to Candahar, and with an assurance that in deference to Afghan susceptibility, the British Government would not propose to despatch any European officer to Caubul unless circumstances should change. This treaty established relations between the British empire and Afghanistan which have lasted, with some brief but stormy interruptions, for thirty years up to the present time. It was concluded on the eve of the war of those mutinies in India which were foreseen by neither of the contracting parties. On its conclusion Dost Mahommed exclaimed that he had thereby made with the British Government an alliance which he would keep till death; and he did keep it accordingly. As a consequence, during the storm, which very soon afterwards burst over Northern India up to the very verge of Afghanistan, he preserved a friendly neutrality which was of real value to the British cause. Thus whatever may be the arguments before or since that date, the beginning of 1857, for or against the setting up of relations with Afghanistan, this treaty proved very useful to British interests in the events which arose immediately after it was made. It is but just to the memory of Edwardes, who was the originator and the prime adviser of this policy, to quote the explanation of it in his own words by a memorandum which he wrote in the following year, 1858. After alluding to the former dealings of the British with Afghanistan, he writes thus regarding himself: “When Commissioner of Peshâwur, in 1854, he sought and obtained the permission of Lord Dalhousie to bring about that hearty reconciliation which was expressed in the first friendly treaty of March 1855, and subsequently (with the equally cordial approval of Lord Canning) was substantially consolidated by the treaty of January 26, 1857. At this latter juncture the Shah of Persia had seized Herat and was threatening Candahar. England was herself attacking Persia in the Gulf, and the Indian Government now gave to the Amir at Cabul eight thousand stand of arms, and a subsidy of £10,000 a month, so long as the Persian war should last. We did this, as the treaty truly said, ‘out of friendship.’ We did it, too, in the plenitude of our power and high noon of that treacherous security which smiled on India in January 1857. How little, as we set our seals to that treaty, did we know that in May the English in India, from Peshâwur to the sea, would be fighting for empire and their lives, and that God’s mercy was stopping the mouths of lions against our hour of need. To the honour of Dost Mahommed Khan let it be recorded that during the Sepoy war, under the greatest temptation from events and the constant taunts of the fanatical priests of Cabul, he remained true to the treaty, and abstained from raising the green flag of Islam and marching down on the Punjab.”