that if your answer is not what I trust it will be, or if you delay to send an early reply, I shall have no alternative but to make whatever arrangements may seem to me best for carrying out the instructions I have received from my own Government.’]

[Footnote 5:  In a letter to Lord Lytton reporting the rebuff the Mission had encountered, General Chamberlain wrote:  ’No man was ever more anxious than I to preserve peace and secure friendly solution, and it was only when I plainly saw the Amir’s fixed intention to drive us into a corner that I told you we must either sink into a position of merely obeying his behests on all points or stand on our rights and risk rupture.  Nothing could have been more distinct, nothing more humiliating to the dignity of the British Crown and nation; and I believe that but for the decision and tact of Cavagnari at one period of the interview, the lives of the British officers and the Native following were in considerable danger.’]

[Footnote 6:  The approximate strength of the three columns was as follows: 

Officers. Men. Guns.

I. The Kandahar Field Force 265 12,599 78

II.  The Kuram Field Force 116 6,549 18

III.  The Peshawar Valley Field Force  325      15,854     48
-----     ------    ---
706      35,002    144]

[Footnote 7: 

’KABUL,
’6th October, 1878.

(After compliments.) ’Your Excellency’s despatch regarding the sending of a friendly Mission has been received through Nawab Gholam Hussein Khan; I understand its purport, but the Nawab had not yet an audience, nor had your Excellency’s letters been seen by me when a communication was received to the address of my servant, Mirza Habibulla Khan, from the Commissioner of Peshawar, and was read.  I am astonished and dismayed by this letter, written threateningly to a well-intentioned friend, replete with contentions, and yet nominally regarding a friendly Mission.  Coming thus by force, what result, or profit, or fruit, could come of it?  Following this, three other letters from above-mentioned source, in the very same strain, addressed to my officials, have been perused by me.  Thus, during a period of a few days several letters from that quarter have all been before me, and none of them have been free from harsh expressions and hard words, repugnant to courtesy and politeness, and in tone contrary to the ways of friendship and intercourse.  Looking to the fact that I am at this time assaulted by affliction and grief at the hand of fate, and that great trouble has possessed my soul, in the officials of the British Government patience and silence would have been specially becoming.  Let your Excellency take into consideration this harsh and breathless haste with which the desired object and place of conference have been seized upon, and how the officials of the Government have been