alitrum_, (or fillip of his middle finger;) but it is not every
middle finger that can do that; and a close kick from a khan of
Toorkistan might leave an uglier scar than a fillip at arm's length from
the Czar. Assuredly his imperial majesty would be stopped at many
toll-bars before he would stable his horses in an Affghan caravansery;
and would have more sorts of boxes than diamond snuff-boxes to give and
take in approaching the Hindoo Koosh. But suppose him there, and
actually sitting astride of the old Koosh in boots and spurs, what next?
In our opinion, the best thing he could do, in case, he desired any
sleep for the next three months, would be to stay where he was; for
should he come down stairs into Affghanistan, we English can by this
time give some account of the shocking roads and bad entertainment for
man and horse, all the way to the Indus. Little to choose between the
Khyber Pass or the Bolan: more kicks perhaps on the first, but worse,
dinners on the other. And then, finally, about the costs, the reckoning,
the "little account" which will be presented for payment on the banks of
the Indus. _Us_ it cost forty thousand camels, which for years could not
be replaced at any price, and nine millions sterling, for a _part_ of
our time. But the Czar, who might wish to plant a still larger army on
the Indus, say thirty thousand, and would have six times our length of
march, could not expect to suffer by less than three times the money,
and by the total generation of camels from Mecca to "Samarcand, by
Oxus--Temir's throne."

Could any man rationally believe of a governor-general, left at large
by his council, that, under the terrors of a phantom invasion such as
this, visionary as a dream, and distant as heaven is distant, he could
seriously have organized an armament which, merely by its money costs,
would be likely to shake the foundations of the empire which he
administered? Yet if Lord Auckland _had_ moved upon the impulse of a
panic so delirious, under what colour of reason could he have been
impeached by the English press, of which the prevailing section first
excited, and to this day nurses intermittingly, that miserable Russian
superstition?[1] The Polish craze, adopted by the press of England and
France, and strengthened by the conviction that in Russia lay the
great antagonist balance to the disorganizing instincts of Western
Europe, had made the Czar an object of hatred to the Liberal leaders.
But to imp