eproaches. The effeminate
delicacy of easterns, and the morbid principle of seclusion on which
they build their domestic honour, will for ever secure both Hindoo
Pagans and Mussulmans from blame of this kind, until they pass under the
influence of a happier religion. How can _they_ act licentiously, in a
way cognizable or proveable, whom rank and usage will not permit to
wander, and who cannot have a temptation to wander, from their own
harems, authorized by the institutions of their country?

This last charge, indeed, being so intrinsically absurd, is hardly of a
nature to have merited any answer, had it not been the one most insisted
upon in England, where its ludicrousness is not so apparent, until the
mind is recalled from the life of Christendom to that very different
life which prevails in Asia. The charge then exhales into vapour; and a
man laughs as a ship's company on the broad Atlantic would laugh, if
charged with roaming abroad at night.

But why do we notice _personal_ considerations at all, in a case where
public relations to Affghanistan should naturally be paramount? We
notice them, because our own press dwelt on personal qualities almost
exclusively; and since this Cabool tragedy will make the whole Affghan
policy immortal, we are anxious, by dispersing the cloud of calumny
connected with the object of our choice, to clear the ground for a
juster estimate of what was either good or erroneous in our further
conduct. Not that personal accomplishments of mind or of body were
unimportant in a ruler of simple half-barbarous men; nor again is it to
be denied that Dost Mahommed, from advantages of age, (forty-five years
against the seventy of the Shah,) and from experience more direct and
personal, would, under equal circumstances, have been the better man.
But the circumstances were _not_ equal. The Dost could not have been
more than a provincial ruler in the land; consequently he could not have
undertaken that responsibility for the whole which formed the precise
postulate of our Indian government.

Yet because the Dost could _not_ meet our purposes, is it true that the
Shah _could_? That is the point we are going to consider; and to have
postponed this question to a question of personalities, even if those
personalities had been truly stated, is specifically the error which
vitiated all the speculations of our domestic press. We say then, that
Shah Soojah had a _prima facie_ fitness for our purposes which