen, attempted any resistance; and this in defiance of