ort of them;--failure so complete, that but for the ruins of
desolated cities, and the deep furrows of slaughter and devastation,
left visible through the length and breadth of the land, the whole might
be regarded as a dream, from which the country had awakened, after the
lapse of five years, to take up the thread of events as they were left
at the end of 1838. But the connexion of our eastern empire with
trans-Indian politics has also fortunately subsided once more to its
former level; and, satisfied with this brief summary, we shall turn to
the consideration of those points in which our own interests are more
nearly implicated.

Our anticipations last year, as to the ultimate fate of Scinde and its
rulers, have been verified almost to the letter. The Ameers (to borrow a
phrase of Napoleon's germane to the matter) "have ceased to reign," and
their territory has formally, as it already was virtually, incorporated
with the Anglo-Indian empire. In our Number for February 1843, we gave
some account of the curious process of political alchemy by which a
dormant claim for tribute, on the part of Shah Shoojah, had been
transmuted into an active assertion of British supremacy over the Indus
and its navigation, and the appropriation of the port of Kurrachee at
the mouth, and the fortified post of Sukkur on the higher part of the
stream, of the river. To this arrangement the Ameers, from the first,
submitted with a bad grace, which it was easy to foresee would lead,
according to established rule in such cases in India, to the forfeiture
of their dominions. And such has been the case; but the transfer has not
been effected without an unexpected degree of resistance, in which the
heroism of Sir Charles Napier, and the handful of troops under his
command, against fearful numerical odds, alone prevented the repetition,
on a smaller scale, of the Affghan tragedy. The proximate cause of the
rupture was the refusal of the Ameers to permit the clearing away of
their _shikargahs_, or hunting-grounds, which were guarded with a rigid
jealousy, paralleled only by the forest laws of William the Conqueror,
and extended for many miles along the banks of the Indus, in a broad
belt of impenetrable jungle, at once impeding the navigation by
preventing the tracking of boats, and presenting dangerous facilities
for ambush. To these cherished game-preserves the Ameers clung with a
desperate pertinacity, which might have moved the sympathy of an Engl