the responsibility of bolder measures. By the end of 1842, nevertheless, all the English forces had been quietly brought away. Dost Mohammad had been restored to power in Kabul, the country had been evacuated, and the policy of bringing Afghanistan within the sphere of British influence, which was now definitely abandoned, lay dormant until it was successfully revived, under very different conditions, nearly forty years afterward.
In 1839 the territory of the Amirs of Sind, in the valley of the Indus, had been brought within the political control of the British by Lord Auckland, who needed it as a stepping-stone and as a basis for his operations toward South Afghanistan. The port of Karachi, near the Indus mouth, had been seized, and the river had been thrown open to British commerce. When Lord Ellenborough determined to retire from Afghanistan, he was very reluctant to give up the valuable position that we had taken up in Sind; he desired, on the contrary, to acquire permanent possession of the stations that our troops had occupied temporarily, and he took advantage of delay in the payment of tribute to press for territorial cessions. Sir Charles Napier, who had been sent to Sind as a congenial representative of demands that were likely to produce war, submitted to the Governor-General a memorandum arguing that, while we were bound to insist on the rigid observance of treaties, yet such strict punctilio would confine us permanently within the limits of the stations which the treaty f assigned to us, and would
