they gained the reluctant concurrence of a few upright men, of whose peculiar scruples they contrived to avail themselves, but with an ignorance of the true English character, for which they are equally distinguished, they overshot the mark, and stand convicted of a design to make a verbal misconstruction the pretence for persecuting an absent man, and to convert honest prejudices into an unconscious instrument of oppression.  They have thus earned a large allowance of general contempt, and they have nowhere, perhaps, excited a stronger feeling of disgust than in the minds of those who thought themselves compelled, by a rigid conscience, to give a seeming concurrence to their proceedings.

In judging of the conduct and position of Lord Ellenborough, it were gross ingratitude and injustice to forget the nature of the calamities with which India was assailed and threatened at the commencement of his goverment.  In the second week of March 1842, the overland mail from the East conveyed intelligence to our shores which struck the nation to the very heart, and spread one universal feeling of grief and dismay, approaching for a time as near to a feeling of despondency as English breasts can be taught to know.  Let us describe the effect in the words of an impartial observer writing at the time:—­

“No such disastrous news has for many years reached this country as that which has arrived from India.  ‘The progress of our arms’ was carried merrily on, till our flag was set beside that of our puppet, Shah Soojah, in Cabul; but there the progress has abruptly terminated in the total engulfing of ‘our arms.’  Yes, Sir William Macnaghten had just written home to declare our supremacy established, when all Cabul rose beneath his feet.  Sir Alex.  Burnes was the first swallowed in the earthquake of arms; next Sir William himself, governor of Bombay, and representative of the power of England in North-Western India, was destroyed, and his mutilated remains were made the object of ignominious ribaldry; and at length, if very general rumour is to be believed, the English army of occupation has been literally expunged.  Corunna, Walcheren, all the reverses that have chequered our military career, baffle the memory to find a parallel to the utter defeat which, in the eyes of the barbarians of the Indian frontier, has crushed our power.”—­Spectator, p. 242.

These were the feelings that possessed this country, and which wrung, even from the Whigs, with every wish to palliate them, an acknowledgment of the heavy disasters which had befallen us.  Pressed with the weight of these convictions, Mr. Macaulay, in a debate on the Income-tax, in April 1842, after cannily disclaiming any responsibility for the Affghan invasion, as having been effected before he joined the Government, was driven to deplore these military reverses as the greatest disaster that had ever befallen us:  and added, somewhat incongruously:—­

“He did not anticipate, if we acted with vigour, the least danger to our empire; though it must always be remembered that a great Mahometan success could not but fall like a spark upon tinder, and act on the freemasonry of Islamism from Morocco to Coromandel.”