Page:Akbar and the Rise of the Mughal Empire.djvu/85

78 outside aid: whilst the Emperor should give unity to the whole by visiting each division in turn with an army of twelve thousand horse, inspecting the local forces and examining the general condition of the province. The project was full of defects. It would have been a bad mode of administration even had the sovereign been always more capable than his generals. It could not have lasted a year had he been less so.

The sudden death of Humáyún came to interfere with, to prevent the execution of, this plan. Then followed the military events culminating in the triumph of Pánípat. That battle placed the young Akbar in a position his grandfather Bábar had occupied exactly thirty years before. Then, it had given Bábar the opportunity, of which he availed himself, to conquer North-western India, Behar, and part of Central India. A similar opportunity was given by the second battle of Pánípat to Akbar. On that field he had conquered the only enemy capable of coping with him seriously. As far as conquest then was concerned, his task was easy. But to make that conquest enduring, to consolidate the different provinces and the diverse nationalities, to devise and introduce a system so centralising as to make the influence of the Emperor permeate through every town and every province, and yet not sufficiently centralising to kill local traditions, local customs, local habits of thought, – that was a task his grandfather had never attempted; which, to his father, would have seemed an impossibility, even if it had occurred or