the Ameer, as a menace to his independence, and the harbinger of war. So it came about that when the Russian mission knocked for admission at the doors of his capital, the Ameer found himself on the one side threatened by Russia, and on the other abandoned and threatened by Lord Lytton. Lord Lytton, in point of fact, is as directly responsible for the entry of the Russian mission to Kabul as he is for the dispatch of his own. But if Lord Lytton's treatment of the Ameer was cruel and ungenerous, criminal, at least to an equal extent, was his treatment of the people over whom he ruled. At that time there was an appalling amount of suffering all over India. The country had been ravaged by a series of famines. In the Punjab prices were abnormally high. The North-West Provinces were still unrecovered from a dearth, during which the Government of India had exhibited a rapacity and indifference to human suffering which would, with difficulty, be credited in England. Terrible as is the mortality resulting from a famine in India, the death-roll represents but a tenth part of the suffering which such visitations inflict. For every human being that dies, ten are left, without money and without physical strength, to struggle feebly for existence on the margin of the grave. They cannot give a fair day's work for a fair day's wage. They may reckon themselves fortunate if their enfeebled powers can earn just sufficient to keep body and soul together. For all these wretched beings--and last year in Upper India they numbered many millions--the smallest rise of price in the necessities of life means death from hunger. A war, therefore, with the enormous rise of prices which it would immediately produce, was nothing less than a sentence of torture and death passed upon tens of thousands of our own subjects. Undeterred, however, by the warnings of experience, deaf to considerations of humanity and justice, the Government of India started on its wild-goose chase after a "Scientific Frontier." The victims whom it trampled to death in this mad chase have never been numbered--they never can be numbered. The Afghans who died in defence of their village homes form but a hundredth part of them. The residue was composed of our own mute and uncomplaining subjects.