that the Anglo-Indian opinion was opposed to it, as a step which outraged Muhammadan sentiment without affording any compensating advantages[1].
The Governor-General's policy with regard to the Mughal Emperor is interesting, and is explained at some length in his Private Journal. In the early part of 1815 he was close to Delhi, and it was intimated to him that he ought to proceed there to visit that sovereign. But he refused, because ' His Majesty expected my acquiescence in a ceremonial which was to imply an acknowledgment that he was the liege-lord of the British possessions.' He denied that the Company held territory on this dependent tenure, not only because he considered it was impolitic to keep up the fiction that the Emperor was lord-paramount of India, but because ' of the recent Act of Parliament which declares the sovereignty of the Company's possession to be in the British Crown.'
'The house of Timúr,' he goes on to say, 'had been put so much out of sight, that all habit of adverting to it was failing fast in India; and nothing has kept the floating notion of a duty owed to the imperial family but our gratuitous and persevering exhibition of their pretensions — an exhibition attended with much servile obeisance in the etiquette imposed upon us by the ceremonial of the court. I have thence held it right to discountenance any pretension of the sort, either as it applies to us or to any of the native princes.'
The act of homage is in India performed by a
- ↑ Malcolm's History of India, i. 537; Summary, &c, p. 43.
