April Burnes himself set out from Kábul on his way back to India through the Punjab.
The retiring Envoy made one more attempt to win Lord Auckland from the error of those new paths, into which his counsellors were leading him. Early in June, on his way through the Punjab, he expounded in a long letter to Macnaghten his own views of the policy which ought to be adopted if Dost Muhammad was indeed to be thrown over. 'But it remains,' he went on, 'to be reconsidered why we cannot act with Dost Muhammad. He is a man of undoubted ability, and has at heart a high opinion of the British nation, and if half you must do for others were done for him ... he would abandon Russia and Persia to-morrow." And he held it to be 'the best of all policy to make Kábul in itself as strong as we can make it, and not weaken it by divided power.' But the last word had already been spoken from Simla. The doom of the Amír was pronounced in Lord Auckland's Minute of the 12th of May, 1838. Of three courses therein specified the Governor-General chose the worst. He would neither leave the Afgháns alone, nor would he grant any assistance to the ruler of Kábul or his brethren at Kandahár; but he would sanction and encourage any movement which our Sikh ally might undertake against Kábul in concert with any force which Sháh Shujá, aided by British officers, might bring into the field.
In his letter from Hasan Abdál, Burnes had drawn a significant contrast between the political aspects of
