h the authority of Shah Shoojah, we attempted to
carry out a system of government which could only have been made
successful by a total revolution in the social condition of the people,
and in the relative positions of classes; and as these revolutions are
not effected in a few years, the attempt failed.[17]

[17] The system, unpalatable as it was to the nation, might, no
doubt, have been carried through by an overwhelming military
force, if the country had been worth the cost; but if it was
not intended to retain permanent possession of Affghanistan, it
appears to us that the native government was far too much
interfered with--that the British envoy, the British officers
employed in the districts and provinces, and the British army,
stood too much between the Shah and his subjects--that we were
forming a government which it would be impossible to work in
our absence, and creating a state of things which, the longer
it might endure, would have made more remote the time at which
our interference could be dispensed with.

But if the predominance of our influence and of our military power, and
the effects of the system we introduced, tended to depress the chiefs,
it must have still more injuriously affected or threatened the power of
the priesthood.

This we believe to have been one of the primary and most essential
causes of the revolt--this it was that made the insurrection spread with
such rapidity, and that finally united the whole nation against us. With
the aristocracy and the hierarchy of the country, it must have been but
a question of courage and of means--a calculation of the probability of
success; and as that probability was greatly increased by the results of
the first movement at Cabul, and by the inertness of our army after the
first outbreak, all acquired courage enough to aid in doing what all had
previously desired to see done.

But if there be any justice in this view of the state of feeling in
Affghanistan, even in the moments of its greatest tranquillity, it is
difficult to account for the confidence with which the political
authorities charged with the management of our affairs in that country
looked to the future, and the indifference with which they appear to
have regarded what now must appear to every one else to have been very
significant, and even alarming, intimations of dissaffection in Cabul,
and hostility in the neighbouring dist