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56 which would carry his veterans through the Kháibar and the Khurd Kábul with little loss of life.

It is hard to conceive anything more fatuous than the policy which English statesmen were pursuing towards countries far remote from our Indian frontier. Well might Dost Muhammad's ministers decline to give up all intercourse with outside powers in return for the offer of our protection against a neighbour of whom they had no fear. And good cause had Afghán Sirdárs for laughter at the panic into which brave English gentlemen were thrown by the sound of a Persian march upon Herát, by the presence of a Persian agent at Kandahár, or of a Russian agent at Kábul; as if none but British troops were free to march anywhere, as if friendly intercourse with other than a British government were a crime, and only a British officer might venture to mask a political reconnaissance in the garb of a commercial mission. Persia also had reason to complain of our interference in her quarrel with Herát, as a breach of the treaty which forbade such interference unless both parties agreed in asking for it. The distant phantom of Russian aggression, which had scared our statesmen and diplomatists out of their moral and political wits, was now driving a peace-loving Governor-General into a course of folly and wrong-doing which has few parallels in English history.

In the middle of May Macnaghten set out from Simla on a special mission to the Court of Ranjít