ENGLAND’S PREMIER.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5851, 31 December 1879, Page 3

ENGLAND’S PREMIER.

THE IMSBAELI OP 1842, AND THE BEACONSPIELD OF 1879. On the 23rd of June, 1842, says the Liverpool Daily Post, a debate on the war in Afghanistan took place in the House of Commons Parliament was in its first session. In X&U Lord Mclborne had dissolved in hopes of a majority, and finding a minority instead, resigned. Sir Robert Peel was Prime Minister; the Administration who had permitted the Afghan war were on trial at the bar of public opinion ; and Lord Auckland, their GovernorGeneral, has just been displaced by Lord Rllensborough. The war itself was not over ; the disaster had come, but not the revenge ; at the moment oi the debate Sale and Pollock were impatiently waiting at Jellalabad, and Nott at Candahar, for orders to advance on Cabul. The discussion took place on a motion for papers made by H. J. Baillie and seconded by Mr. Disraeli. The hr,se of 38 years has swept almost all tin actors from the stage, but the events are the same, and follow one another in the same setjr ence . One actor remains, still playing the most, conspicuous parts : changed, yet unchanged, willing to dare any inconsistency for the sake oi r,arty triumph, and thinking no sacrifice too great to keep himself in the public eye. Afghanistan , is . what it was then ; Russia is what it was then, except that her colossal weakness has since been probed by the Crimean and the Turkish wars ; India is what it was then, except that in gaining Sindh and the Punjaub it has gained a mountain frontier. But Mr. Disraeli said ip 1542 what advanced Liberals are saying m"V. “ The late Ministers of the Crown,” I-.- iidd, “those fortunate gentlemen who proclaimed war without reason and prosecuted it without responsibility, would have an opportunity to-night of telling us why that war was entered into. He wanted to know how a stronger barrier or a more efficient frontier could be secured than

this which they possessed—which natii-e seemed to have marked out as the limit of a great empire. But they wanted a barrier. A barrier against whom? Who was the unknown foe against whom we v/agod these mysterious wars, to baffle whom we attacked the chiefUins who were not our enemies, invaded countries with which we had no quarrel, incurred ruinous expenditure, experienced appalling disaster? That foe could not be Russia?” And then, catching np the word from an incautious interruption of Lord Palmerston’s, he cried, “ Oh, then it was Russia ? and proceeded to arg 'Rat the aggressions of Russia against India, 'al, ought to be met and counteracted in E .. And now, after a lapse of almost forty years, the cycle of affairs has come around again ; Britain has made another military promenade to Cabal to put a puppet on the throne ; her embassy has been massacred ; Yakoob Khan, like Shah Sonjah, is weak, or faithless, and the British columns are preparing to set out on a similar errand to those which Pollock and Sale and Nott commanded. But the courageous assailant of the Afghan policy of 1839 is the Prime Minister of 1879, above all other men responsible for a war precisely similar to that which he so eloquently denounced.