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To secure the levy of a duty on salt... there grew up gradually a monstrous system, to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any tolerable civilised country. A Customs line was established which stretched across the whole of India, which in 1869 extended from the Indus to the Mahanadi in Madras, a distance of 2,300 miles; and it was guarded by nearly 12,000 men... It would have stretched from London to Constantinople... It consisted principally of an immense impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes.
Sir John Strachey, in a footnote to Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, by Major General Sir W H Sleeman KCB
