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130 and the daughters of the indigenous princes. There was, he well knew, no such equaliser as marriage. The Rájpút princes could not fail to feel that their relationship to the heir to the throne, often to the throne itself, assured their position. When they reflected on the condition of Hindustán prior to his rule; how the Muhammadan conquests of the preceding five centuries had introduced strife and disorder without cohesion, and that this man, coming upon them as a boy, inexperienced and untried in the art of ruling, had introduced order and good government, toleration and justice, wherever he conquered; that he conquered only that he might introduce those principles; that he made no distinction between men on account of their diversity of race or of religious belief; they, apt to believe in the incarnation of the deity, must have recognised something more than ordinarily human, something approaching to the divine and beneficent, in the conduct of Akbar.

His toleration was so absolute, his trust, once given, so thorough, his principles so large and so generous, that, despite the prejudices of their birth, their religion, their surroundings, they yielded to the fascination. And when, in return, Akbar asked them to renounce one long-standing prejudice which went counter to the great principle which they recognised as the corner-stone of the new system, the prejudice which taught them to regard other men, because they were not Hindus, as impure and unclean, they all, with one marked exception, gave way. They recognised that