Government. It was granted, and the treaty of 1809 made the Sutlej the line of demarcation between, as we might now say, the respective spheres of influence of the Maharaja and the British. Many of these chiefs misbehaved in the first Sikh war, and were reduced by ourselves to the position of jagirdars. Six of them still enjoy local autonomy; and though their exact status could not be briefly explained, I cannot consider them misdescribed by the phrase in common use which names them feudatories of the Indian Empire.
These Indian illustrations give, I think, some support to the remark of Bishop Stubbs, that though feudalism was of distinctly Frank growth, the principle that underlies it may be universal. If I am asked what is the bearing of this evidence on the questions in the history of European institutions from which I set out, I would answer, Look at the elaborate regulations for judicial combat or private war intended to mitigate greater disorder, at the well-known descriptions of the unceasing petty warfare of feudal times, at the conversion of the Roman villae into forts, at the castles which still dot the Rhine. It is not, I think, without significance that the salvamenta are traced chiefly in the charters of monasteries. Strong ecclesiastical corporations might stem for a time the tide that rapidly overwhelmed individuals. If in those centuries of rapine and violence an individual was strong enough to keep his own allodial property, he probably also had both the power and the will to prey upon his neighbours. It seems a reasonable conjecture that in parts of Europe everyone who was strong enough to avoid becoming a feudal vassal, might set up for himself as a feudal lord. And if we wish to note one of the great points of difference between European feudalism and the nascent, never completed feudalism of India, we may lay our finger on the one word commendation. Protection was sought in various ways or accepted as the alternative of plunder; and in India, as in feudal Europe, the land was the basis of all political institutions. But in India there was no Roman law of patron and freedman, of patron and client; nor was there that heritage of the ideas of formally enacted law which had devolved on the Frankish kings and the Church from the days of the great Empire. For this reason a new personal status, resulting from a contract and carrying with it a complete
