a layman may say so, with skill and determination, and our troops fought gallantly.  But what is the upshot?  We managed to advance into the heart of the Mahsud country on a single line, subjected and still subject to incessant attacks by the enemy; but we are very little nearer effective occupation than when we started; and now financial stringency has necessitated a material alteration in the whole programme, and we are reverting more or less to the methods whereby we have always controlled the tribes, namely, tribal levies or khassadars belonging to the tribe itself, frontier militia or other armed civil force, backed by troops behind.

FRONTIER POLICY

And for my own part I believe this is the best solution.  We must not expect a millennium on the North-West Frontier.  The tribal lion will not lie down beside the district lamb in our time, and we must deal with the problem as best we can in accordance with our means, and to this end my views are briefly as follows:—­

(1) We should do everything possible to provide the younger trans-border tribesmen with all honourable employment for which they are suited:  service in the army, in the frontier civil forces, and in the Indian police or similar forces overseas, and we should give labour and contracts as far as possible to tribesmen for public works in their vicinity.  For the problem is largely economic.  Unless the lion gets other food he is bound to cast hungry eyes on the lamb.

(2) We should do all that is possible to establish friendly relations with the tribal elders through selected and sympathetic political officers, to give them, by means of subsidies for service, an interest in controlling the hot-bloods of their tribe, and, where possible, to give them assistance in education and enlightenment.  We must remember that we have duties to the tribes as well as rights against them.

(3) We should extend the khassadar or levy system; that is, we should pay for tribal corps to police their own borders, arming themselves and providing their own ammunition and equipment.  In this way we give honourable employment and secure an effective safeguard against raiders without pouring more arms into tribal territory.

(4) We must have efficient irregular civil forces, militia, frontier constabulary, and police, well paid and contented.

(5) We should revert to the old system of a separate frontier force in the army, specially trained in the work of guarding the marches.  Those who remember the magnificent old Punjab frontier force will agree with me in deploring its abolition in pursuance of a scheme of army reorganisation.

(6) We should improve communications, telephones, telegraphs, and lateral M.T. roads.

(7) We should give liberal rewards for the interception and destruction of raiding gangs, and the rounding up of villages from which raids emanate.