In the revolution which had overthrown the Suddozye dynasty, the tribes had taken no active part, and the Barukzye Sirdars had risen to power neither by their aid nor in spite of their opposition. A long succession of sanguinary civil wars, which had deprived them, one by one, of the leaders to whom they looked for guidance and support, had so enfeeble and prostrated them, that but a remnant of their former power was left. No immediate apprehension of danger from such a source darkened the dawn of the Barukzye brethren’s career. But to be cast down was not to be broken—to be enfeebled was not to be extinct. There was too much elasticity and vitality in the order for such accidents as this to subject it to more than temporary decline. The Douranees were still a privileged class; still were they fattening upon the immunities granted them by the Suddozye Kings. To curtail these privileges and immunities would be to strike at the source of their dominant influence and commanding strength; and the Barukzye Sirdars, less chivalrous than wise, determined to strike the blow, whilst the Douranees, crippled and exhausted, had little power to resist the attack. Even then they did not venture openly and directly to assail the privileges of the tribes by imposing an assessment on their lands in lieu of the obligation to supply horsemen for the service of the state—an obligation which had for some time past been practically relaxed—but they began cautiously and insidiously to introduce “the small end of the wedge,” by taxing the Ryots, or Humsayehs of the Douranees, whose various services, not only as cultivators but as artificers, had rendered them in the estimation of their powerful masters a valuable kind of property, to be protected from foreign tyranny that they might better bear their burdens at home. These taxes were enforced with a rigour intended to offend the Douranee chiefs; but the trials to which they were then subjected but faintly foreshadowed the greater trials to come.
Little by little, the Barukzye Sirdars began to attach such vexatious conditions to the privileges of the Douranees—so to make them run the gauntlet of all kinds of exactions short of the direct assessment of their lands—that in time, harassed, oppressed, impoverished by these more irregular imposts, and anticipating every day the development of some new form of tyranny and extortion, they were glad to exchange them for an assessment of a more fixed and definite character. From a minute detail of the measures adopted by the Barukzye Sirdars, with the double object of raising revenue and breaking down the remaining strength of the Douranees, the reader would turn away with weariness and impatience; but this matter of Douranee taxation has too much to do with the after-history of the war in Afghanistan, for me to pass it by without at least this slight recognition of its importance.