{"book":"adl0973","page":77,"text":"could he maintain his position, the usurper gradually collected a powerful body of soldiers, chiefly recruited from the Northern Province. It was in constant readiness to protect his person, to impress the poor people over whom he ruled, to crush any rebellion at its first signs, and even to carry out his plan of the conquest of the whole of Afghanistan. He showed particular favour to these troops by paying double and treble salaries and by granting them special privileges.\n\nThough every means of injustice and extortion had been adopted in order to fill the treasury, the extravagance of his colleagues proved such a heavy drain that the Bacha was obliged to devise yet newer methods of extracting money. He issued paper currency which nobody would accept; and which the poor shopkeepers were made to honour at the point of the bayonet.\n\nThe foul mind of the tyrant was open to every suspicion against those who were most distinguished either by birth or merit. He suspected the students most and regarded them as his secret enemies. Whenever he was frightened at the false news of treason\n\n48","chars":1099,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0973/00077.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":315,"title":"Progressive Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0973/77","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0973/canvas/77","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."}}