All this would seem to point to a good deal happening which is detrimental to the interests of the British Government which the Afghan ruler fears may come to their knowledge, but from what I saw and heard in the country, it is only occasionally that anything happens which would interest the Indian Government, and then only mildly. It may be, however, to prevent news of these occasional happenings leaking out that the Afghan rulers consider it necessary to make the people afraid of giving news of any sort to the enemies of their country; for so they look upon all those who are not of themselves. They certainly have occasion to fear their prison system becoming known publicly, for cruelty of all sorts is common in the way of torture. Imagine a prison where the limbs which have been hacked off men are left lying about, together with the dismembered bodies of those dead, of the suffering inflicted on them, until the whole place reeks of decomposing flesh, and then consider the frame of mind of hundreds who are imprisoned without trial, unknowing of what their own punishment is to be, who daily live in the midst of these horrors. If the truth about the Kabul prisons were generally known, other countries would probably unite in insisting on such barbarity being stopped. The common people, who have their own way of looking at everything, attribute the large numbers of men killed in prison without any generally known reason for their execution to the British Government, and say that as the British were unable to conquer them by fighting, they now pay the Amir large sums of money monthly (the subsidy) to kill them in other ways. The people also say of the Bala Hisar (high fort) in Kabul, which Lord Roberts rased to the ground in 1880 after the massacre of Cavagnari and his men, and which still remains in ruins, that the Amir has been ordered by the British Government not to rebuild it, as one of the conditions of his occupying the throne. The opinion of these people, however fallacious, is still the opinion of those who comprise the bulk of the population, and although they are ignorant and uninformed their opinion ought not to be altogether neglected.