III. 1839. the instinct of self-preservation, when Runjeet Sing's CHAP. lair was avoided to fall on the Ameers? The British strength was sufficient to overwhelm either or both together; but Runjeet Sing was wily, and powerful enough to give trouble; the Ameers were weak, despised, and supposed to be rich. Fear! and cupidity! these were the springs of action. Sir Alexander Burnes had said their treasury contained twenty millions sterling." The Ameers may be supposed wealthy," was one of the earliest intimations given by Lord Auckland to his negotiator. The armies now passed onwards to Affghanistan, the subsidiary force entered Scinde, and the political obligations of its rulers became totally changed. The original injustice remained in all its deformity, yet, being admitted by treaty without public protest or stroke in battle, became patent as the rule of policy, and new combinations involving great national interests were thus imposed on Lord Auckland's successor, demanding a different measure of right from that which should have governed the Anglo-Indian Government's intercourse previous to these treaties. For amongst the many evils attendant on national injustice not the least is the necessity of sustaining the wrongdoer's policy, thus implicating honest men in transactions the origin of which they cannot approve. Some abstract moralists hold indeed, that Governments stand in the same relation to each other that private persons do in a community; that as leaders and guides of nations, they should be governed by the same rules of morality as the leaders and guides of families. It would be well for the world were this practicable. But when private persons wrong each other they have a tribunal to I. 1839. PART controul them, and to enforce reparation; or they may voluntarily amend the wrong. Apply this to nations. Their tribunal is war. Every conquest, every treaty, places them on a new basis of intercourse. The first injustice remains a stigma on the government perpetrating it; but for the nation, for succeeding governments, new combinations are presented which may, and generally do, make it absolute for self-preservation, and therefore justifiable, not only to uphold but to extend what was at first to be condemned. Scinde is a striking illustration of this truth. The Affghan war once kindled, that invasion once perpetrated, the safety of the troops engaged in it imperatively required that Scinde should continue to be occupied; that the treaties concluded with Lord Auckland should be loyally adhered to by the Ameers. Say the Affghan armies ought rather to have been withdrawn, and two scores of injustice wiped off together. Was it possible? If possible would it not have been imputed to fear, to weakness, to any thing but an abstract sense of justice. Nations, especially those of the East, are neither so pure nor so frank as to greet virtue in a state garb. Wrong they are ever ready to offer to others; wrong they ever expect; and when it fails to arrive, opportunity favourable, they despise the forbearance as a folly. To have abandoned Affghanistan ere victory had redeemed the character of British strength, would have been the signal for universal commotion if not of insurrection throughout India. The having abandoned it at all led to the Scindian war, which was an inevitable consequence of the flagitious folly of the first enterprise. III. 1839. One alleviation for this otherwise unmitigated CHAP. transgression against Scinde remains, and it is a great one. It was not perpetrated against a nation, but against the Ameers; not against a people, but their rulers, and they were bad, indescribably bad. Oppressors themselves, they were oppressed by stronger power. Tyrants they were without pity. or remorse; without pity their fall should be recorded. Their people gained as they lost; the honour of England suffered, yet humanity profited; the British camps and stations offered asylums to thousands who would otherwise have led a life of misery. But this palliation, this solace to the mind, amidst so much to condemn, was not foreseen, it was incidental; it cannot be pleaded by Lord Auckland; his treaties expressly resigned the people to the cruelty of their rulers. The invasion of Affghanistan presents no such redeeming accompaniment. It was undertaken to place a proud tyrant on the throne; to force him on a people who detested him; and being conducted without ability terminated in disaster so dire, as to fill the mind with horror; enforcing what cannot be too often repeated, that incapacity and vanity are, in great enterprises of war, tantamount to wickedness. Colonel Pottinger, created a baronet, continued Resident in Scinde until the beginning of 1840. He was then replaced in the lower country by Major Outram, having been previously relieved in the upper country by Mr. Ross Bell. His negotiations offer some points of character worth noting. His natural feelings of justice, breaking out at the sight of Shah Sooja's receipts for a debt which he was again demanding at the head of an I. PART army; his reprobation of the attack on the fort of Kurrachee by the Wellesley; his aversion to profit by that violence, and his frequent, earnest, exhortations to treat the people with gentleness and fair dealing; contrast strongly with the general oppressive march of the negotiation he was charged to conduct, and with the hearty bluntness, by which he overwhelmed the unhappy Ameers, and as it were smothered them, with praises of Lord Auckland's loyalty and forbearance. Parliamentary Papers on Scinde, No. 174. His vehement declarations of the good faith and moderation of political acts which the most subtil sophistry cannot palliate, much less justify; the deference he inculcated for the tyrannical pleasures of the Ameers whose real rights he had by his treaties just taken away, are somewhat curious specimens of reasoning. Speaking of their "Shikargahs" or hunting preserves, which he acknowledged they had formed by turning, within a few years, one fourth of the fertile and peopled land into a wilderness; and they were still marching onwards in that devastating career, one of them having recently destroyed two large villages to form a future Shikargah" for his child, then only eight years old; and the whole of them declared that their hunting grounds were dearer to them than their wives and children; he yet desired, that they might be respected, because the ancient forest laws of the Normans in England were equally pernicious! And while thus recurring to the worst, the most cruel oppression of the worst periods of English history as a guide for British policy in the nineteenth century, and an excuse for the Ameers of Scinde; with singular inconsistency he recommended a conciliating and protecting policy towards the people! 66 CHAPTER IV. IV. 1839. THE mutations of the Affghan war, the hostility CHAP. of the Brahooe Beloochs and other hill tribes under the Prince of Khelat, nourished the discontent of the Ameers with hopes of redress, and encouraged them to form secret plans, and set intrigues on foot against the supremacy of the British. But soon internal dissensions, and the death of the Brahooe Prince, Merab, who was killed at the storming of Khelat by General Wiltshire, on that officer's return from Cabool to reinforce the subsidiary army in Scinde, prevented the adoption of any decided plan in 1839. But in 1840, when the Brahooes rose in arms for the son of Merab, and defeated several British detachments; when the Murrees and Booghtees on the north-western quarter beyond Scinde, were driven by British injustice to insurrection; when Runjeet Sing, his son, and grandson, had all died in quick succession and the Punjaub was in commotion; then the Ameers became unquiet and thus spoke in their secret councils. 1840. mentary No. 248. "It is good to combine with other powers be- Parliacause the British Government is surrounded by Papere, enemies; because it fears insurrection in India, Scinde. and is lax in its rule over neighbouring states; but it is difficult, because its rule is rigid in Scinde, and we are divided and quarrelling. If we could all unite it would be well." At the time these councils were held, Dost |