ready to set the freemasonry of Islamism on fire “from Morocco to Coromandel.”  If we have been placed in a false position, as regards our Mahommedan subjects, we have to blame the Whigs, whose wanton and unwise measures created this collision of interests, and not Lord Ellenborough, who has adopted measures the most natural and the most humane, to reestablish the ascendancy and the reputation of English and Indian power.

The proclamation of Simla needs no vindication.  It has satisfied every one but the Whigs, who can never forget and never forgive it.  It is poor pretence to say, that it denounces in an indecorous manner the errors of the previous governor.  It does no such thing.  It speaks, indeed, of errors, but only conscious culpability would have taken the allusion to itself.  There were errors, and grievous ones.  The Whigs themselves must say that; and they have not been slow to shift to the shoulders of military officers the results that most people think they should bear themselves.  The proclamation of Lord Ellenborough seems to us to have been framed with a punctilious desire to reconcile in the eyes of India his own policy with that which had been avowed by his predecessor, and to ascribe the change of plans to a change of circumstances, and not of principles.  We speak here of the avowed policy of his predecessor; for Lord Auckland, at least, pretended that he had no aggressive or hostile views against the Affghans, and no desire for a permanent occupation of their country.  The real designs of the Whig Government are a different thing; and with these, as avowed by Lord Palmerston in Parliament, the intentions of Lord Ellenborough were wholly irreconcilable.

Let us listen here to one who knows the subject.  The Duke of Wellington tells us the errors that Lord Ellenborough alludes to as occasioning our military disasters, and he shows us where those errors lay:—­

“There is not a word in this proclamation that is not strictly true.  But I do not blame the noble lord opposite, the late Governor-General of India; yet I cannot help looking at the enormous errors which have been committed from the commencement of these transactions in which these disasters originated, down to the last retreat from Cabul—­I say, looking at all this, I still must blame, not the late Governor-General, but the gentlemen who acted under him.  In the first place, I attribute the error to the gentleman who fell a victim to his own want of judgment.  The army unfortunately was partly English and partly Hindoo—­not Affghans, but Hindoos.  What was the consequence?  To maintain the whole system of the government, including the collection of the revenue, devolved upon that army.  All the details of the government were carried on through the agency of that English and Hindoo army, and eventually it became necessary to support that army with some troops in the service of the Company.  Now, the gentleman who was responsible for this ought to have