slew an enemy of the
faith, he thereby also secured to himself eternal happiness. But the
chiefs are not so full of faith; and although we would not altogether
exclude religious antipathy as an incentive, we may safely assume that
something more immediately affecting their temporal and personal
concerns must with them, or at least with the large majority, have been
the true motives of the conspiracy--of their desire to expel the English
from their country. Nor is it difficult to conceive what some of these
motives may have been. The former sovereigns of Affghanistan, even the
most firmly-established and the most vigorous, had no other means of
enforcing their commands, than by employing the forces of one part of
the nation to make their authority respected in another; but men who
were jealous of their own independence as chiefs, were not likely to aid
the sovereign in any attempt to destroy the substantial power, the
importance, or the independence of their class; and although a
refractory chief might occasionally, by the aid of his feudal enemies,
be taken or destroyed, and his property plundered, his place was filled
by a relation, and the order remained unbroken. The Affghan chiefs had
thus enjoyed, under their native governments, an amount of independence
which was incompatible with the system we introduced--supported as that
system was by our military means. These men must have seen that their
own power and importance, and even their security against the caprices
of their sovereign, could not long be preserved--that they were about to
be subjected as well as governed--to be deprived of all power to resist
the oppressions of their own government, because its will was enforced
by an army which had no sympathy with the nation, and which was
therefore ready to use its formidable strength to compel unqualified
submission to the sovereign's commands.

The British army may not have been employed to enforce any unjust
command--its movements may have been less, far less, injurious to the
countries through which it passed than those of an Affghan army would
have been, and its power in the moment of success may have been far less
abused; but still it gave a strength to the arm of the sovereign, which
was incompatible with the maintenance of the pre-existing civil and
social institutions or condition of the country, and especially of the
relative positions of the sovereign and the noble. In the measures we
adopted to establis