these princes power without responsibility. Our hand of iron maintains them on the throne, despite their imbecility, their vices and their crimes. The result is, in most of the states, a chronic anarchy, under which the revenues of the State are dissipated between the mercenaries of the camp and the minions of the Court. The heavy and arbitrary taxes levied on the miserable raiyats serve only to feed the meanest and most degenerate of mankind... The theory seems in fact admitted, that government is not for the people, but for the king, and that so long as we secure the king his sinecure royalty, we discharge all the duty that we, as sovereigns of India, owe to his subjects, who are virtually ours.'
I have quoted at some length these remarkable words of the Times in 1853, because when the Times could permit to itself so eloquent a conviction as to the necessity of reform, we may be sure that that necessity was clear and urgent. Lord Dalhousie has been represented by one school of writers as an innovator who, upon general principles, determined to abolish the old system of ruling India by means of intermediate native princes. By another school he is declared to have been merely the passive instrument of destiny in accomplishing a revolution necessary and inevitable in itself.
As a matter of fact Lord Dalhousie was neither a doctrinaire innovator nor a passive instrument in
