Page:The Earl of Auckland.djvu/79

Rh they did their work. On the 10th of December, Cotton's division began its march down the left bank of the Sutlej, encumbered by a train of 30,000 camels and 38,000 camp-followers. The road selected for its march to Kábul passed through more than a thousand miles of parched plains and rugged mountains, peopled either by lawless tribes or by communities ill affected to our rule. The military objections to such a movement were to be refuted by its success, but the policy which inspired it had few friends at home outside the Ministry and the Board of Control. The Duke of Wellington held that 'the consequence of crossing the Indus once to settle a government in Afghánistán will be a perennial march into that country.' Lord William Bentinck declared that Auckland and Macnaghten were the last men in the world whom he would have suspected of such folly.

Lord Wellesley laughed at the very notion of occupying a land of 'rocks, sands, deserts, ice, and snow.' Metcalfe, who had always opposed the measures taken for opening the Indus to our trade, held ' that the surest way to bring Russia down upon ourselves is for us to cross the Indus, and meddle with the countries beyond it.' Mountstuart Elphinstone, writing to Burnes, allowed that an army of proper strength might take Kandahar and Kábul, and set up Shujá, 'but for maintaining him in a poor, cold, strong, and remote country among a turbulent people like the Afgháns, I own it seems to me to be hopeless.' Like Lord Lawrence forty years later, he contended that