{"book":"adl0973","page":38,"text":"peasantry. Increased taxation necessitated\nby the European tour and other expensive\nschemes meant increased hardship for this\nclass, which constitutes the major part of the\npopulation and which gained nothing by the\nenhanced revenues. In consequence, the\npeasants were in a sad plight. Straved, over\nworked, ill-clothed, they became full of hatred\ntowards their oppressors till only a spark was\nneeded to cause an explosion.\nThe condition of the army was worse still.\nThey were ill-kept and ill-fed. Under the\nlaws of conscription every Afghan was required\nto serve the army for two years. But in\npractice the rule applied to the poor only ;\nthe rich could easily bribe the officials and\nstay at home. The sanitary arrangements of\nthe cantonments were very bad. The\nsoldiers were paid only Rs. 4 a month,\nwith which to maintain themselves, and in\nmost cases their families as well. Some of\nthese wretched people were obliged to get\nleave from their officers and to engage in some\nprivate work with which to eke out their\nmeagre allowance. Others deserted the army\nbut since their salaries continued to be drawn\n\n11","chars":1114,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0973/00038.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":315,"title":"Progressive Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0973/38","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0973/canvas/38","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0973/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0973_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}