The news from India is not additionally disastrous. The spring
had witnessed no renewal of the winter's visitations; and if the British had made no progress, but merely maintained their ground, their enemy appears, from probable accounts, to have lost ground. Rumours of every kind impute treachery to Snail SUJAH but not folly or vice of a worse kind than he was known to be -guilty of when the English forced him on to the throne. Other stories impute want of decision and a criminal supineness to the military leaders of the British in Cabul : but all the charges against Individuals are perhaps no more than the promptings of a natural de- sire to find excuses for the unparalleled defeat of the British arms. And if the leaders are culpable, those who chose such leaders, and placed them at a post to which they were unequal, are not excul- pated. It is, however, probably the fact, that the Native soldiers have been guilty of "misbehaviour"; that is the milder and more timid Hindoo is scared by the reckless barbarity of the Afghan, and prefers something like mutiny to glorious certain death. There is not much philosophy in charging them with cowardice because they are tasked beyond their powers : the philosophy were to abstain from using a Hindoo in enterprises to which a Hindoo is not fitted. Dissension among the Afghans, indeed, appears to perform the office of fear among the Sepoys ; and they begin to retreat in a protracted contest with disciplined perseverance.
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