of the Manjha, in which he and Futeh Singh were supreme, that the first compact of amity and friendship was concluded. It was within the subsequent forty years betwixt January 1806, when Lord Lake crossed the Sutlej at Ludiana, to February 1846, when Brigadier Wheeler marched from the same place to Jhelundur, that the province was conquered, and managed by Runjit Singh and his successors. For the three years subsequent to Lord Lake's retirement, the cupidity of Runjit Singh, was excited by the richness and defenceless state of the plains of Malwa and Sirhind, and his religious vanity was flattered by the possibility of extending his rule to the Ganges; these hopes were crushed in: 1809 by the forward policy of Lord Minto, by the negotiations of Metcalfe, and the military demonstration of Ochterlony. But no sooner had this crafty politician satisfied himself, that there was no fear of further interference on the side of Hindústan, no sooner had he reconciled himself to the armed intervention, which had prescribed the Sutlej as his limits, than he set himself vigorously to work to bring under his immediate controul the provinces, the privilege of confiscating which had been conceded to him. No ties of relationship saved the estates of his maternal uncles and his step mother-no claim of friendship averted the evil from his " turban brother," once his equal and ally: year after year the feast of Dusserah found Runjít preparing for an expedition of plunder and annexation, and the death of each Chieftain of the old school was the signal of attachment of his territories, and the confiscation of his wealth, till one by one all the former possessors were annihilated, or reduced to insignificance. At the close of twenty years the heads of the three most powerful families remaining in the Doab fled precipitately across the Sutlej, preferring independence in the small estates, which they possessed in the Protected Territory to the uncertain enjoyment of their extensive patrimonies under the daily increasing exactions of their unprincipled neighbour.

Thus it fell out, that Runjit Singh became the undisputed lord of the Jhelundur Doab. But it must not be supposed that the whole revenues of this fertile province found their way to his treasury: a large portion of the country was still left in the possession of the less powerful of the old Sikh Chiefs, who had wisely bent to the storm: a proportion was conceded for the subsistence of the descendants of those, who had been summarily ejected,-Runjit Singh being too politic to exasperate a large proportion was re-distributed in Jaghír to the military followers, who had assisted in the conquest, and who formed the new Aristocracy; and a still larger proportion became the

C

prize of intriguing priests, or was disposed of in religious grants to the shrines, or generally for the maintenance of the professors of the Sikh persuasion, and the Hindu faith. Like the majority of unprincipled plunderers Runjit Singh was pre-eminently superstitious, and his religious advisers were forward in assuring him, that the readiest and most certain method of atoning for past offences was by enriching the shrines of his religion with some portion of the ill-gotten spoils.

Such small remnant of territory as remained after the extensive appropriation for religious and secular purposes, was committed to the tender mercies of the Imperial farmers. Having entered into engagements for the payment of a certain amount of revenue, the Contractor was vested with supreme fiscal and judicial power, with uncontrouled privileges of imprisonment, and rackrent, his orders being without appeal, and his processes most summary. So long as the fixed instalment was paid in, so long as the royal ear was not pestered with too impertinent, and too flagrant complaints, so long as well-timed douceurs kept friendly the possessor of the Royal counsels, so long as no higher bid was made for the farm, so long was the term of the contract. No consideration for the good of the people, no thought of the improvement of the districts, no principles of Justice, Polity, or Humanity, were allowed to interfere, or were supposed to bear on the question.

Armed with such awful and irresponsible power, surrounded by a hungry train of needy relations and dependents, conscious that his time was short, that the bargain had been driven hard, and that its fulfilment would be exacted, himself of low origin, and unprepared by education for his duties,-can it be a matter of surprize that the power should have been violated by the Contractor for his own advantage, that all dictates of conscience, all rights of property, all respect for things sacred, should have been laid aside, and that his sole object should have been the gathering in of wealth, the converting of his ill-gotten treasures into ingots of gold, and the disposing of them so as to elude the grasp of his successor, who, he knew too well, would arrive armed with the power of confiscation and imprisonment? The change of Contractor was always heralded by the arrival of his successor with a sufficient force, generally accompanied by a short siege in one of the district strongholds, and ended in a summary attachment of all available assets of the ex-Governor, a search in the Sanctum of his zenana for gold and silver ornaments, and a maltreatment, supposed or real, of his women. The receiving charge of the new Contractor was signalized by the expulsion of every subordinate inducted by his predecessor, a general re

sumption of all grants of land made by his orders, and a general crusade against all his relations. The same story then followed, the chapter ended with the same peroration: the confiscator of yesterday underwent the same ordeal of his misdoings: private revenge, malice, and all the evil passions, which had been engendered by the short tyranny, found their vent in the established finale.

The last, and perhaps worst, of these Provincial Governors was Sheikh Imam-úd-dín, whose name late events have made familiar to the most casual of readers. The history of his family is a fair sample of the chequered life of adventurers in the East. Some fifty years ago all the adult male members of his house were extinguished in a feud at Kirtarpore. One solitary representative of the family had remained at home to perpetuate the line of these second Fabii, and his children in the memory of man sold shoes, and obtained their living by humble employments in the town, in which his godson ruled with the power of a Monarch; and to his great grandson was reserved the honour of contending in arms for the vale of Kashmir with the whole power of British India. Twice was the farm of the Jhelundur provinces made over to the tender mercies of this family. The first time ended in the ensuing year in summary confiscation and expulsion. During however the unsettled times, which succeeded the death of Runjit Singh, the footing, which had been lost, was again recovered, the emptied coffers were again re-filled for the space of six years the whole country was in the undisturbed possession of these Philistines, whose hosts appeared numberless, and everything valuable, good, or costly, was finding its way into their hands; while, owing to the absence of all efficient controul at Lahore, they were enabled to delay the payment of the Government instalments, and render no accounts of their stewardship. But their lease expired with the treaty, by which these provinces were ceded to the Company, and though for a short time they clung fondly to the idea, that it might possibly be continued to them, they soon sunk down to the level of private citizens, and would have been allowed to enjoy their wealth in peace, had not the fatality, attending upon ill-gotten gains, involved them in collision with the British power in Kashmír, which has ended in a manner much to be lamented by themselves.

Under such a system, as the one described, any attempt at good Government must have been impossible: there was neither the will, the power, nor the material for the establishment of Civil Justice, and the peculiar nature of the tenures of land, and the relation borne by parties to the Supreme Government of

Lahore, would have rendered any attempt of the best intentioned abortive. Large tracts of country interspersed in various directions were held by powerful absentee Sirdars, or influential Religieux, who looked upon the local Governor, as their equal, and permitted no interference within the limits of their Jaghirs, in the boundaries of which they affected a virtual independence: each of these had his army of retainers, his artillery and castles, prepared to take up any quarrels either immediately, or incidentally affecting their master's interests: the tracking of crime was thus rendered impracticable, and all administration of civil justice rendered impossible. General improvement, such as the construction of roads, the protection of merchants, and the other numerous cases of an enlightened Government, never entered the ideas of rulers, who looked upon the soil merely as a mine, whence their hoards were to be amassed, and the people as the instruments of production.

That the country flourished, that the population increased, must be attributed to the sturdy and independent character of the cultivators of the soil, who, waging one continual war with their superiors, have in the long run held their ground, and by dint of their numbers, and the permanency of occupation, come off victorious. The natural fertility of the soil was such, as few districts in Hindústan can exceed, and the position of the country at the time of British occupation presents fair ground for some sort of argument either that in practice the state of things above described is not injurious to the people, or that the prosperity of the producing classes is not effected by Social and Political institutions.

The resemblance, however, of the mutual relations of the ruler the nobility and the people in these provinces to that of Europe in the middle ages under the Feudal system must occur to anybody, who is acquainted with the history of those times, and who has read the pages of Hallam. We have here the superior Lord, or Suzerain, holding direct of the crown on tenure of service in war, and attendance on days of ceremony with an appointed force: under him are the different grades of vassals, the subinfeudation of fiefs, the smaller Jaghirdar holding of his superior Lord upon terms of service, harsher, more binding, but of the same family, as those which bound the holder in chief to the crown. Power has the same effect upon the human mind in all climes, but the leading feudal principles seem to have insensibly developed themselves in the same form in the distant countries of Europe and Asia. The weak must yield to the strong, and as the free tenure in chivalry by continued ex-' actions of the Crown and Superior Barons, degenerated gradu

ally, but certainly, in England into the most odious and oppressive of tenures, till in the days of Charles I. they could no longer be tolerated, and were abolished by his son at the restoration, so the easy tenure of service, upon which the Jaghirs were held by the Sikh Chiefs, become irksome under Runjit Singh, and has eventually swallowed up nearly the whole Jaghír under the uncompromising system of our rule. The pages of Blackstone in his chapter on tenures in Chivalry, may apply with equal force to the tenure in Jaghír. Aids are a natural incident of feudal holdings, and none more natural, than that of a fine of recovery:" nothing more simple than for the Suzerain to step in during the confusion incidental on the death of his vassal, and wring a handsome price from his widow and orphan: the marriage of the Chief, or his son's, presented another plausible pretext for exaction under the garb of a present:-the absorption of estates of childless Chiefs, the confiscation of those of rebellious Chiefs, the annexation of defenceless ones, and the arbitrary management of the estates of minors to the advantage of the self-constituted guardian were opportunities, which were greedily made available by both Hindu and Norman.

In another particular the Sikh chief resembled his European prototype: the hand of man may be strong, but in proportion as the physical triumphs over the intellectual faculties, so do superstition and bigotry establish their empire. Your professional plunderer is invariably a devout Religionist: with his hands steeped with the blood of the slaughtered victims, he keeps the shrine of his favorite Saint, or Divinity, and feels confident, that if he has not fully atoned for the deed, he has at least made the Deity a sharer in his crime: there are always to be found wolves in the garb of ecclesiastics ready to share in the devotional offerings of plunder, and to mutter benedictions for the benefit of the robber. No scruple seems to have suggested itself as to the impurity of the offering arising from the sin of the donor, no connexion appeared to these holy men to have existed between the spirit of the Devotee and the advantage to be gained by the gift:-it was sufficient that the offering was costly, and it mattered not that the tabernacle was constructed from the plunder of the Egyptian. In this way in Papal Europe sprung into existence many of the Abbeys and Monasteries: on this account Monkish Chronicles handed down in rapturous terms of applause the brave robber knight, who sacked flourishing towns, plundered the high-way, put thousands of innocent people to the sword, and founded a convent of monks to eat venison and drink burgundy, and pray at their leisure for the soul of the founder. Matters were managed much in the same manner