familiar Indian precedent, had taken advantage of a Court paralysed by profligacy to do what they pleased; and their pleasure was that of sturdy warriors, entrenched in forest fastnesses and followed by small armies of retainers as little compunctious as themselves. For such men might is right, and the doctrine had been, no doubt, rudely applied against rivals and dependants. A British official, who conducted an inquiry, a few years previous to annexation, into the condition of the Province, had travelled through a tract of eighty miles which Nature had designed to be a garden but which one of the Oudh magnates had reduced to a desert. When the British administrator appeared upon the scene, bent on beneficent projects for an oppressed peasantry, backed up by Courts which could not be bribed and forces which it was impossible to resist, the Oudh Tálukdár found himself in a new and uncongenial world. The European officials regarded him with no friendly eye, as an oppressor of the poor and a useless incumbrancer of the soil. His title-deeds were strictly scanned; his vague prerogatives were disallowed. Tenant-rights, of which the tenant himself had scarcely dreamed, were boldly affirmed. Great dissatisfaction, accordingly, existed in the landed classes of Oudh. When the Mutiny came, the tenantry sided with their traditional lords against an alien protector, and the rebel soldiers, themselves for the most part drawn from the peasantry of Oudh, found in the strongholds and jungles of the landholders their
