It is probable that Lord Ellenborough himself had no very clear perception, at this time, of the course which he purposed to pursue. He had made up his mind, he said, to save India in spite of every man in it who ought to give him support;[240] but it seemed to be his idea to save India rather by withdrawing all our troops within the Sutlej, than by striking a decisive blow for the re-establishment of our military supremacy in Afghanistan. It was his opinion that the danger of our position at that time arose from the absence of so large a body of troops from the provinces of Hindostan; and that we might better afford to leave our external injuries unredressed, than weaken our means of defence in India itself for the purpose of redressing them. Viewing the matter in this light, Lord Ellenborough thought less of redeeming the military character of the British nation than of bringing back the troops to Hindostan; and he would have brought them back without an effort at such redemption, if the almost universal voice, not only of the chief civil and military officers, but of the Anglo-Indian community at large, had not been lifted up against so inglorious and degrading a concession. The opinions and desires of Pollock and Nott—of Robertson and Clerk—of Rawlinson, Outram, Macgregor, Mackeson, and others, who were eager for a forward movement, and little inclined to conceal their genuine sentiments under a cloak of official reserve—how little soever Lord Ellenborough might have been disposed outwardly to acknowledge their influence—were not without their effect. Public opinion he professed to despise. The judgments of the Press he pretended to hold in such absolute contempt, that he lived in habitual ignorance of all that emanated from it; but it is believed that this disregard of public opinion was rather a profession than a fact, and that Lord Ellenborough was shaken in his determination to bring back the armies to the provinces, by the clamour that, from one end of India to the other, was raised against the obnoxious measure of withdrawal. He had by this time, too, received information from England that an inglorious retirement from the scene of our late humiliation, and the abandonment of all the brave men, tender women, and innocent children, in the hands of the Afghans, would be viewed with no satisfaction either by his old ministerial colleagues, or by the people of Great Britain. Many powerful external influences, therefore, roused him to a sense of the necessity of doing something in advance; but the “withdrawal policy” was emphatically his own, and he was resolute to preserve the shadow of it if he could not maintain the substance.