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[1878-1880 A.D.] once more to undertake active measures for securing their political ascendancy in that country. But the amir, whose feelings of resentment had by no means abated, was now leaning toward Russia; and upon his refusal to admit a British agent into Afghanistan the negotiations finally broke down.

THE AFGHAN WAR OF 1878-1880

In the course of the following year (1878) the Russian government. to counteract the interference of England with their advance upon Constantinople, sent an envoy to Kabul empowered to make a treaty with the amir. It was immediately notified to him from India that a British mission would be deputed to his capital, but he demurred to receiving it; and when the British envoy was turned back on the Afghan frontier hostilities were proclaimed by the viceroy in November, 1878, and the second Afghan War began. Sir Donald Stewart's force, marching up through Baluchistan by the Bolan pass, entered Kandahar with little or no resistance; while another army passed through the Khyber pass, and took up positions at Jalalabad and other places on the direct road to Kabul. Another force under Sir Frederick Roberts marched up to the high passes leading out of Kuram into the interior of Afghanistan, defeated the amir's troops at the Paiwar Kotal, and seized the Shutargardan pass which commands a direct route to Kabul through the Logar valley. The amir Sher Ali fled from his capital into the northern province, where he died at Mazar-i-Sherif in February, 1879. In the course of the next six months there was much desultory skirmishing between the tribes and the British troops, who defeated various attempts to dislodge them from the positions that had been taken up; but the sphere of British military operations was not materially extended. It was seen that the farther they advanced the more difficult would become their eventual retirement; and the problem was to find a successor to Sher Ali who could and would make terms with the British government.

In the meantime Yakub Khan, one of Sher Ali's sons, had announced to Major Cavagnari, the political agent at the headquarters of the British army, that he had succeeded his father at Kabul. The negotiations that followed ended in the conclusion of a treaty in May, 1879, by which Yakub Khan was recognized as amir; certain outlying tracts of Afghanistan were transferred to the British government; the amir placed in their hands the entire control of his foreign relations, receiving in return a guarantee against foreign aggression; and the establishment of a British envoy at Kabul was at last conceded. By this convention the complete success of the British political and military operations seemed to have been attained; for whereas Sher Ali had made a treaty of alliance with, and had received an embassy from Russia, his son had now made an exclusive treaty with the British government, and had agreed that a British envoy should reside permanently at his court.

Yet it was just this final concession, the chief and original object of British policy, that proved speedily fatal to the whole settlement. For in September the envoy, Sir Louis Cavagnari, with his staff and escort, was massacred at Kabul, and the entire fabric of a friendly alliance went to pieces. A fresh expedition was instantly despatched across the Shutargardan pass under Sir Frederick Roberts, who defeated the Afghans at Charasia near Kabul, and entered the city in October. Yakub Khan, who had surrendered, was sent to India; and the British army remained in military occupation of the district round Kabul until in December (1879) its communications with India were interrupted, and its position at the capital placed in serious jeopardy, by a

[1878-1880 A.D.]

general rising of the tribes. After they had been repulsed and put down, not without some hard fighting, Sir Donald Stewart, who had not quitted Kandahar, brought a force up by Ghazni to Kabul, overcoming some resistance on his way, and assumed the supreme command. Nevertheless the political situation was still embarrassing.

Abdurrahman, the son of the late amir Sher Ali's elder brother, had fought against Sher Ali in the war for succession to Dost Muhammed, had been driven beyond the Oxus, and had

lived for ten years in exile with the Russians. In March, 1880, he came back across the river, and began to establish himself in the northern province of Afghanistan. The viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, on hearing of his reappearance, instructed the political authorities at Kabul to communicate with him. After pressing in vain for a treaty he was induced to assume charge of the country upon his recognition by the British as amir, with the understanding that he should have no relations with other foreign powers, and with a formal assurance from the viceroy of protection from foreign aggression, so long as he should unreservedly follow the advice of the British government in regard to his external affairs. The province of Kandahar was severed from the Kabul dominion; and the sirdar Sher Ali Khan, a member of the Barakzai family, was installed by the British representative as its independent ruler.

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For the second time in the course of this war a conclusive settlement of Afghan affairs seemed now to have been attained; and again, as in 1879, it was immediately dissolved. In July, 1880, a few days after the proclamation of Abdurrahman as amir at Kabul, came news that Ayub Khan, Sher Ali's younger son, who had been holding Herat since his father's death, had marched upon Kandahar, had utterly defeated at Maiwand a British force that went out from Kandahar to oppose him, and was besieging that city. Sir Frederick Roberts at once set out from Kabul with ten thousand men to its relief, reached Kandahar after a rapid march of 313 miles, attacked and routed Ayub Khan's army on September 1st, and restored British authority in southern Afghanistan. As the British ministry had resolved to evacuate Kandahar, Sher Ali Khan, who saw that he could not stand alone, resigned and withdrew to India, and the amir Abdurrahman was invited to take possession of the province. But when Ayub Khan, who had meanwhile retreated to Herat, heard that the British forces had retired, early in 1881, to India, he mustered a fresh army and again approached Kandahar. In June the fort of

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(1880 A.D.] Girisk, on the Helmund, was seized by his adherents; the amir's troops were defeated some days later in an engagement, and Ayub Khan took possession of Kandahar at the end of July. The amir Abdurrahman, whose movements had hitherto been slow and uncertain, now acted with vigour and decision. He marched rapidly from Kabul at the head of a force, with which he encountered Ayub Khan under the walls of Kandahar, and routed his army on September 22nd, taking all his guns and equipage. Ayub Khan fled toward Herat, but as the place had meanwhile been occupied by one of the amir's generals he took refuge in Persia. By this victory Abdurrahman's rulership was established.d

Roughly speaking, of the years from the close of 1858, when the government of British India was transferred from the East India Company to the crown, to the commencement of 1900, half were occupied in preparing, in plotting out, and in making a vigorous commencement in the execution of the great projects for the moral and material development of India, of which the latter half saw the application and extension. The schemes which were then put into force, more particularly for the material development of India, for increasing the sytem of railway communications, for fiscal reform, or for the prosecution of irrigation works, had their inception in the preceding period, and more particularly in its second decade. The work of reorganisation, of progress, and of financial reform, which was commenced in 1859 by Lord Canning, though from time to time hindered under his successors by war, was on the whole continuously carried on. In spite of discouragement from famines and plague, from a succession of wars on the northwestern and eastern frontiers, and from the ruinous effect on Indian finance of the continuous fall in the value of silver relatively to gold, the work begun in the first half of the forty-one years under review, and vigorously resumed after 1880, was more or less consistently carried on up to 1900. Thus the whole period forms, as it were, one growth. The first half is inextricably bound up with the second; and while much of the progress of the last twenty years has been in directions previously but little pursued, more has been but the sequence and necessary outcome of the foregoing period.

SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS

The finances of the country, which, during the years immediately preceding 1876 and 1877, had been very carefully husbanded by the Indian government, were in those two years made the subject of a fresh and exhaustive study. Sir John Strachey took charge of the finances in 1876, and his administration marks a new era in Indian finance. He was not destined to reap the fruit of all his labours; but great changes had already been effected by him, and more were in contemplation, when the stress and strain of the Afghan War deferred their execution. The obstructive old internal salt customs frontier line, stretching at one time from the Indus to the Mahanadi in Madras, a distance of 2,300 miles, and guarded by nearly 2,000 men, had been finally abolished. The inland salt duties throughout India were at the same time in great measure equalised. Arrangements had been concluded with certain native states by which, subject to compensation allotted to them, the great Indian sources of salt supply, which lie for the most part within their territories, were made over to the control of the government of India. The consumption of salt at once considerably increased as a consequence of this measure, and the revenue corresponded. Similar reforms had been contemplated, and in a

[1880 A.D.]

small measure had been commenced, with regard to the customs revenue from import duties levied in India on cotton goods.

During Lord Mayo's rule administrative measures had been initiated, having for their object the decentralization of the finances; the transfer, that is to say, to the several provincial governments of the direct control of a portion of the public receipts and expenditure within their limits, with corresponding relief and advantage to the central administration. In 1877-1879 these measures were further developed. Certain important local sources of revenue were definitely placed in the hands of the provincial governments, which were left to cultivate and improve them, to augment their produce, and to spend all or a definite part of them, at their discretion. On the other hand, the expenditure in certain branches of administration was transferred to provincial governments, of which the cost would be defrayed from the funds assigned them. Economy and good administration resulted, so far as the finances and the provincial governments were concerned, while the central government was relieved from provincial importunities, of which it could not always measure the relative importance, and from the control of details of provincial administration of which, in truth, it was not a competent judge.

Education had advanced during the twenty years under review, though relatively to area and population it was still in an extremely backward state. A despatch from England in 1854 had laid down with fulness and precision the principles which were to guide the government in state education, and its provisions were continued and enlarged by a subsequent despatch of 1859. These two despatches still form the charter of education in India. The three universities of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay had been incorporated in 1857 by acts of the Indian legislature. Among the several presidencies and provinces Bengal and Madras had on the whole shown the greatest advance; but Bombay, with its large and highly intelligent Parsee population, has always been prominent in respect of education.

The three great codes which pre-eminently do honour to the Indian legislature - the Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the Civil Procedure Code-were passed during the earlier part of the sixth decade of the nineteenth century. The labours of Sir Henry Sumner Maine and Sir FitzJames Stephen had enriched the Indian statute book with other important acts, such as the Evidence Act, various forest laws, the Criminal Tribes Act, the Christian Marriage Act, the Mohammedan and Parsee Marriage Act, and an Act for the Prevention of the Murder of Female Infants. The relations of landlord and tenant in upper India and in Oudh had occupied the attention of the legislature. A high court of judicature, similar to those already existing in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, had been established for the north-west provinces. The police system throughout India had been reorganised; sanitation had been especially recognised as claiming attention; the trade of India had developed from a total in round figures of forty-one millions of imports and forty-three millions of exports in 1859-64 to a total of sixty-two millions of imports and seventy-six millions of exports in 1880-81. Notably the great tea industry had taken firm root, and was assuming ever-increasing proportions. There existed at that date twenty-one jute mills, mostly in Bengal. Brewing had been introduced, and was becoming more and more extended. Steam paper mills and some minor industries had also taken root.

The administrative note, therefore, of the seventeen years from 1859, after the close of the Mutiny, to 1876 was one of moderation and cautious advance. They were years but little removed from the rule of the late East India Company and the great catastrophe of 1857. The whole machinery of govern

[1880-1882 A.D.] ment, more especially during the earlier part of that period, was successively brought under review, and in almost every department reorganisation more or less complete was projected. It was a time mainly of study and deliberation, preliminary to action; of prudent but thorough overhauling of the administration which had been but recently handed over to the crown.

With the advent in 1880 of Lord Ripon as viceroy the portals of war were closed, and India entered once more upon the pleasant paths of peace. Remission of taxation, encouragement of primary and secondary education, the promotion of local self-government, the amelioration of the status of the agricultural tenant, the recognition and promotion of native claims to a share in directing the internal affairs of India — these were the cardinal points of the policy of 1880 and the years immediately ensuing. During the preceding period the attention of the central government, and the genius of those who inspired it, had been more immediately devoted to the material progress of India. Of that sympathetic and indulgent handling of the native population which characterised the East India Company, the traces become less and less apparent as we pass from the sixth towards the close of the seventh decade. The greatest benefits had been conferred on the people by the fiscal and public works measures introduced during those years. But of any seeking or strengthening of personal touch with them on the part of the administration there is comparatively little trace. Much was done for the people, but in concert with them little was attempted. The steps taken in this direction during the eighth decade mark a return to the more personal and human aspects of administration which before 1857 had been perhaps exclusively prominent, but which of later years might be judged to have fallen too greatly into abeyance. In short, after 1880, and for a brief term of subsequent years, the moral development of India again took an equal place in the foreground, and the characteristic note of the decade which succeeded 1880 is to be found in the greater effort made during that period to combine moral with material progress.

A

In 1882 India was freed from taxation on her imports, strong liquors and salt excepted. The customs duty thenceforth, and till further changes, was derived entirely from the produce of an export duty on rice, and from import duties on salt and alcohol. At the same time the salt duty was reduced. The estimated loss of revenue consequent on this reduction was £1,400,000. total of two and one-half millions in taxation was thus remitted to the country, In their Finances and Public Works of India,e the two Stracheys, writing in 1881, had expressed themselves on the subject in strong terms: "The policy followed by the government of India during the viceroyalty of Lord Lytton was one of absolute free trade, without reserve or qualification, and financial necessities alone prevented that policy from being carried out to the fullest extent. The proceedings of the last three of four years have, however, succeeded in rendering inevitable the almost total abolition of the customs duties, which of all Indian taxes are probably the worst."

It is, however, necessary to add that the abolition of the import duties on cotton goods was carried out against the very general feeling whether of Europeans or of the educated natives of India.

EMPLOYMENT OF NATIVES IN PUBLIC SERVICE

The salaries of the upper grades of the native subordinate executive services were improved in 1882, at an estimated increase of about £50,000 a year. It was declared to be the intention of the British government and of the gov

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