and lands; but scarcely one of them (except the Sikhs) represented any solid organization, political principle, or title. Most of the rulerships depended on the personality of some chief or leader, who was raised more by the magnitude of his stakes than by the style of his play above the common crowd of plunderers and captains of soldiery. Any one who had money or credit might buy at the imperial treasury a farmān authorizing him to collect the revenue of some refractory district. If he overcame the resistance of the landholders, the district usually became his domain, and as his strength increased, he might expand into a territorial magnate; if the peasants rallied under some able headman and drove him off, their own leader often became a mighty man of his tribe and founded a petty chiefship or a ruling family. The traces of this chance medley and fluctuating struggle for the possession of the soil or of the rents were visible long afterwards in the complicated varieties of tenure, title, and proprietary usage that made the recording of landed rights and interests so perplexing a business for English officials in this part of India.
The English reader may now form some notion of the distracted condition of upper India when the Marathas invaded it in 1758 with a numerous army intended to carry out definite plans of conquest. The Moghul Empire was like a wreck among the breakers; the emperor Alamgir, who had long been a state prisoner, had been murdered; and the strife over the spoils had assumed the character of a wide-spreading free
