Page:Akbar and the Rise of the Mughal Empire.djvu/161

154 Western India, including Gujarát and Khándesh, ready to seize an opportunity, to sit still was to invite attack. He was forced to go forward. The experience of the past, and the events daily coming under his notice, alike proved that there must be but one paramount authority in India, if India was to enjoy the blessings of internal peace.

During those twenty years he had had many intervals of leisure which he had employed in discussing with those about him the problem of founding a system of government which should retain by the sympathy of the people all that was being conquered. He had convinced his own mind that the old methods were obsolete; that to hold India by maintaining standing armies in the several provinces, and to take no account of the feelings, the traditions, the longings, the aspirations, of the children of the soil, – of all the races in the world the most inclined to poetry and sentiment, and attached by the strongest ties that can appeal to mankind to the traditions of their fathers – would be impossible.

That system, tried for more than four centuries, had invariably broken down, if not in the hands of the promulgator of it, certainly in those of a near successor. Yet none of those who had gone before him had attempted any other. His illustrious grandfather, who had some glimmering of the necessity, had not been allotted the necessary time, for he too had had to conquer to remain. His father had more than almost any of the Afghán sovereigns