accomplished such an undertaking; to have overcome so many and such formidable intervening obstacles, and planted the British guns in triumph on the walls of Herat, is one of the most glorious exploits which have ever graced the long annals of British military prowess. That our soldiers were undaunted in battle and irresistible in the breach has been often proved, in the fields alike of Asiatic and European fame. But here they have exhibited qualities of a totally different kind, and in which hitherto they were not supposed to have been equal to the troops of other states. They have successfully accomplished marches, unparalleled in modern times for their length and hardship; surmounted mountain ranges, compared to which the passage of the St Bernard by Napoleon must sink into insignificance; and solved the great problem, so much debated, and hitherto unascertained in military science, as to the practicability of an European force, with the implements and incumbrances of modern warfare, surmounting the desert and mountain tracts which separate Persia from Hindostan. Involved as we are in the pressing interests of domestic politics, and in the never-ending agitation of domestic concerns, the attention of the British public has been little attracted by this stupendous event; but it is one evidently calculated to fix the attention of the great military nations on the continent, and which will stand forth in imperishable lustre in the annals of history.

There is one result which may and should follow from our undertakings in Affghanistan, which, if properly improved, may render it the means of strengthening, in the most essential manner, our possessions in the East. The Indus and the Himalaya are the natural frontier of our dominions; they are what the Danube and the Rhine were to the Romans, and the former of these streams to Napoleon's empire. The Indus is navigable for fifteen hundred miles, and for nine hundred by steamers of war and mercantile vessels of heavy burden. It descends nearly in a straight line from the impassable barrier of the Himalaya to the Indian ocean; its stream is so rapid, and its surface so broad, that no hostile force can possibly cross it in the face of a powerful defensive marine. Never was an empire which

had such a frontier for its protection; never was such a base afforded for military operations as on both its banks. Provisions for any number of soldiers; warlike stores to any amount; cannon sufficient for a hundred thousand men, can with ease ascend its waves. Vain is the rapidity of its current; the power of steam has given to civilized man the means of overcoming it; and before many years are expired, British vessels, from every harbour in the United Kingdom, may ascend that mighty stream, and open fresh and hitherto unheard-of markets for British industry in the boundless regions of Central Asia. Now, then, is the time to secure the advantages, and gain the mastery of this mercantile artery and frontier stream; and, by means of fortified stations on its banks, and a powerful fleet of armed steamers in its bosom, to gain that impregnable bar. rier to our Indian possessions, against which, if duly supported by manly vigour at home, and wise administration in our Indian provinces, all the efforts of Northern ambition will beat in vain. But there is one consideration deserving of especial notice which necessarily follows from this successful irruption. The problem of marching overland to India is now solved; the Russian guns have come down from Petersburg to Herat, and the British have come up from Delhi to the same place. English cannon are now planted in the embrasures, against which, twelve months ago, the Russian shot were directed; and if twenty thousand British could march from Delhi to Candahar and Cabool, forty thousand Russians may march from Astrakan to the Ganges and Calcutta. Our success has opened the path in the East to Russian ambition; -the stages of our ascending army point out the stations for their descending host; and the ease with which our triumph has been effected, will dispel any doubts which they may have entertained as to the practicability of ultimately accomplishing the long-cherished object of their ambition, and conquering in Calcutta the empire of the East. This is the inevitable result of our success; but it is one which should excite no desponding feeling in any British bosom; and we allude to it, not with the selfish, unpatriotic design of chilling the national ardour at our success, but in order, if possible, to arouse the British people to a sense of the new and more extended duties to which they are called, and the wider sphere of danger and hostility in which they are involved.

It is no longer possible to disguise that the sphere of hostility and diplomatic exertion has been immensely extended by our success in Affghanistan. Hitherto the politics of India have formed, as it were, a world to themselves; a dark range of intervening mountains or arid deserts were supposed to separate Hindostan from Central Asia; and however much we might be disquieted at home by the progress of Russian or French ambition, no serious fears were entertained that either would be able to accomplish the Quixotic exploit of passing the western range of the Himalaya mountains. Now, however, this veil has been rent asunder this mountain screen has been penetrated. The Russian power in Persia, and the British in India, now stand face to face; the advanced posts of both have touched Herat; the high-road from St Petersburg to Calcutta has been laid open by British hands. The advanced position we have gained must now be maintained; if we retire, even from tributary or allied states, the charm of our invincibility is gone; the day when the god Terminus recoils before a foreign enemy, is the commencement of a rapid decline. We do not bring forward this consideration in order to blame the expedition; but in order to show into what a contest, and with what a power, it has necessarily brought us. Affghanistan is the outpost of Russia; Dost- Mohammed, now exiled from his throne, was a vassal of the Czar; and we must now contend for the empire of the East, not with the rajahs of India, but the Muscovite battalions.

The reality of these anticipations as to the increased amount of the danger of a collision with Russia, which has arisen from the great approximation of our outposts to theirs, which the Affghanistan expedition has occasioned, is apparent. Already Russia has taken the alarm, and the expedition against Khiva shows that she has not less the inclination, than she unquestionably has the power, of amply providing for herself against what she deems the impending danger. No one can for a moment suppose

that that expedition is really intended to chastise the rebellious Khan. Thirty thousand men, and a large train of artillery, are not sent against

an

obscure chieftain in Tartary, whom a few regiments of Cossacks would soon reduce to obedience. A glance at the map will at once show what was the real object in view. Khiva is situated on the Oxus, and the Oxus flows to the north-west from the mountains which take their rise from the northern boundary of Cabool. Its stream is navigable to the foot of the Affghanistan mountains, and from the point where water communication ceases, it is a passage of only five or six days to the valley of Cabool. If, therefore, the Russians once establish themselves at Cabool, they will have no difficulty in reaching the possessions of Shah Shoojah; and their establish ment will go far to outweigh the influence established by the British, by the Affghanistan expedition, among the Affghanistan tribes. Already, if recent accounts can be relied on, this effect has become apparent. Dost Mahommed, expelled from his kingdom, has found support among the Tartar tribes; backed by their support, he has already re-appeared over the hills, and regained part of his dominions, and the British troops, on their return to Affghanistan, have already received orders to halt. Let us hope that it is not in our case, as it was in that of the French at Moscow, that when they thought the campaign over it was only going to commence.

Have

Regarding, then, our success in Affghanistan as having accelerated by several years the approach of this great contest, it becomes the British nation well to consider what preparations they have made at home to maintain it. Have we equipped and manned a fleet capable of withstanding the formidable armament which Nicholas has always ready for immediate operations in the Balti we five-and-twenty ships of the line and thirty frigates ready to meet the thirty ships of the line and eighteen frigates which Nicholas has always equipped forsea at Cronstadt? Have we thirty thousand men in London ready to meet the thirty thousand veterans whom the Czar has constantly prepared to step on board his fleet on the shores of the Baltic? Alas! we have none of these things. We could not, to save London from destruction or the British empire from conquest, fit out three ships of the line to protect the mouth of the Thames, or assemble ten thousand men to save Woolwich or Portsmouth from conflagration. What between Radical economy in our army estimates, Whig parsimony in our naval preparations, and Chartist violence in our manufacturing cities, we have neither a naval nor a military force to protect ourselves from destruction. All that Sir Charles Adam, one of the Lords of the Admiralty, could say on this subject last session of Parliament was, that we had three ships of the line and three guard-ships to protect the shores of England. Never was such a proof afforded that we had sunk down from the days of giants into those of pigmies, than the use of such an argument by a lord of the British Admiralty. Why, thirty years ago, we sent thirty-nine ships of the line to attack the enemy's naval station at Antwerp, without raising the blockade of one of his harbours, from Gibraltar to the North Cape. Herein, then, lies the monstrous absurdity, the unparalleled danger of our present national policy, that we are vigorous even to temerity in the East, and parsimonious even to pusillanimity in the West; and that while we give Russia a fair pretext for hostility, and perhaps some ground for complaint in the centre of Asia, we make no preparation whatever to resist her hostility on the shores of England.

The contrast between the marvellous vigour of our Indian Government and the niggardly spirit with which all our establishments are starved down at home, would be inconceivable if we did not recollect by what opposite motives our Government is regulated in Hindostan and in the British islands. Taxation in India falls upon the inha bitants, who are unrepresented; taxation at home falls upon the ten-pounders, who have a numerical majority in Parliament. We never doubted the inclination of a democracy to dip their hands in other people's pockets; what we doubted was their inclination, save in the last extremity, to put them in their own.

Disregard of the future, devotion to present objects, has, in all ages, been the characteristic of the masses of mankind. We need not wonder that

the British populace are distinguished by the well-known limited vision of their class, when all the eloquence of Demosthenes failed in inducing the most enlightened republic of antiquity to take any measures to ward off the danger arising from the ambition of Philip of Macedon; and all the wisdom of Washington was unable to communicate to the greatest republic of modern times, strength or foresight sufficient to prevent its capital from being taken, and its arsenals pillaged by a British division not three thousand strong. Unless, however, the Conservative press can succeed in rousing the British public to a sense of their danger on this subject, and the Conservative leaders in Parliament take up the matter earnestly and vigorously, it may safely be pronounced that the days of the British empire are numbered.

No empire can possibly exist for any length of time which provokes hostility in its distant possessions, while it neglects preparation in the heart of its power; which buckles on its gloves and puts on the helmet, but leaves the breastplate and the cuirass behind. If a Russian fleet of thirty ships of the line appears off the Nore, it will not be by deriding their prowess, or calling them a "pasteboard fleet," that the danger will be averted from the arsenals and the treasures of England. The Russian sailors do not possess any thing like the nautical skill or naval habits of the British; but they are admirably trained to ball practice, they possess the native courage of their race, and they will stand to their guns with any sailors in Europe. Remember the words of Nelson, "Lay yourself alongside of a Frenchman, but out-manœuvre a Russian."

The manifest and not yet terminated dangers with which the Affghanistan expedition was attended, should operate as a warning, and they will be cheaply purchased if they prove a timely one, to the British people, of the enormous dangers, not merely to the national honour and independence, but to the vital pecuniary interests of every individual in the state, of continuing any longer the pernicious system of present economy, and total disregard of future danger, which for twenty years has characterised every department of our Government. Why is it that England has now been compelled in the East, for the first time, to incur the enormous perils of the Affghanistan expedition-to hazard, as it were, the very existence of our Eastern empire upon a single throw; and adventure a large proportion of the British army, and the magic charm of British invincibility, upon a perilous advance, far beyond the utmost frontiers of Hindostan, into the heart of Asia? Simply because previous preparation had been abandoned, ultimate danger disregarded; because retrenchment was the order of the day, and Government yielded to the ever popular cry of present economy; because the noble naval and military establishment of former times was reduced one-half, or allowed to expire, in the childish belief that it never again would be required. Rely upon it, a similar conduct will one day produce a similar necessity to the British empire. It will be found, and that too ere many years have passed over, that the Duke of Wellington was right when he said, that a great empire cannot with safety wage a little war; and that nothing but present danger and future disaster, will result from a system which blindly shuts its eyes to the future, and never looks beyond the conciliating the masses by a show of economy at the moment. An Affghanistan expedition-a Moscow campaign will be necessary to ward off impending danger, or restore the sunk credit of the British name: happy if the contest can thus be averted from our own shores, and by incurring distant dangers we can escape domestic subjugation.

But let not foreign nations imagine, from all that has been said or may be said by the Conservatives on this vital subject, that Great Britain has now lost her means of defence, or that, if a serious insult or injury is offered to her, she may not soon be brought into a condition to take a fearful vengeance upon her enemies. The same page of history which tells us that while democratic states never can be brought to foresee remote dangers, or incur present burdens to guard against it, when the danger is present, and strikes the senses of the multitude,

they are capable of the most stupendous exertions. That England, in the event of a war breaking out in her present supine, unprepared state, would sustain in the outset very great disasters, is clear; but it is not by any ordinary calamities that a power of such slow growth and present magnitude as England is to be subdued. She now possesses 2,800,000 tonnage, and numbers 1,600,000 seamen in her commercial navy, and a fleet of seven hundred steam-boats, more than all Europe possesses, daily prowl along her shores. Here are all the elements of a powerful marine; at no period did Great Britain possess such a foundation for naval strength within her bosom. What is wanting, is not the elements of an irresistible naval force, but the sagacity in the people to foresee the approaching necessity for its establishment, and the virtue in the Government to propose the burdens indispensable for its restoration. In the experienced difficulty of either communicating this foresight to the one, or imparting this virtue to the other, may be traced the well-known and often-predicted effects of democratic ascendency. But that same ascendency, if the spirit of the people is roused by experienced disgrace, or their interests affected by present calamity, would infallibly make the most incredible exertions; and a navy, greater than any which ever yet issued from the British harbours, might sally forth from our sea-girt isle, to carry, like the French Revolutionary armies, devastation and ruin into all the naval establishments of Europe. No such career of naval conquest, however, is either needed for the glory, or suited for the interests of England; and it is as much from a desire to avert that ultimate forcible and most painful conversion of all the national energies to warlike objects, as to prevent the immediate calamities which it would occasion, that we earnestly press upon the country the immediate adoption, at any cost, of that great increase to our naval and military establishments which can alone avert one or both of these calamities.

" SISTER," said the little one to her companion, "dost thou remember aught of this fair bay, these soft white sands, and yonder woody rocks?"

"Nay," replied the other, who was somewhat taller, and with a fuller yet sweet voice, " I knew not that I had ever been here before. And yet it seems not altogether new, but like a vision seen in dreams. The sea ripples on the sand with a sound which I feel as friendly, and not unknown. Those purple shapes that rise out of the distant blue, and float past over the surface like the shadows of clouds, do not fill me with the terror which haunts me when I look on vast and strange appearances."

"To me," said the little one, "they look only somewhat more distinct than the marks which I have so often watched upon the sea."

"Oh! far brighter are they in colour, far more peculiar and more various in their forms. My heart beats while I look at them. There are ships and horses; living figures, bearded, crowned, armed, and some bear banners and some books; and softer shapes, waving and glistening with plumes, veils, and garlands. Ah! now 'tis gone."

"Rightly art thou called the Daughter of the Sea, and art indeed our own Sea-Child. Here in this bay did I and my sisters, in this land of Faëry, first find our nursling of another race." "Was this, then, my first name among you, beloved friends? The bay is so beautiful, that even in your land of Faëry I have seen no spot where it were better to open one's eyes upon the light."

" Yes, here did our Sea-Child first meet our gaze. I and a troop of my sisters were singing on the shore our ancient Song of Pearls, and watching

the sun, which, while we sang, and while it went down, changed the sands that its beams fell on into gold, and the foam that rippled to the shore into silver. We had often watched it before, and we knew that if, without ceasing our song, we gathered the gold sands and silver foam while the sun was on them, into the shells that lay about, they would continue in their changed state. Left till sunset they returned to what they were, and we had only the sands and foam. We thought the sport so pleasant that we had carried it on for some minutes, and even amused ourselves with scattering the shining dust over each other's hair, when I saw something floating between us and the sun. We all looked; and soon it drifted near us, and was entangled in the web of sea. weed that waves in the tide round this black single rock. A large sea-eagle at the moment stooped to seize the prize. But I wished myself there before it, and one bound carried me farther than a long stone's-throw of our dark enemies the mountaineers. Thus the eagle in his descent struck only the waters with his talons, and flew off again, screaming to the clouds, while I brought what I had won to my sisters."

"Dear one!" said the Sea-Child, "I guess what it was." And she kissed the airy face of her companion with her own, which seemed rather of rose-leaves, and the other only of coloured vapour.

"Yes," said she, "my own SeaChild, there was a small basket of palm-leaf lined with the down of the phœnix, and in this the baby lay asleep. Beautiful it was indeed, but far unlike the beauty of my sisters. We cared no more for gold or silver dust, or rippling waves, or the rays of