But now the tax gatherer swaggered over
the land, and the people had to endure him, for at his back were the
soldiers of the Feringhees and the levies of the Shah. The latter were
paid by assignments on the revenues of specified districts; as the levies
constituted a standing army of some size, the contributions demanded were
heavier and more permanent than in bygone times. Macnaghten, aware of the
discontent engendered by the system of assignments, desired to alter it.
But the Shah's needs were pressing; the Anglo-Indian treasury was
strained already by the expenditure in Afghanistan; and it was not easy
in a period of turmoil and rebellion to carry out the amendment of a
fiscal system. That, since the surrender of the Dost, there had been no
serious rising in Northern or Eastern Afghanistan, sufficed to make
Macnaghten an optimist of the moment. He had come by this time to a
reluctant admission of the fact against which he had set his face so
long, that Shah Soojah was unpopular. 'He has incurred,' he wrote, 'the
odium that attaches to him from his alliance with us'; but the Envoy
would not admit that our position in Afghanistan was a false one, in that
we were maintaining by our bayonets, against the will of the Afghans, a
sovereign whom they detested. 'It would,' he pleaded, 'be an act of
downright dishonesty to desert His Majesty before he has found the means
of taking root in the soil to which we have transplanted him.
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