The scheme sounds excellent. A letter has been read aloud in every city and country market-place, apprising the people of the new law, and they are delighted in proportion, but scarcely believe that the Government will be strong enough to enforce it. Indeed, it is hardly probable that the new taxation system can succeed unless two important steps are first taken--the tribes must be disarmed, and a new set of governors be appointed to take the place of the old. As long as the tribesmen are armed, there can never be law and order, any more than there can be settled peace upon the Indian frontier under the same conditions. At one moment the tribes will side with the Government, at another they will take the part of a governor, at another they will attack a neighbouring tribe. It is all very well to tax such men justly and to treat them like civilized beings, instead of trampling them underfoot, preventing their becoming rich, and holding them to be ignorant devils; but they are not civilized, unfortunately--they have not sufficient education to know when they are well off and to profit by it. Every man of them has a gun, and bloodshed and plunder are life itself to him. Treat him well, he bides his time, grows rich with the rest of his tribe; together they descend upon their neighbours, avenge an old wrong, loot to their hearts' content, perhaps attack the Sultan himself. But disarm one and all such men, and in the far future a peaceable agricultural folk may reign in their stead. It would be a work of time, but it has been effected before in the annals of history.
The second condition, which would go far towards the working of the new system of taxation, is the appointment of new governors. The salary which the governors are to receive, is a comparatively small one, compared with the vast sums which they have been in the habit of accumulating, by means of extortion and by defrauding the Government. It is hardly fair to expect a man to cut down his expenses, give up half his wives, sell his slaves, and fall in the estimation of those under him. The thing must assuredly lead to dispute, born of peculation, and fighting must be the inevitable result. But if, on the other hand, new men are appointed, who from the first suit their expenditure to their means, a more peaceful working basis will be established.