letter of the 16th, I have this day written to Mr. Colvin. In a day or two it is my intention to send up officially, with my comments, a paper handed to me by Sir A. Burnes, on the present state and future prospects of this country. I hope to show that, all things considered, we are in as prosperous a condition as could have been expected. Sir A. of course wishes to prove the contrary, since by doing so, when he succeeds me, his failures would thus find excuse and his success additional credit. This is all natural enough. I have been exposed to a thousand interruptions whilst writing this, and beg pardon if I have used too much freedom.”[47] In a letter despatched a few days afterwards to Lord Auckland, Macnaghten wrote: “I trust the Russians may not come to Khiva this year, for we have quite enough on our hands without them. Captain Conolly starts in a few days. I trust your Lordship will have the goodness to direct that both he and Captain Abbott be gazetted as lieutenant-colonels whilst serving in Toorkistan.” There had gone forth a mission—and an ill-omened one, to Bokhara—there had gone forth two missions to Khiva—and now one was to be despatched to the intervening state of Kokund. Eagerly did Arthur Conolly grasp the idea of this Kokund mission. He was a man of an earnest, impulsive nature, running over with the purest feelings of benevolence, and glowing with the most intense longings after the civilisation and evangelisation of the human race. He believed that the great Central-Asian movement was designed by Providence to break down the huge walls of Mahomedanism which begirt the shining East, and to substitute civilisation, liberty, and peace, for barbarism, slavery, and strife. He was a visionary, but one of the noblest order; and when he looked out beyond the great barrier of the Hindoo-Koosh, traversed in imagination the deserts of Merve, and visited the barbarous Courts of the Khans of Khiva, Kokund, and Bokhara, he never doubted for a moment that the mission which he was about to undertake was one of the highest and holiest with which a Christian officer could be entrusted. “I feel very confident,” he wrote to a friend, “about all our policy in Central Asia; for I think that the designs of our government there are honest, and that they will work with a blessing from God, who seems now to be breaking up all the barriers of the long-closed East, for the introduction of Christian knowledge and peace. It is deeply interesting to watch the effects that are being produced by the exertions of the European powers, some selfish and contrary; others still selfish, but qualified with peace and generosity; all made instrumental to good. See the French in Africa; the English, Austrians, and Russians on the Bosphorus, forcing the Turks to be European under a shadow of Mahomedanism, and providing for the peaceful settlement of the fairest and most sacred countries in the world.”[48]