The hope was vain, the evil lay deeper; disaffection to the Shah and hatred to the British power were becoming intensified from day to day, and the aspiration for relief was swelling into a passion. In the days before our advent there had been venality and corruption in public places--occasionally, likely enough, as Macnaghten asserted, to an extent all but incredible. But exaction so sweeping could have occurred only in regions under complete domination; and in Afghanistan, even to this day, there are few regions wholly in this condition. When the yoke became over-weighty, a people of a nature so intractable knew how to resent oppression and oppose exaction. 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.' While he wrote, Macnaghten must have experienced a sudden thrill of optimism or of self-delusion, for he continued: 'All things considered, the present tranquillity of this country is to my mind perfectly miraculous. Already our presence has been infinitely beneficial in allaying animosities and in pointing out abuses.' If it had been the case that the country was tranquil, his adjective would have been singularly appropriate, but not precisely in the sense he meant to convey.