In the light of facts as now known, these charges are seen to be the outcome of a vivid imagination or of partisan malice.  There can be no doubt that Shere Ali had played us false.  Apart from his intrigues with Russia, he had condoned the murder of a British officer by keeping the murderer in office, and had sought to push on the frontier tribes into a holy war.  Finally, he sent orders to stop the British Mission at Ali Musjid, the fort commanding the entrance to the Khyber Pass.  This action, which occurred on September 22, must be pronounced a deliberate insult, seeing that the progress of that Mission had been so timed as that it should reach Cabul after the days of mourning were over.  In the Viceroy’s view, the proper retort would have been a declaration of war; but again the Home Government imposed caution, urging the despatch of an ultimatum so as to give time for repentance at Cabul.  It was sent on November 2, with the intimation that if no answer reached the frontier by November 20, hostilities would begin.  No answer came until a later date, and then it proved to be of an evasive character.

Such, in brief outline, were the causes of the second Afghan War.  In the fuller light of to-day it is difficult to account for the passion which the discussion of them aroused at the time.  But the critics of the Government held strong ground at two points.  They could show, first, that the war resulted in the main from Lord Beaconsfield’s persistent opposition to Russia in the Eastern Question, also that the Muscovite intrigues at Cabul were a natural and very effective retort to the showy and ineffective expedient of bringing Indian troops to Malta; in short, that the Afghan War was due largely to Russia’s desire for revenge.

Secondly, they fastened on what was undoubtedly a weak point in the Ministerial case, namely, that Lord Beaconsfield’s speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, on November 9, 1878, laid stress almost solely on the need for acquiring a scientific frontier on the north-west of India.  In the parliamentary debate of December 9 he sought to rectify this mistake by stating that he had never asserted that a new frontier was the object of the war, but rather a possible consequence.  His critics refused to accept the correction.  They pinned him to his first words.  If this were so, they said, what need of recounting our complaints against Shere Ali?  These were merely the pretexts, not the causes, of a war which was to be waged solely in the cold-blooded quest for a scientific frontier.  Perish India, they cried, if her fancied interests required the sacrifice of thousands of lives of brave hillmen on the altar of the new Imperialism.

These accusations were logically justifiable against Ministers who dwelt largely on that frigid abstraction, the “scientific frontier,” and laid less stress on the danger of leaving an ally of Russia on the throne of Afghanistan.  The strong point of Lord Lytton’s case lay in the fact that the policy of the Gladstone Ministry had led Shere Ali to side with Russia; but this fact was inadequately explained, or, at least, not in such a way as to influence public opinion.  The popular fancy caught at the phrase “scientific frontier”; and for once Lord Beaconsfield’s cleverness in phrase-making conspired to bring about his overthrow.