great peninsula. It is divided into more | Verres, like the banished Gaekwar of Barthan 800 States, large and small, but the oda. But there the analogy ceases. When only important Principalities are the 153 in we come down to feudal times, we find the which the Chiefs, by patent, govern the influence of Christianity working in the people without our detailed interference, Holy Roman Empire, and modifying Robut subject to our general control and to our man institutions. To say nothing of such continual civilising or humanising influence. familiar instances as the claim of Edward to Nor should it be overlooked that these 50,- be suzerain of Scotland, of the early English 000,000 pay a taxation of about 16,000,- kings to be sovereigns of France, and of 0001. a year, every rupee of which goes into the former kings of the Two Sicilies to be the pockets of their chiefs, save only 750,- paramount over Cyprus and Jerusalem, we 0007. of annual tribute to the Paramount have a still closer analogy in the old relation Power. This sum suffices only to pay for of the States of Germany to the Emperor the political and diplomatic establishments in who ruled from Vienna, of the Swiss Canthe States. The rest of India, the four-fifths tons to the Federal Powers previous to 1848, of its people under our ordinary administra- and even, in principle, of the Southern tion, are taxed to keep up an army and cen- States of America, which revolted, to the tral civil establishments, for the peace and Central Government. There are some livsecurity of the other fifth, who, or whose ing who remember the time when the Gerprinces, enjoy, moreover, all the advantages inan Emperor still claimed to be, from the of our trade and communications. The jurist's or theoretical point of view, the history of this India, in a constitutional sole independent sovereign in Europe. In sense, may be condensed into these two that sense, not only theoretically but as an statements the 153 Hindoo and Mahome- unquestioned fact, the Queen is the only dan chiefs are sovereigns, some of whom independent sovereign in India-an empire have an ancestry more ancient than that of in itself larger than that founded by Charlethe oldest ruling families in European his- magne and claimed by his latest successors, tory. They are, nevertheless and in fact, as it is more extensive and, on the whole, tributary sovereigns, who are the feuda- more civilised than even that of Augustus and tories of the British Crown by conquest; Trajan. But there the analogy ceases. For whom that Crown has kept in peaceful exist- there is this peculiar to the tributary kings ence and growing prosperity, and who have who rule over fifty millions of people, that transferred to the Queen the allegiance which their States have lost nationality as well as they all more or less acknowledged to the complete independence. As it is true that Emperor of Delhi, although the Queen's each of the United States of America is not right is legally that of conquest, and not of a nation, but forms an integral part of the mere succession to the Moghul dynasty. one nation embodied in the Union, while The British conquest and administration still, in a subordinate sense, 'free, soverof India have given a new chapter to Interna- eign, and independent,' so is it true, though tional Law. The relation of our Sovereign to under very different historical and political the tributary sovereigns of India differs conditions, that Indian nobles have become from each of the two apparently analogous absorbed in a higher nationality than they cases in history and jurisprudence, the Ro- or their ancestors ever had, while enjoying man and the Feudal. Even after the writ- limited sovereign power. There cannot be ings of Dean Merivale, to say nothing of nationality without sovereignty, while there Gibbon, there is no more fertile nor less may be in the East Indies, as in the United worked field of historical investigation than States there is, sovereignty without nationthe Roman government of the Provinces. ality. This is not the place to quote auWhether for the sake of early Church thorities, from Vattel to Twiss, on the abHistory, or of the administration of mod-stract doctrine, but so slight a reference to ern India, an exhaustive treatise on that subject is sorely needed. But whether we refer to the frontier provinces directly administered by the Emperor, and corresponding to the non-regulation districts of India, as they were and still are, or to the more settled countries, the appointments to which rested with the Senate, we shall find nothing exactly like the position of the Queen's Indian nobles. In character, indeed, and in crimes, every decade reveals a Herod, like the dispossessed Nawab of Tonk, or a that doctrine is necessary to justify the position which, for the highest and most unselfish ends, the British nation has been forced, by no will of its own or its agents, to assume, in the century from Clive to Dalhousie and Canning, towards the anarchic but real sovereignties of Southern Asia. Twiss, indeed, is content with three sentences on the native States of India, when he comes to details; but even Sir Henry Durand, who remarks on the meagreness of the reference, does not blame him, for his work treats the law of nations considered as independent | than justice dictated the national verdict political communities, while he describes But we the principalities of India as 'protected dependent States,' over which the East India Company was virtually sovereign. Like the trees of the forest and the generations of men, both nations and sovereign powers rise and fall, and the two questions in each case are-what are the facts? what is the right or law? Every period has its own crop of such cases, and none more so than the decade which saw Federal triumph over State rights, for the highest ends, in America; which saw first the Danish, then the Austrian, then the French wars with the King of Prussia, result in a new Emperor and constitution for Germany; which has seen Turkey vainly trying to stamp out the efforts of its Christian subjects after nationality and at least subordinate sovereignty. Or, to go to the East, the same decade has seen the rise and very recent fall of the new Mahomedan sovereignty of Yakoob Beg, who expelled the Chinese from Kashgaria; and the recognition by Lord Mayo at Umballa of the Afghan Ameer, Sher Ali, who had complained that the former Viceroy's policy of recognising any de facto ruler there had weakened his power and prolonged a desolating civil war. International law, as still taught and studied, is so purely feudal and Roman in its ideas and terms that, like 'political economy' generalised only from European data, it has caused serious misunderstandings between the native sovereigns and the Paramount Power. The question of fact being settled, that of law or right becomes the subject of the interpretation of treaties. Our tributary kings are independent in some functions and not in others, and some have many more independent powers than others. Subject always to the general peace and wellbeing, of which the Queen is the guardian, and to a certain small tribute, all have the power of raising taxes, a few of coining money, a few of life and death, all of internal legislation. But none may declare war, or maintain larger armies than are allowed by treaty, or send ambassadors and enter into political relations with each other, while hostilities with the Queen would be rebellion, involving not merely discrowning, but trial before the Queen's ordinary tribunals, as the four Nawabs of 1857 were tried, and three were executed, and as the Great Moghul himself was tried and mercifully banished to Rangoon. Great Britain keeps the peace of Southern Asia, because she has been and is still unable to help herself. Individuals among her agents may have done wrong, though ignorance has more often passed on some even of these. could go over the history of each one of these hundred and fifty-three sovereigns, and show how England alone has kept them and their houses in existence, delivering them from themselves, like the Mahratta chiefs now represented by Sindia, Holkar, and the Gaekwar, and from the Mahrattas and Mahomedans, like Mysore, the Rajpoot, and Boondela States, and even the Nizam of Hyderabad. Others we called into existence in an evil moment, like Oudh, which in its infamy we had to sweep away, yet royally pensioned; and like Cashmere, sold by Lord Hardinge to an oppressive Sikh chief under an excess of that sentiment which Henry Lawrence generally directed so well. There is not a sovereign who has done homage to the Queen's son, who would be there but for the British Crown. Unlike former suzerains, Mussulman and Hindoo, we protect our tributary sovereigns from internal revolt. outside attack, and the rapacity which would strip them of their revenues. Very solemn is the responsibility we thus incur, at once to the fifty millions of her Majesty's subjects whom they govern, and to the hundred and ninety millions whom we directly rule. We prevent the former from rising against a tyrant, as they used to do, and therefore we are bound to see that the tyranny does not become so intolerable as to endanger the peace of the Empire. We take the hard-earned taxation of our own direct subjects to meet our Imperial duties to the native States. How simplified would the financial problem in India become if the hundred and fifty-three kings spent their revenues on their own States, and we had to think only of the remaining two-thirds of the Empire! But what of the loss of nationality? We would be the last to underestimate such a loss, and if you probe it to the bottom you come to the mystery which lies at the root of the conquest of India by successive invaders all through the Christian centuries. Why are we there, why in 1857 did we insist on remaining there, why do we not leave now instead of girding up our loins for the great Turkish collapse? The true answer is, that the peoples of India never had a nationality in the real sense of the word: the moral justification of our supremacy, apart from historical fact, is that we are giving them a nationality. On this subject the almost appalling ignorance of Mr. Bright, in a recent speech at Manchester, on the alleged failure of the government of India to make canals as preventives of famine, has called forth from Sir James Stephen a pro In When the first anniversary of the proclamation of the Empire came round, last January, Lord Lytton completed the ceremonial or chivalric side of the policy, by the institution of the new Order of the Indian Empire at Calcutta. The country had passed through the most severe and widespread famine with which it had been afflicted since that of 1768-70, just before Warren Hastings became the first GovernorGeneral under the Charter of 1773. Southern, Central, and Western India, and especially in the first, dearth affected at least thirty millions of the people. One-tenth of these were fed daily by Government, at a cost which has added nine and a quarter millions sterling to the debt. As if to prove that the new Imperial relation was no empty ceremony or merely a spectacular dream, England, the Colonies of Australasia and the West Indies, and the portions of India not so affected, contributed in relief of their famine-stricken fellow-subjects a sum which falls little short of a crore of rupees, or nearly a million sterling. The plenteous rains of October, followed by bountiful harvests test and a reply which deserve to be placed beside the finest passages of Macaulay's two Indian Essays. The attitude and the action of Mr. Bright towards his country's administration of the greatest dependent empire that history has seen, is a most unfortunate feature in his public life. His instincts may be all right, but, his facts being generally wrong, these instincts when expressed in his speeches become pernicious alike to the good government of the people of India and to the good name, not to say merits, of the successive generations of soldiers, officials, missionaries, and merchants, who have made British India what it is. If he had taken one-thousandth part of the pains he has shown, again and again, in some purely local question of class interest, to master the greater Indian problems, as even Mr. Fawcett has done; if his zeal without knowledge had led him to see the land and the people with his own eyes, as Mr. Grant Duff has lately done, it might have been his to roll away the reproach that England seems to know less and care less about the Empire entrusted to it than the rivals, Portuguese and Dutch, French and Russian, whom it has supplanted. Mr. Bright, with all his gifts of feeling and expression, falls a victim to the first grievancemonger, who has a personal injury to avenge or a crotchet to press at the cost of the people of India. Himself ignorant, he is the easy prey of the one-sided whose little knowledge is worse than ordinary men's ignorance. Unlike Mr. John Stuart Mill, Mr. Bright was the unreasoning foe of the East India Company, and we are willing to admit that he sometimes did the useful work of stimulating that famous institution' to more rapid progress. But when, doubtless in the fulness of time, the great Company 'I need not dwell upon a fact so well apwas asked to resign to the Crown and to preciated by your Highness, that in ordering Parliament the trust which it had adminis- with special solemnity the title she assumed her Government in this country to proclaim tered with unparalleled success, because with last year, her Majesty desired to give public justice and humanity, did Mr. Bright fit emphasis to her Royal recognition of the Imhimself to guide the country in the work of perial duties owed by England to England's construction and reform? The Queen's Gov- great Eastern dependency, and to the equal ernment of India-the work of the present solicitude with which the national interests of Lord Derby-and the Queen's successive her Eastern and Western subjects are cherViceroys, of whatever party, have certainly solicitude so many and such touching proofs ished by their common Sovereign. Of this not been assisted, and they have undoubt-have been vouchsafed to me, that I should be edly had their position weakened in the eyes of the uninformed British public, by Mr. Bright. It is not enough to declare that his relation to India has always been unpatriotic; there are few authorities who will not join with us in saying that it has been hostile to the best interests of the people, while it has added greatly to the financial and political difficulties of the local govern ment. save in unhappy Mysore, which has lost one-fourth of its inhabitants-restored smiling prosperity to the land, and the Government of India took upon itself the new duty of providing annually a million and a-half sterling as a reserve for famine years. This gave a pathetic significance to the first anniversary, and justified the Viceroy in using such language as this when, in the Imperial Museum, unveiling Mr. Marshall Wood's statue of the Queen at Calcutta, presented to the people of India by the greatest of the landholders of Bengal, his Highness the Maharaja of Burdwan. unworthy to stand here if I could speak of them without emotion. During the past year the sufferings of the people and the difficul ties of the Government of India have been great indeed, but they have not been greater than the tender sympathy with which her Majesty has personally studied every detail of our terrible calamity and encouraged every effort of her Government to overcome the difficulties of its anxious task. It is the duty of those, to whom her Majesty has entrusted the administration of this great Empire, to give effect to her gracious intentions, by patiently developing the practical application of those principles which can alone insure its permanent and progressive prosperity. In performance of this our judgment may sometimes err, our foresight fail-for we are not less fallible than other mortals, but I can confidently assert that the one object we have ever honestly at heart is, to deserve the confidence of our Sovereign by preserving and promoting for her people throughout India those blessings of personal freedom, combined with social order, which we regard as the common heritage of all British subjects.' While this was going on in the metropolis of India, the London Gazette' notified that the Queen had created the Imperial Order of the Crown of India, to commemorate the assumption of the Imperial title of Empress of India,' and' to be enjoyed by the Princesses of the Royal house and the wives or other personal relatives of Indian Princes.' Side by side with the Queen's daughters and the wives and daughters of deceased or retired Viceroys, we find the Mahomedan Begum of Bhopal, chief of female rulers in the East, the Hindoo Maharanee Sur Nomoyee of Bengal, most benevolent of her sex in any land, and the Christian Maharanee Dhuleep Singh. These and previous names invite us to a few personal sketches of the most remarkable of the princes of India. Historically they may be grouped in four classes, according as they are Rajpoot, Mahratta, Sikh, or Mahomedan. The three last are of yesterday, owing their very existence to the British alliance or protection under the alternate systems of subsidiary engagements and the balance of power. The Hindoo sovereigns of Rajpootana, and also of Nipal, rightfully claim, though by adoption, an antiquity compared with which the oldest genealogies of the pedigree-hunters of Europe are modern. No descent can be traced farther back than that of the sun-race of India, save in the case of the two tribes of the Jews. But the houses of Rajpootana also have been preserved from extinction at the hands of Mussulinan and Mahratta only by the English sword and English law. Even the most independent dynasty of all, that of Nipal, has been sovereign in the hills between Bahar and Tibet only since 1769, or after Clive, when Prithi Narain, the Chief of Goorkha, was invited to assist one of the three branches of the reigning house against his rivals. We do not count Nipal as within our system of feudatory States, although its late Premier, Jung Bahadoor, was a faithful subordinate ally of ours, and, before his death, had the joy of having a grandson born to him, who will succeed the present Maharaj Dheraj on the throne at Katmandoo. So much independence does Nipal possess, though in a sense a vassal of China on the one side and of British India on the other, that the Hindoos look on its secluded valleys as the last retreat of their faith. There, too, the Mahratta pretender, Nana Dhoondopunt, sought an asylum in 1857, as other Hindoo State fugitives had done before him, and there he is believed to have perished miserably. The Maharaj Dheraj, who nominally rules Nipal, and is now forty-eight years of age, claims descent from the same branch of the Sesodhea Rajpoots as the ruling house of Oodeypore. His heir-apparent, Trilok Beer Bikrum, married the daughter of the Mayor of the Palace, the late Maharaja Jung Bahadoor, who visited England in 1847, and had a principality of his own, where he exercised sovereign powers. 6 The photograph of the representative of the oldest of all the IIindoo Sovereign houses, the Maharana of Meywar, or Oodeypore, as given in Mr. Wheeler's book, fails to do justice to the purity of the type of face. It is the boast of the family that they never submitted to give a daughter in marriage to the Mahomedan rulers of Delhi; nay, that for long they refused to intermarry with the other houses who had thus degraded themselves, although under compulsion. But when, for the common weal, it became necessary to form coalitions against the Mussulman Emperors, these excluded chiefs always stipulated for re-admission to connubium.' When Oodeypore consented to grant this, the condition was made that the sons of its princesses should succeed the father in preference to elder boys by other mothers. This, however, so acted as to break up the confederacy by introducing family dissensions, of which the Mahrattas took advantage. Holkar and Sindia thus began to seize what even the Mahomedans had failed to snatch away, and our intervention alone, in the interests of peace, perpetuated eighteen of the families. So jealously has Oodeypore preserved the appearance of independence, that not one of its sovereigns had condescended to enter Delhi since it ceased to be Aryan. The present Maharana, Sujjun Singh, who was just of age, or eighteen, was the first of his race to do homage at the Imperial city, but it was to the Empress who had saved his house, respected his honour, and guaranteed his rights for ever. When, on the death of the late Maharana Sumbhoo Singh, in 1874, the Maharanees and the nobles of the State were permitted to adopt the present chief, his uncle refused allegiance to the boy, and astronomer Jey Singh II., whose observatories and abilities gained for him from Delhi the title of Sewace, 'or great. Though united to nine wives, and only forty-five years of age, the present chief has no children, nor has he adopted an heir. He rules two millions of people, and has a privy purse of 475,000l. from which he liberally encourages art and education. The Sambhur Lake of Jeypore and Joudhpore, famous for its salt, is now worked by the British Government in the interests of India, and to the advantage of the chiefs. The we have ever since kept him a State prisoner.. In Sujjun Singh we see embodied the old nature worship of the Veds. Vishnoo, the Sun-god, was the deity of the Rajpoots ere yet, as a band of warriors, they left the ancestral plains of Iran, under that hero Rama, whom later generations adored as his incarnation. First of the warrior clans who followed Rama, and whose deeds the great epic of the Ramayana records, eldest of the Soorya Bunsee, or Children of the Sun, was the head of the Meywar house. There is no Hindoo who does not recognise that lad of twenty to be the legitimate heir to the throne of Rama. The genealogical tree of the present dynasty goes back with strict accuracy to Keneksen, its founder, in A.D. 144. The most distinguished of the house was the eightieth in descent from Rama, that Bappa who took the fort of Chittore in 714. That was the capital till Akbar sacked it, and Oodey Singh founded the present city which bears his name. In 1661 Raj Singh built that marble embankment which surrounds Kankrowlee Lake for twelve miles, in order to feed the people in the great famine of 1661. Jey Singh surpassed him, in the construction of Deybur Lake, the largest in India, with a circumference of thirty miles. In spite of Mahomedan aggression and of the disastrous results of the policy of non-interference on our part, which some ignorant persons still advocate, the young Maharana still reigns over a population of more than a million, and enjoys a gross revenue of 640,000l. a year. Of this only 25,0007. is paid to the British Government, which has shown a generosity and a restraint in its treatment of the Rajpoot feudatories without a parallel in the history of conquest. His Highness enjoys a personal income of 225,000l. after paying 240,000l. to his vassals, 130,000l. to temples and Brahmins, and 20,000l. to the ladies of the Zenana. Such civilisation as has penetrated the Aravelli Mountains of Mey-supremacy of India which we took from war, with their Mhair, Bheel, and Meena aborigines, is the result of the action of the British Political Resident, and of wise and cultured missionaries like the late Dr. Wilson and Mr. Shoolbred. The young chief has a finer career before him than any previous child of the Sun or representative of Rama. In all that a Hindoo means by progress and enlightenment the older Maharaja of Jeypore and his family, however, are more remarkable. Sprung from the Cuchwaha clan of Rajpoots, one of the thirty-six royal races of the Hindoos, his Highness represents not only Rama, as the third house of Joudhpore does, but the great engineer and Most remarkable of all our feudatories is one who, next to Cashmere, is the youngest of them in origin, the Maharaja Sindia. Sivajee, first of the Mahrattas, left successors so contemptible that that great genius of war is now represented by an obscure princeling who owes his position to us. Sivajee's Peishwa, or Mayor of the Palace, too has passed away, the last pretender to represent him being the Nana. But the Mahrattas still live in the three houses of Sindia, Holkar, and the Gaekwar, originally shepherd lads who sought a careef in arms. photograph of Sindia, in the Delhi quarto, reveals the whole man and his history, even more than the well-known picture of our own Henry VIII., whom he resembles. Yet even in this house, which is but of yesterday, twice the chiefs have been heirless and refused to adopt, and twice we have interfered to perpetuate the Principality. Ranojee was the slipper-bearer of the Peishwa, who rewarded his fidelity by making him leader of the body-guard. Ranojee it was who, by plunder like that which laid the foundation of many of our own noble houses, acquired the broad lands and fertile fields which still form the bulk of the State of Gwalior. His son, Mahadajee, was equally great as a statesman and a soldier. The defeat at Paniput, where in 1761 the Mahrattas fought with the Afghans for that both, taught him that discipline was essential to success, and that the secret of that lay with the French and the English. So he organised his marauding bands under foreign adventurers; he kept the Emperor his prisoner; he ruled India for years after a rough fashion, and he even mediated between the Peishwa and the English in the Treaty of Salbye. When he died in 1794, his grand-nephew carried out a much restricted power amid all the fluctuations of our policy, till 1827, when he died without an heir, natural or adopted. Now was made evident that influence of women of strong will and great ability, which has ever been characteristic of the Mahrattas, and |