of
the tenant-at-will, is virtually converted into a deposit, lodged in
the hands of the landlord, to secure the depositor's political
subserviency and vassalage. Let him but once manifest a will and a
mind of his own, and vote, in accordance with his convictions,
contrary to the will of the landlord, and straightway the deposit,
converted into a penalty, is forfeited for the offence. It is surely
not very great Radicalism to affirm that a state of things so
anomalous ought not to exist--that the English tenant should be a
freeman, not a serf--and that he ought not to be bound down by a
weighty penalty to have no political voice or conscience of his own.
The simple principle of 'No lease, no vote,' would set all right; and it
is a principle which so recommends itself to the moral sense as just,
that an honest Whiggism would gain, in agitating its recognition and
establishment, at once strength and popularity. But there are few
Scotch tenants in the circumstances of vassalage so general in
England. They are in circumstances in which they at least _may_ act
independently; and the time is fast coming in which they must either
make a wise, unbiassed use of their freedom, or be hopelessly
crushed for ever.

_January 28, 1846._

CONCLUSION OF THE WAR IN AFFGHANISTAN.

We trust we may now look back on by far the most disastrous passage
which occurs in the military history of Great Britain, as so
definitively concluded, that in the future we shall be unable to trace
it as still disadvantageously operative in its effects. A series of
decisive victories has neutralized, to a considerable extent, the
influence of the most fatal campaign in which a British army was ever
engaged. But this is all. One of our poets, in placing in a strong
light the extreme folly of war, describes 'most Christian kings' with
'honourable ruffians in their hire,' wasting the nations with fire and
sword, and then, when fatigued with murder and sated with blood,
'setting them down just where they were before.' It is quite
melancholy enough that our most sanguine expectations with regard to
the Affghan war should be unable to rise higher by a hair's-breadth
than the satiric conception of the poet. We can barely hope, after
squandering much treasure, after committing a great deal of crime,
after occasioning and enduring a vast amount of wretchedness, after a
whole country has been whitened with the bones of its inhabitants,
after a British army