In India Lord Lytton resigned. One of his last acts was to deliver a contemptuous speech refuting Mr. Gladstone’s suggestion that the finances of that Dependency were in a state of confusion. To the very last Lord Lytton endeavoured to persuade the English people that the Afghan War had cost only six millions of money, and his Finance Minister (Sir John Strachey) produced a most comforting “Prosperity Budget.” It had, however, one defect. As Lord Hartington discovered when he went to the India Office, a trifling sum of £9,000,000 sterling had been dropped out of the expenditure side of the Afghan War accounts; in other words, a mistake which would have been called by a very ugly name indeed had it been made in the office of a bank or of a railway company, had been made at the expense of the British taxpayer by the Indian Government. While Lord Lytton was assuring England that the war was costing £200,000 a month, it was costing £500,000. Nay, for two years he had been paying away this excess of expenditure over estimates without knowing it, or getting from the Treasury a monthly statement of the money spent on the war! But the position of affairs in Afghanistan was rapidly becoming unendurable. England held Cabul as the Emperor Augustus held Rome--like a man who had a wolf by the ear. Lord Lytton recognised Shere Ali Khan as independent Wali of Candahar, and the ex-Ameer Yakoob was a prisoner in India. But Abdurrahman Khan (a grandson of Dost Mahommed, and an exile in Russia) was a pretender for the throne; and so was the warlike Ayoob Khan, a son of the ex-Ameer, Shere Ali. Ayoob was, moreover, marching from Herat against the British at Candahar with a force of fierce irregular troops.