was levied on passing caravans, wherever they halted for the day, shows that in origin it was essentially blackmail.
From the rekwali of Rajpiitana it is an easy transition to the famous chauth of the Marhattas. Chauth means a fourth, and what the Marhattas eventually claimed was the chauth or fourth of the land revenue, that is, of the ruler's share of the produce in money or kind, of all India. In its origin the Marhatta chauth was a payment to obtain protection as well as exemption from pillage. And here the difference between East and West is striking and characteristic. In Europe an individual, by voluntary compact, assumes a new personal status; he takes upon himself a new legal clothing, partly of German, partly of Roman materials, but of a new fashion that is neither German nor Roman. In India a community, or an officer, or tributary prince of a decaying empire, agrees to pay to a new master a part of that share of the crop, or its cash equivalent, which by immemorial custom had been taken by the ruler of the day. And observe the connection between such agreements and territorial sovereignty. Out of the claims, conquests, and military arrangements of the Marhattas arose a loose, though complex, military confederacy, and, in the end, a still surviving group of territorial despotisms.
There are points of resemblance between the rise of the Marhattas and the rise of the Sikhs; but the dominion of the great Sikh Maharaja, Ranjit Singh, was better consolidated than the Marhatta empire ever was. In his progress to supremacy Ranjit Singh habitually reduced independent chiefs to the position of Jagirdars acknowledging his authority and bound to follow him with contingents in war. Conquering their territories, he sometimes restored a part of them in jagir sometimes he gave the dispossessed chief a jagir in another part of the country. You remember that a jagir means a grant of the ruler's share of the crop in money or kind. These jagirs established a sort of feudal relation between the Maharaja and the conquered chiefs, but it was in no sense voluntary; it was forced upon them by conquest in arms. There is, however, in this part of India a famous historical example of the voluntary adoption of a new allegiance. On the south and east of the Sutlej a number of chiefs, having strong reason to know that Ranjit Singh meant to extend his overlordship to their possessions, sought the protection of the British
