morality of the Punjab was exceedingly low. Yet the Sikhs had the excuse that the position of women was a degraded one, and as education and sentiment had never placed her, as in Western Europe, upon an elevated pedestal, there was no reason to expect from her or from men any lofty ideas of purity. But if we accept contemporary literature as sufficient evidence, the society of Paris to-day is fully as corrupt as that of the Punjab in 1830; and the bazaars of Lahore, while Ranjít Singh was celebrating the festival of the Holi, were not so shameless as Piccadilly at night in 1892.
So with the political methods of Ranjít Singh. Violence, fraud and rapacity were the very breath of the nostrils of every Sikh chief. They were the arms and the defence of men who in a demoralized and disintegrated society, had to be ready to resist attack and protect their lives and property. It would be as reasonable to reproach the lion for the use of his teeth and claws, as to regard the force or fraud which made up the military and political history of the Mahárájá and the chiefs of his Court as more than the ordinary and necessary result of their life and surroundings. To-day, the ruler of Afghánistán conducts his administration on principles very similar to those of Ranjít Singh, yet the British Government, with whom he is in subordinate and feudatory alliance, does not offer a remonstrance, because it understands that savage
