Under the absolute Amir

Amir Abdur Rahman was greatly interested in all mechanical work, and his interest extended to trade, and the merchants carrying it on. The status of a merchant, in his opinion, was equal to that of any of his Government officials, and any complaint or representation a merchant might make to him was sure of a hearing. When he started his workshops, his avowed intention in doing so was not only to be able to turn out guns and rifles, but to educate his people. He said he wanted to teach them the trades of other countries, in order that they might raise themselves to a level with the people of other nations, whereby they would not only make themselves and their country as prosperous as others were, but also by having an interest in work, would lose their habits of idleness, which caused them to drift into lawlessness and wrong-doing. He afterwards complained many times that, in spite of all he had done for them, his people were still the same, and that although he had killed so many thousands, the lesson failed to have the effect he desired on the rest of his subjects.

His son, the present Amir, also takes the keenest interest in all things mechanical, and having been, from the time he was a boy, the chief officer of the Government workshops, visiting them once a week, and inspecting each department and all that was turned out, his knowledge of machinery is greater than that possessed by his father. There are some matters, however, that the Amir and the officials connected with the workshops cannot properly grasp, and occasions them a good deal of thought and perplexity. For instance, they cannot quite understand that it requires a given quantity of heat to generate a given quantity of steam, and as they burn a large amount of wood daily in the boilers (they have no coal), they are ever trying to reduce this quantity, without lessening the work of the engines. Once they thought they had solved the question, by using larger and thicker pieces of wood for the boilers, because these burnt more slowly than small pieces, and then when these huge lumps of wood failed to keep up the head of steam, and the engines ran slower and slower, they suspected the firemen of being the cause of it, and so had several of them thrashed.

Another time the stock of firewood for the boilers ran out, and a supply of freshly cut wood was brought in daily, for use until further large supplies could be arranged for, and stocked to dry. The wood being wet, it naturally burned slowly, and the steam could not be kept up, and although the daily consumption of wood remained the same, the engines worked worse than ever. They tried many things to alter this state of affairs, and looked in all directions but the right one to find the cause of the engines not working well, even opening out the cylinders to see if the pistons were right, and when all their investigations failed to locate the cause of the trouble, the firemen were thrashed again. The firemen were once convicted of falsifying the quantity of wood burnt daily, making out that a larger quantity was used than was correct, and selling the balance, and after that they were ever suspected of doing their work badly or trying to spoil things for revenge. This was principally the reason that, whenever one of the officials got a bright idea for reducing the quantity of wood burnt daily, the firemen were invariably accused of spoiling the experiment, and as often as not were punished on suspicion. The life of a man who works on that which is little understood by those over him is not all roses.

Although I was nominally in charge of the boilers and engines, with all sorts of other work, I was not responsible for the quantities of materials used, that being in the hands of another official, and the inherent suspicious nature of the Afghan, together with his ignorance of work, makes him chary of accepting advice on such matters, so that, although I was consulted, my opinion, which exonerated the firemen, was looked upon as prejudiced, and my proposal to cut the wood into small pieces was regarded as a desire to waste Government property. Soon after my appointment as engineer to the Government, I had received another firman (Amir’s written order) which placed the engines and boilers in my charge in addition to the work for which I had been engaged, and I was told to thoroughly examine them, as the engines worked very badly, and to report if it was the fault of the engines, boilers, or the firemen. No firman is given without all people whom it concerns knowing it very soon after, and when I went to the boiler-house the next day, I found the men there very gloomy, and they probably thought that, as they who were on the work always and had done their best to keep steam up on the limit of firewood had failed, there was little chance of my doing better, and then, no doubt, I would put the blame on them, according to the method of their own people, who always blame the men under them when they are unable to right matters. My examination of the boilers showed that they were encrusted with a thick deposit of lime and mud, for no attempt had been made to clean them out since they were first started, so the men told me, and it took about two weeks to put matters right. After this the firemen always referred to me as an authority when blamed for their work, and it was considered that I had found out their swindling and had promised not to report them if they carried on the work properly in future. In many other things I found that it was thought I favoured the workmen, and shielded them from punishment because I pitied them, for I let it be known very clearly that I considered the pay of most of the men inadequate, and though I was able to have the wages of many of the men increased as opportunity offered, it was done more as a favour to me than anything else, and other workmen remained at the same rate of pay on which they started work.

Another idea they had was that of bringing water to a higher level by means of syphons, and one day, when I was in durbar with the late Amir, he held forth on this subject to some chiefs who had come to see him from a distant part of the country, explaining to them, that if you take an inverted syphon, and pour water down one of its legs, the water rises up out of the other one; it did not rise up far above the level of the second opening, he said, but he intended using a series of them to bring water in this way to a dry stretch of land near Kabul, which stood above the level of the neighbouring streams, and he turned and asked me, if what he said was not correct. I gave no answer, as an affirmative would involve me in the carrying out of the work, and to say otherwise would not be polite in public durbar, when it was the Amir who spoke. Some time afterwards the principal ustads (foremen) of the workshops were sent for by the Amir, who explained his idea to them, and told them to think it over and see who could do this work, either by such syphons or a pump that would work by itself. They retired and gave several days to the consideration of the problem, and making various experiments, and I heard of the matter by their eventually coming to me in ones and twos, to ask my opinion and advice.

In the iron and brass foundries, I found that the quantity of fuel allowed for drying moulds and cores was so small that almost half of the castings turned out bad. This was another case of saving money for the Government by the official in charge, whose pay had been increased for so doing, as a well-wisher of the Government. The great percentage of bad castings caused thereby was an item of loss not considered until I pointed it out.

The Afghan officials who manage shops or works of any description very much resemble the travelling M.P. who spends three or four months in India in the cold season, and then goes home prepared to explain the cause of, and a remedy for, all problems connected with its governing.

The Kabul workshops comprise two large machine-shops, with about a hundred machines of sorts; two cartridge-making shops with machinery for turning out solid drawn Martini and Snider cartridges; metal fuze shop, blacksmiths’ shops, steam hammer shop, iron and brass foundries, mint, rolling-mill shop, and the boiler and engine houses. There are besides these, hand shops for making limbers and wheels of guns, gun cartridges, cartridge and shell filling, artillery harness, bandoliers, boots, etc., gun browning, black powder, percussion cap powder, leather tanning and currying, soap and candle, spirit distilling, acid making, electro-plating and polishing, sword and bayonet making and grinding, bullet moulding, tin and copper work, carpentry, pattern making, painting, household furniture making, etc. Between four and five thousand men are employed.

The Afghan workman is intelligent, and can, if he will only give his mind to his work, or domestic or other affairs will allow him to do so, do work requiring considerable skill and intelligence in a manner which is highly creditable. This is the Afghan workman at his best. In the case of work requiring very exact fitting or finish, they generally fail, mostly because they have not thoroughly mastered the art of making gauges and working to them, and it is chiefly on this account that the field and machine guns are unreliable. In some cases a workman appears to have displayed a considerable amount of ingenuity in ascertaining the wrong way to do a thing and then so doing it; but there is, however, no doubt, that with education and training the Afghan would make a fine workman. I have often known a man ruin his work, otherwise well finished, through lack of technical knowledge of some process in one part of it, and I was generally applied to for help after the failure, for they all like to do things off their own bat, if they can, hoping, thereby, to get all the credit from the Amir. Much of the reason for their not applying to any one for help is the fault of the officials, who, when bringing a man with some special work he has done before the Amir, claim that the man was at a standstill in this or that way during its process, and that they assisted him in his difficulty, thus cheapening the work of the man’s hands to their own credit, and in some cases the official claims the entire credit, making out that the man worked to instructions. However, it is one of the results of the system of government that all men try to bring themselves to the Amir’s favourable notice, and the means are of little account for so desirable an end.

In all work there is an ustad (teacher or foreman) and his shagirds (pupils or workmen). When the shagird has learnt all he can learn from his ustad, or thinks he has, he usually casts about for a way of ousting his master and taking his place himself. This he generally sets about doing by privately reporting to the Amir that his ustad indents for much more material than his work requires, and sells the surplus to help defray his living expenses, which, as all his neighbours will testify, are far above his income. This does not always have the effect aimed at, and cause the ustad to lose his position that the shagird may jump into it; but the ustad is perhaps made a prisoner, and wears leg irons as he goes about his work as usual during the day, and at night is taken back to prison, while the mirzas set about the task of checking his accounts, and as this is a work of years, the ustad often dies before the matter is settled.

In any work which is accompanied by risk, such as powder making, etc., the Afghan gets careless of precautions after a time, and the result is an occasional explosion, which kills many and unnerves the rest for a month or two, but eventually the same carelessness prevails, until another accident makes them cautious again for a time. The making of fulminate of mercury was prolific of accidents at one time, but no further accidents happened after I introduced the usual method of preparation, but some accidents occurred through roughly handling the filled percussions caps, and once sixty thousand of them exploded through carelessness on the part of one of the foremen, who took up a few of them to look at, and then threw them back into the box where the rest were; four were killed, and some others were permanently disabled, while one man was blinded, a cap entering each eye, but was otherwise uninjured. In one powder explosion twenty-one men were killed, and many others injured, chiefly through the force of the explosion bringing down a heavy roof on the men who were working underneath. There were several other accidents through carelessness, each time causing death or injury to one or two, and eventually the Amir gave me orders to draw up a list of regulations, and give full particulars of what was necessary, in order to minimize risk in the making and handling of explosives. Having sanctioned this, the necessary work was put in hand, and the regulations came into force, after which the accidents stopped.

The pay of the workman is mostly fixed at starvation rates, though several of the men, who have had their pay increased for doing some small work for the Amir himself, get too much so far as ability is concerned. The workshops were started about eighteen years ago, and the pay of many of the workmen, who were boys when they were first engaged, is still the same, although they have become of greater value to the Government by the experience they have gained, and that which makes it still harder for them is that the price of food has increased tremendously, and bread, which is their chief food, is four times the price now to what it was then. There are men who have been working on special machines from the time the shops started, drawing eight rupees per month (5s. 4d.), and these are men with wives and families, and sometimes other female relatives dependent on them. How they live on it is a problem, but they are men with no surplus adipose substance on their bones, as may be imagined. Others, and they are mostly boys, who are taken on now for any new work, commence at ten rupees (6s. 8d.) per month. Most of the ordinary machine men (turners, etc.), and hand-fitters, get from twenty to thirty rupees per month (13s. 4d. to 20s.). Ustads get from twenty to one hundred rupees per month (13s. 4d. to 66s. 8d.).

Excepting in the Government workshops there are very few trades carried on in the country. The few trades there are, and they are all carried on in a small way only, are coppersmiths, tinsmiths, blacksmiths, gold and silversmiths, carpenters, leather workers, etc. The bulk of the commerce of the country is confined to dried fruits, which are exported to India and Russia. Fresh grapes are also sent to India, wrapped in wool, and enclosed in small round wooden boxes. Kabul and its neighbourhood produce large quantities of very good grapes, which sell in the season at about a penny for eight pounds, and for the best varieties at about a farthing per pound. I made wine from these grapes, blending two or three sorts; and after maturing for three years or so, it was equal to any of the wines commonly sold in India, and being pure grape juice, it was perhaps better than most. Apricots are also grown in large quantities, and grapes and apricots form the bulk of the dried fruits exported. Grain is also exported, though not in large quantities; but, with cheap means of carriage, a large trade in several articles could be brought about. Most fruits and vegetables grow well in Kabul, and large crops are given, the climate being particularly adapted for all fruits not requiring a tropical sun. In Jelalabad and Kandahar districts the heat is such that most tropical fruits are grown, and in the former district sugar-cane is produced in large quantities.

A good deal of silk is also produced, and the country offers great facilities for an extensive cultivation of the silkworm. The silk is at present produced in three districts—Bokhara, Herat, and Kohistan, and there only in comparatively small quantities. Carpets are also made: those similar to Persian carpets in Herat and Turkestan, and felt carpets in Kandahar and Hazara. Cloth of various descriptions is also manufactured by means of hand-looms in different parts of the country, and in Ghazni numbers of posteens (overcoats) are made from sheep skins. Most of the latter articles are not exported, for only enough is produced to meet the demands of the country. Numbers of camels, horses, cattle, and sheep are bred in different districts, but few are exported, and for the past few years horses are not allowed to be taken out of the country for sale, something having been said about them being bought up for the use of the Indian army. Turkestan is the best cattle and horse-raising country in Afghanistan, as it possesses large tracts of fertile country for grazing; and to hear Turkestanis talk of the agricultural and mineral richness of their country, one would imagine it the Eldorado. A small quantity of timber is floated down the river from the Jelalabad district for sale in India, but the quantity is very small, for the hills and mountains in Afghanistan are for the most part quite barren, and there are very few trees except in one or two isolated places, and not many there.

There is little or no rainfall in the country, but in the winter snowstorms are frequent, and the melting of the snow on the mountains gives the water required for the crops during spring and summer, the water being led over the land by means of channels for the necessary irrigation. These irrigation channels are cleaned out every spring, and on the day appointed for clearing the stream, all the men who use the water are called together by drum and fife (or an instrument similar to it), and they work up stream each day in a body, clearing away weeds, and deepening the channel where it has silted up until the whole is finished.

There are frequent fights among cultivators about the first use of the water from the subsidiary channels, for it frequently happens that the smaller ones do not carry enough water to irrigate the land on both sides at once, and naturally quarrels ensue as to who shall have the water first. Long handled spades are generally in the hands of those who are quarrelling, and these are used, and men are killed at times, for the spade inflicts a heavy blow and cuts deeply. The quarrels also frequently lead to one man firing the other’s crops in revenge, and then lawsuits, with numbers of paid witnesses on both sides, result.

The mills for grinding flour are fixed at convenient points on the irrigation streams, and are worked by water-wheels, which, however, have a very low efficiency, less than a quarter of the power available being transmitted to the mill. The mills are of a very old type; one stone revolves on a fixed lower one, and the grain is fed in at a hole pierced near the centre of the upper stone. The flour from the first grinding is very coarse, and it is reground two or more times, according to the degree of fineness required.

There is a great want in Afghanistan of some cheap and speedy means of carrying freight. At present the cumbersome method of carrying all things by pack-animals is the only means at disposal, and the time occupied in getting over a short distance necessarily makes the system a costly one, for it takes a week for them to travel a hundred miles, and the cost of doing so works out at about eighteen shillings a hundred-weight for that distance, and this in a country where all things are cheap. The weight and size of any article carried is also limited to the carrying capacity of the horse or camel employed.

The Koochee people do most of the carrying of goods from place to place, and they are a hardy race, similar to gipsies in having no fixed home. They move about in caravans of fifty to a hundred animals, which include camels, horses, donkeys, and sheep, for sheep have to carry small packs too. The women and children travel with the caravan wherever it goes, and the household pots and pans, with a few fowl, are carried on the top of a donkey, the fowl, with their feet tied to prevent escape, sitting on the top of the pack, and the baby, if there is one, wrapped in a shawl, and carried in a bundle beside them. They often have a large number of sheep with them, and when the lambs are too young to stand the journey the boys and girls carry them in their arms. When they stop for a while at any place they rig up rough huts, composed of sticks covered with mats or grass, but at other times the shelter of a tree or rock suffices. They are a finely built people, with free, graceful movements, due, no doubt, to the open-air life they lead and the constant exercise, and as no sickly child could live such a life, it is a case of the survival of the fittest.

One such caravan passed me one day while I was standing near a road I was constructing through a ravine, and the reports from some blasting going on near by made one of the young camels bolt. In doing so he collided with a full-grown girl of the caravan, and she was thrown some distance, landing with a good deal of force on some sharp jutting boulders and stones. I started forward, thinking she must be killed; but the girl, after a few moments, sprang up, brushed the dust from her clothes, and walked on unconcernedly. The Koochee women are not purdah, though they cover their faces with a shawl as they pass an Englishman. During the harvest months, when the heat of the lowland plains is too great for the pack-animals, and there is little carrying work done, the Koochee people move from one place to another, working as harvesters, and when the crops of one district are cut and in, they go on to another; for owing to differences in altitude the harvesting time in different districts varies. The men who look after the camels fasten them at night-time in a circle, so that the camels, in a way, form a wheel, with bodies as spokes, and noses pointing to the hub. The man, when he sleeps, lies down in the centre under the necks of the camels, and rests there unmolested by them.

Tea is imported into the country through India. Generally speaking, the Chinese green tea only is consumed, and it is shipped from China to Bombay, and thence railed up to Peshawar for the Kabul merchants, and to Quetta for the Kandahar and Herat merchants. From Peshawar to Kabul, and from Quetta to Kandahar it is carried on by camels. A large quantity of tea is imported annually, and only the very poor use the Indian hill tea, as they cannot afford the other, which sells at three shillings to five shillings a pound. I once tried to introduce an Indian green tea into Kabul; but they did not care for its flavour, and the fact of it being Indian tea was sufficient to condemn it in their opinion.

Other articles imported are cotton goods, cloth, silks, and velvets. Of the latter two, large quantities are used by the women, and at one time men and boys dressed a good deal in silks and velvets also; but the new court fashion is black cloth, so the demand for them is getting less with the men. Saddlery and leather goods, old clothes, sugar, and other household necessaries, are brought up by merchants from India; but the trade in them is very small.

There are no measures in Kabul for grain, liquids, etc., and all things are sold by weight. The weights differ from those used in India, and are built up from the nukhut, a description of pulse about the size of a pea, the weight of each seed of which is fairly equal. Twenty-four of these nukhuts go to a miskal (six and one-sixth miskals nearly equal an ounce); ninety-six miskals equal one pau, which is slightly less than an English pound; sixteen pau equal one seer, and eighty seers equal one kharwar. Excepting in the Government stores there are no exact weights made and used; the people in the bazar taking stones of different sizes and using them as weights, the difference between the stone and the true weight being on the side of the shopkeeper of course. In lineal measure there are two different yards, or guz, as they are called. The one used by surveyors and builders is nearly twenty-eight inches, and the other guz for measuring cloth, etc., is nearly forty-two inches. The kro, or mile, is, as I have already mentioned, an indefinite quantity, but is usually taken to be about one and a half English miles.

The Government offices are controlled and worked by the mirzas, or clerks. The mirza is looked upon as an educated man in the country, but his education is limited to Persian literature, a smattering of the old Arabic, and the first four rules of arithmetic; but even in these first four rules he is far from proficient, and when it comes to a fraction being included in the calculation, he is hopelessly lost. I was present once when some eight or ten of them together tried to solve a calculation which involved multiplication only, and all of them arrived at different results, while the man who was nearest the correct answer took a good deal of credit to himself for being so nearly right. The mirzas are a class of themselves, although drawn from all classes, and they differ from the rest of the population in their nervous and soft manner, at the back of which, however, is a nature as cruel and heartless as any in the country. It is not the cleverest mirza in his work who comes to the front and has charge of departments, but the one who is cleverest in deceit and intrigue, and it is to excellence in these respects that the young mirza gives attention, when he listens to his elders making up a case, with words and meaning purposely involved, to give them a loophole of escape should their scheme fall through. The mirzas are full of cunning, and difficult for the layman to trap, and they are ever scheming one against the other, or against other people who have money, that they may in one way or another get them in their coils and squeeze them (as they put it).

The work they prize most is taking the accounts of one of themselves, or of some official whom they have already reported to the Amir, as swindling the Government of lakhs of rupees, and undertaking in their report to prove what they say. After reporting such a case, they are generally given the task of proving their accusation, and this necessitates the accused person’s accounts being gone through. In doing this they are weighed by no consideration of the figures shown in the books and papers under examination, but search their minds for an idea of some allegation which will involve the accused and be difficult for him to refute, and then, for proof of lesser wrong-doing which will give colour to the greater alleged wrong, they look through the papers, and, as no official is guileless in the conduct of his duties, it is usually easy to get up a few bad-looking cases against him. Then they go into figures, and I have known men accused of swindling more than double the amount which has actually passed through their hands; and to do this without being detected is simpler than it appears, for very few persons besides the mirzas can do more than count up to twenty, and the mirza’s papers give the figures and other proofs of the huge sums swindled. Then all of them go before the Amir, together with the papers and other proofs (?), and in the end the accused is put in prison together with his family, and all his money and other property is confiscated. To be correct, not all is confiscated, for a good deal of money has already gone into the investigating mirza’s hands in a vain attempt to induce him to withdraw his charge, or at least reduce his figures; but although the mirza will hold out hopes until he gets the money, he knows that, having begun, he must ruin the man and have him put where he is harmless, or else there will be an ever active enemy lying in wait for him. However, there is always requital, for no one mirza holds any position for long, and a day comes when the intriguer is himself treated in the same way, and is put in prison or killed. Two or three years is the usual limit of a mirza’s tenure of high office, for their methods of attracting money to themselves soon lead to exposure by other mirzas who become envious and want the position themselves, in order that they, too, may make something, and have a merry, if a short, life.

In getting up cases, the mirzas do as others do, and pay false witnesses, and this leads at times to the Amir being at a loss to know which side is right, and ordering them all to be tortured with the fanah in order to find out the truth. I saw two mirzas, who were accused of falsifying accounts, being publicly fanah’d in the bazar one day as I rode through; but they were making statements very rapidly with the minimum of pressure on the fanah. Their endurance is less than that of the other men of the country, and this is no doubt due to a sedentary life and incessant smoking, for wherever you see a mirza, there, too, you will see a chillum.

The mirzas have various ways of making money, and one is in the collection of customs duties and various taxes, when they make all they can out of the people who have to pay. If they have to give a receipt to any man for money paid, or goods delivered, they will keep the man waiting all day for it, or even for a few days, if he gives them nothing. The equivalent of a penny is accepted if the man is poor and they see he can give no more. Men coming into Kabul and having to travel two or three days to get there to pay some duty or tax of less than a rupee, have been kept waiting for days because they refused to give the mirza a few annas; so the people see that it saves money to give to the mirzas, and if they complain to a higher authority the mirza and all in his office will swear that the man never came near them. Again, if money has to be paid to a man from the Government treasury he must give some of it to the mirza who pays it out, and this is taken so much for granted that the mirza usually hands it over one or more rupees short, according to the amount of money that has to be paid.

The late Amir used to give salaries to very few of the mirzas employed on Government work. He said they made money from the people whether they got a salary or not, and as the people would not complain to him, they might pay for the mirzas—an economical way of looking at the matter. The Government storekeepers are all mirzas, and apparently make a good thing out of it, for they wear good clothes, ride good horses, and have many wives and women in their houses, though their pay is seldom more than the equivalent of ten pounds a year. However, as there is no system of stock-taking, and no ones knows what is, or is not, in the stores, it is an easy matter for them to make money out of such a job, but their tenure of office is usually a short one, some one or other of those under them reporting their shortcomings, probably because they were given too small a share of the plunder.

If an Afghan owes money, it is similar to getting blood out of a stone to make him pay it; usually the odds in both cases are equal, unless a considerable amount of pressure can be applied. With many of them it looks as though their hearts were wrung when having to pay up, for it is done with a gloomy countenance and a display of considerable temper, as though they were being robbed by force of hard-earned gains. The method the late Amir inaugurated for the payment of debts was to send soldiers to the house of the debtor for the money, and if it was not at once forthcoming, the soldiers quartered themselves on the man, and partook of the best in the house, and if there was no best in the house, the man was made to get it as quickly as possible, or feel the weight of the butt end of a rifle. Under these circumstances the debtor lost no time in settling up, if only for the sake of getting rid of his unwelcomed guests, who turned the house upside down, and involved him in the loss of several rupees each day for their food and tobacco. Any person proving a debt could apply to Government for these soldiers, or mahsuls as they are called, and the soldiers employed for the purpose became quite experienced in turning these visits to their own advantage.

There is a colony of Hindoos in Kabul which has been there for many generations. They are the money-lenders to the people, as the Jews used to be in other countries. Also they do almost all the dealing in precious stones and jewellery, and of late years most families have been forced to sell much of the jewellery they possessed, the increased cost of living necessitating it, in order that they should not starve. Whatever a Hindoo offers for an article may be looked upon as being never more than two-thirds of its value, and the people, among themselves, when selling anything to one another, say that the Hindoos offer to give so much for it, and therefore it must be worth the money they themselves ask. Some of the Hindoos are employed in the Treasury offices as being more trustworthy than the mirzas, and also better accountants.

The money of the country is all coined in Kabul, the mint, with its up-to-date coining presses, being situated in the workshops, where the presses are at times kept working day and night when large sums of money are required quickly. When the late Amir, who wanted money badly, saw the revenues yearly dwindling, he cast about for means to increase it, and one day the idea of doing so in the following way occurred to him. The Kabul rupee used to be an irregularly shaped coin, hand-stamped, but it was made of pure silver, so the Amir had all these rupees collected and melted down as they accumulated, and as they were melted down a fairly high percentage of copper was added. This alloyed silver was then cast into bars, rolled, and coined afresh in the new mint, which turns out a rupee with a milled edge and pressed with nicely engraved dies. In this way, by melting down the old pure silver rupees and adding copper before re-coining, the Amir made a considerable amount of profit, and when the old rupees of his own country were finished, he collected Persian rupees and added copper to those; but, unfortunately, under one of the Shahs, the same thing had already been done, so that many of the Afghan rupees contain more than double the proportion of copper than is usual in the standard coinage of other countries. Thereafter the Amir ordered the collection of those Persian rupees which were coined under other Shahs, and the exchange offered for these rupees in the Kabul treasury was one Persian for one Kabuli rupee; but to make still further profit, the Amir ordered that one pice less than a Kabuli rupee should be given in exchange for each Persian one, and the Shah, on hearing this, ordered a like reduction in exchange on all Afghan money brought into his country. The result of adding an unusual amount of copper to the rupee, together with other causes, however, depreciated its value in India, where five Kabuli rupees used to be taken in exchange for four Indian, and the exchange nowadays is two Kabuli for one Indian.