English head with European and native subordinates. A strong local administrative body of fifty-six superior officers, Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners, was thus built up: twenty-nine of them being drawn from the Military and twenty-seven from the Civil Service. Lord Dalhousie resolved, from the outset, to convert the Punjab into a safe British Province, and to make it a source of strength instead of a source of danger. For the first time in the history of India a really effective system of defences was created on the North-Western frontier against the races of Central Asia. A line of forts and cantonments rose along the border, and the whole western side of the Indus was strongly held by connecting military roads.
A wall of steel and stone was thus raised between the British territories and the wild Pathán tribes and Afghánistán. The internal peace of the province was at the same time secured by a military police of horse and foot with a separate detective force, under the British District Magistrates, making a total police force of 11,000 men. The old Village Watch was retained in addition, and its responsibility for tracking criminals from hamlet to hamlet was strictly insisted on. The warlike instincts of the population were repressed by a general disarmament: the Pesháwar valley and the frontier districts being, however, allowed to
