I gave the bun to toiling handicraft. R. A. K LI GENERAL ROMER YOUNGHUSBAND AND SCINDE. THE death, last December, of General Romer Younghusband removes one of the last survivors of the first Afghan war of 184042 and of Sir Charles Napier's Scinde campaign of 1843, and while reviewing his life the opportunity may fitly be taken to glance back at the Indian frontier problem as it stood in those long passed days, for my uncle and my father, who likewise was present in both campaigns, and still survives, were engaged in the same great struggle to which we Anglo-Indians of the present day are devoting so much of our energies. It was to strengthen India against Russia that my uncle and father fought over sixty years ago, and it is on the same work that their sons are still engaged. General Romer Younghusband was born in 1819. He came of a Northumbrian family who had been settled in the neighbourhood of Bamburgh for many centuries, and who, braced by the North Sea air, were remarkable for their longevity. A tombstone in Bamburgh churchyard testifies to his great-great-grandfather having lived to the age of 103. The later generations went bodily into the naval and military forces of the Crown. His grandfather was a captain in the royal navy. Of the next generation the only two sons went, the one into the navy, and the other (the father of General Romer Younghusband) into the Royal Artillery; and of the next generation all five sons entered the army-two to be killed in action, one, Edward, at the siege of Multan in 1848, and the other, George, in the Indian Mutiny; while the remaining three all became general officers. It had been Romer Younghusband's wish to enter the navy, but his uncle, John Romer, when acting as Governor of Bombay, had been able to secure for him a commission in the East India Company's service, and though he used in his latter days to recall the pang it was to him to go into what then seemed the terrible exile of Indian service, he accepted the nomination rather than be a further burden on his parents. His commission in the Company's service was dated December 1837. Passage to India was in those days a very different thing from what it is now, when the journey from London to Bombay can be made in a fortnight. My uncle, who was the sole passenger on board the sailing-ship on which he left Liverpool, did not reach Bombay for four months, and never sighted land from the time he left till the time he arrived. India was just then stirring with a fresh 'Russian scare.' During the Napoleonic wars the Government of India had expected a French or a Russian, or a Franco-Russian, invasion of India, for the idea had certainly been entertained by no less a military authority than Napoleon; and but for the destruction of the French fleet by Nelson at the battle of the Nile it might have been put into execution. It was to guard against such a military invasion that the Indian Government had sent expeditions to Egypt and costly missions to Persia at the beginning of last century. In 1839, however, the fear of an actual military invasion by Russia was not so great. She had no Napoleon, and Sir William Napier, the talented historian of the Peninsular war, writing at this time, said: The profound falsehood of her government-her barbarous corruption-her artificial pretensions-the eye-glitter of her regular armies, shining only from the putrescence of national feeling, would lead to the negative [in answer to the question whether she is to be feared]. Her surprising progress in acquisition of territory within the last hundred years would lead to the affirmative. If we believe those writers who have described the ramifications of the one huge falsehood of pretension which, they say, pervades Russia, her barbarity, using the word in its full signification, will appear more terrible than her strength. Nor can I question their accuracy, having, in 1815, when the reputation of the Russian troops was highest, detected the same falsehood of display without real strength. A direct military invasion of India was then not feared; but what did cause anxiety was the steady political encroachment— natural and unavoidable though it might have been-of Russia towards India. As Sir William Napier was careful to add, 'some innate expanding and dangerous strength must belong to a nation which, during long contests with the most warlike people of Continental Europe, led by Frederick and Napoleon, has steadily advanced by arms and by policy, appropriating whole countries to herself.' And this dangerous strength, the great soldier-historian thought, would not be diminished by a revolution. The chances of revolution have been spoken of,' he says, as the remedy for the Muscovite power; but who can predict that revolution will not augment rather than diminish her warlike strength and ambition? Her policy is national, and it threatens freedom.' We may well believe Russians when they say that they did not inaugurate a policy of expansion over Siberia and Central Asia with the express purpose of striking at India. They were undoubtedly drawn on by natural causes, just as we had been in India. A great Power in a plain cannot keep still alongside of small barbarian States. It is hard enough to avoid absorbing them even when they are safely stowed away in mountains. It was natural enough, therefore, that Russian power should expand over Siberia down to Central Asia. But it was none the less dangerous to India, because it was only natural, and the Russians were quick enough to see the advantage it gave them. 'The benefit we have gained,' says a Russian writer, Terentyeff, 'consists in the fact that from our present position our power of threatening British India has become real and ceased to be visionary. In this respect our Central Asian possessions serve only as an étape on the road to further advance, and as a halting-place where we can rest and gather fresh strength.' . Lord Auckland was fully justified, then, in believing that a danger from Russian encroachment did exist, and he determined resolutely to meet the danger, though the Indian frontier was then at the Sutlej, far behind even the Indus; though the Punjab, Scinde, and Baluchistan, now British provinces, were then all three independent States, and even at Delhi there was still a Mohammedan king, the last representative of the old Mogul emperors; and though, on the other side, the Russian frontier was hundreds of miles further back than it is now, and Khiva, Tashkent, and Samarkand were still wholly independent of the Russians, and the Caucasus and Turcomania had not yet been conquered. The whole of the Punjab, Afghanistan, Bokhara, and Khiva separated the British on the Sutlej from the Russians in Western Siberia, yet the British in India felt the warning instinct of self-preservation urging them to take measures betimes for the protection of India. And the measures which Lord Auckland took had as their aim precisely the same object as the British Governments of the present day have in dealing with the self-same problem that still confronts us. Lord Auckland's object, like Lord Ripon's, Lord Dufferin's, Lord Lansdowne's, Lord Elgin's, and Lord Curzon's, was to establish a strong united Afghanistan under its own ruler as a bar to the further territorial encroachment of the Russians towards India. Russia had Cossack 'deserters' helping the Persians to attack Herat ; and she had an agent in Kabul itself. Even though the independent Punjab, Scinde, and Baluchistan still lay between the then Indian frontier and Afghanistan, we felt that, at every cost, we must exclude Russian influence from that country. It might have been wiser-rather than march an army through all these hundreds of miles of independent country in order to set up a puppet king of our own at Kabul-to have met Russian diplomatic activity by counter diplomatic energy, by sending missions to gauge accurately the existing conditions, and to seek in the first place to enlist the goodwill of the Afghans, and appeal— if, indeed, any appeal would have been necessary—to their instinct .of self-preservation to hold their country inviolate from Russian encroachment. But Lord Auckland was so impressed with the danger which threatened India that he was convinced that nothing less than an army could effect his object. A great force was therefore assembled to march-not by the direct route through the Punjab, for that its ruler forbade, but by the circuitous route by Scinde, Quetta, and Kandahar to Kabul to place our nominee Shah Shuja on the throne of Afghanistan and banish all Russian influence. That a governor-general of that time should have conceived it expedient to send a large force so many hundreds of miles outside our frontier must at least betoken the vividness and reality with which he conceived the danger to India. Even now, with our frontier touching Afghanistan, with communications to the frontier so perfect, with our army highly organised, with our finances in good order, and with England brought so much nearer by steam navigation and telegram, we think very profoundly before we send an army to Kabul. But in 1839 we were in no such favourable position. The finances of India were embarrassed, and, what was worse, the public service still bore the taint of the early trading days of the East India Company, when its servants were miserably paid, and had to make what they could from trade and other sources. A governor of Bombay had to leave within forty-eight hours on account of monetary entanglements he had got into with the natives. Among the civil and political officers were a few very able men, but there were also a number of men whose heads had been turned by the powers they possessed, and through living remote from that bracing stimulus of contact with |