mischief as he and his favourites pleased; and they did it very successfully. But Macnaghten and his officers virtually governed in the Sháh's name. No troops could be moved without the Envoy's sanction; English officers had a voice in the civil government; our soldiers acted as the Sháh's police, and the Indian Treasury supplied the chief means of maintaining the new rule. What revenue the Sháh himself could gather from his subjects for the payment of his own troops and officials was raised by methods the least likely to make him popular with the classes most affected by the new system, especially with tribal chiefs accustomed to raise their own levies in time of need. It became daily clearer, even to Macnaghten himself, that the new Durání Empire existed only by force of British bayonets and British gold.
In the spring of 1840, the fierce Ghilzai clans of the hill-country between Kandahár and Ghazní, who had never brooked a ruler, save one of themselves, for ages past, and who lived mainly by plundering forays and the heavy tolls wrung from passing caravans, took up arms in defence of their ancient rights and perquisites, and attempted to block the roads between Kandahár and Kábul. General William Nott, an old Company's officer, who commanded the Kandahár garrison, made prompt answer to this bold challenge. In the middle of May some two or three thousand Ghilzai highlanders charged fiercely at the guns and Sepoys of the little force which Captain Anderson had led out a week before from Kandahár. Swept
