It seemed to the Envoy, at this time, that there was no middle course to be pursued. All through our Central-Asian policy, indeed, there ran two substantive ideas. It was either the bayonet or the money-bag that was to settle everything for us. When Macnaghten found that the rulers of Herat were not to be dragooned into propriety, he declared that there was nothing left for us now but to bribe them. He proposed that a subsidy of two or three lakhs per annum should be granted to Herat; that guns, muskets, and ordnance stores in abundance should be furnished to the state; and in the meanwhile he continued to send up more treasure, with a profusion which startled the Calcutta Government, to be expended on the strengthening of its defences and the sustentation of the people. But as the treachery of Yar Mahomed became more fully developed, the Governor-General began to mistrust the efficacy of the course of forbearance and conciliation which he had in the first instance recommended. He had authorised Major Todd to declare his forgiveness of all past offences, and was willing to enter upon a new covenant of friendship, _rasâ tabulâ_, with the offending state. But he was not then acquainted with the fact of the letter to Mahomed Shah, in which, with almost unexampled shamelessness, the writer boasted of the cajolery practised upon the English, who lavished their money freely upon Herat, whilst its rulers were flinging themselves into the arms of Persia; for although that letter had been written in January, and came, therefore, within the margin of those offences for which forgiveness had been declared, it was not until some time afterwards that this crowning act of perfidy was discovered and laid bare before the Governor-General. Then it would seem that Lord Auckland began to waver in his resolution to maintain the independence of Herat. But he was at this time resident at Calcutta. Sir Jasper Nicolls,[36] who had held the chief command at Madras, an old and distinguished officer, who had done good service in the Nepaul war, and was possessed of an amount of Indian experience almost unexampled in an Indian Commander-in-Chief, was at the Presidency. The war in Afghanistan had been extremely distasteful to him from the beginning, and he now viewed with suspicion and alarm all the projects which were passing before him for the despatch of more troops and the diversion of more treasure from their legitimate purposes in Hindostan. No warlike promptings, therefore, from the military side of the Council Chamber, ever stimulated Lord Auckland to bury his legions in the inhospitable defiles of Afghanistan, or to waste the finances of India in insane attempts to change the nature of the chiefs and people of Central Asia, and to bribe them into quiescence and peace.