the greater part of the territory which had been wrested from him, and a supplementary agreement, dated the 1st of January, 1806, was made with Ranjít Singh and the Ahluwalia chief. This professed to be a treaty of friendship and amity between the Honourable East India Company and the Sirdárs Ranjít and Fateh Singh, by which the latter agreed to cause Jaswant Ráo Holkar to at once leave Amritsar and never again to hold connection with him, or aid him with troops, or assist him in any manner whatever. The British Government, on its part, promised that as long as those chiefs abstained from holding any friendly connection with its enemies, or from committing any act of hostility on their own part against it, the British armies would never enter their territories nor would the Government form any plans for the seizure or sequestration of their possessions or property.
These treaties, which excluded Holkar from the Punjab, practically secured Ranjít Singh from English interference in his plans of conquest north of the Sutlej. The country held by Sikh chiefs south of that river had not yet been the subject of arrangement, and in the summer of the same year 1806 the disputes of the Phúlkian Rájás induced Ranjít Singh to invade it. The condition of this unhappy country was melancholy in the extreme. The districts between the Sikh States and Delhi, acquired by the English in 1803, had been perhaps the most pitiable, but the lot of the peasantry in the Sikh portion of the tract was
