We had shot our bolt and failed. He had simply to decline to make peace, and keep out of our reach. We should then have been compelled either to evacuate the country, or to occupy it with the certainty that a little later on we should be compelled to withdraw, when the drain on the finances of India became too heavy to endure. Sir Henry Rawlinson rightly says, that a very small force can march from one end of Afghanistan to another; but a very large force is requisite permanently to hold it. The tribal divisions which hinder unity of resistance hinder also the achievement of any decisive victory. Each tribe is an independent centre of life, which requires a separate operation for its extinction. Such was the dilemma in which the Government found themselves involved. It was almost equally disastrous either to withdraw or to advance. If the troops were withdrawn, they would return burdened with the ignominy of failure. If they advanced, it would be into a tangle of military and political embarrassments, the issue of which it was impossible to foresee. There was only one way of escape possible, and that was to relinquish the ambitious projects from which the war originated, and acquiesce in any settlement which the adversary would agree to. The result was the Treaty with Yakoub Khan--a Treaty which I have no hesitation in saying has placed in peril the existence of our Indian Empire. It is, indeed, impossible to account for the infatuation or the obstinacy which caused the Indian Government to stipulate for the reception of an undefended British Envoy at the Court of a prince in the position of Yakoub Khan. It would have been so easy to have introduced a clause in the Treaty, to the effect that as soon as Yakoub Khan's authority was firmly established an English Envoy should be accredited to Kabul. This would have saved the political consistency of the Government without exposing the Indian Empire to the tremendous strain and peril of a second Afghan expedition. There was absolutely nothing to be gained, either in India or England, by immediately forcing an English Envoy on the luckless Yakoub; while it enormously enhanced the difficulties with which he had to cope. Nevertheless, in the face of historic precedents, in defiance of multiplied warnings, Lord Lytton deliberately resolved to reproduce, for the edification of Asia, the tragedy of Shah Soojah and Sir William Nacnaghten, the only difference being that on this occasion the principal parts were played by Yakoub Khan and Major Cavagnari. The fact is that from first to last in this bad business the chief agents were moving in a world of their own imagining. They appear to have persuaded themselves that they had but to refuse to _see_ facts, and the facts would vanish. They had but to publish in the _Times_ that Lord Lytton was a "Viceroy specially gifted," and forthwith he would become what he was described to be. They had but to assert that the Afghans had no objection to the presence of a