The ex-Amir of Afghanistan, Sirdar Yakub Khan, is now well on his way to India: the order for his deportation having been carried out so silently and quickly that, while I am writing, the majority of men in Sherpur cantonments are ignorant of his departure. As I ventured to predict in forwarding the news of the close of the Commission of Inquiry, Yakub Khan’s fate is that of an exile to India; but even now we are in the dark here as to whether he will be treated as a State prisoner, and allowed to live in luxurious comfort, or will be sent to the Andamans, to drag out his life as a common malefactor. If the latter, it will be an ignoble ending of a career which in its earlier stages promised such brilliant achievements. Yakub Khan was once the first soldier in Afghanistan, but from the evil moment when he confided in the word of his father, his fame was at an end. Five years’ captivity—and such captivity as only Shere Ali could devise—broke his spirit, dulled his intellect, and left him the weak incapable we treated with at Gundamak, and confided in so blindly until the fatal week in September. That under fairer auspices he might have proved a strong ruler, such as the Afghans require, can scarcely admit of a doubt; that he would have been a Dost Mahomed even his most ardent admirers would hesitate to assert. The conditions of government in a country like Afghanistan compel the sovereign either to be a tyrant or the tool of factions: Yakub Khan, during his few months of power, was the latter. His accession to the throne took place under circumstances to cope with which, even in the prime of his manhood before imprisonment had crippled him, would have taxed his power to the uttermost. After five years in a dungeon he was suddenly liberated by his father, only to find that father in the last stage of defeat and despair, his kingdom practically at the mercy of a powerful invader, and himself a panic-stricken fugitive. Left first as Shere Ali’s regent, Yakub Khan could do nothing beyond watch, with Oriental submission to fate, the advance of the two invading armies up the Jellalabad and Kurram Valleys. The help which Shere Ali expected to receive from his Russian friends over the Oxus was not forthcoming; in a few weeks came the news of the death of the Amir at Mazar-i-Sharif, and Yakub found himself in possession of a kingdom already tottering to its fall. If he had had the energy of Dost Mahomed he might have organized armies, called upon the semi-barbarous tribes still lying between Cabul and India to join his soldiers in a holy war, and make a supreme effort to check the invasion which had driven his father from the capital. But that energy was lacking; he made but a faint-hearted appeal to the fanaticism of the hill-tribes, and, unsupported as this was by any real attempt to collect the scattered units of Shere Ali’s once-powerful army, it necessarily failed. Nothing was left to him but negotiation;