Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/164

 132 MOHAMMAD TAGHLAK AND FIROZ SHAH he left a shattered empire and an impoverished and rebellious people. Yet he began his reign with everything in his favour. He followed a deeply revered father, and he had a high reputation of his own. He was known to be a great general, and his private life was temperate and even austere. All India was quiet, and the distant provinces had been recovered. The suspicion that his father's sudden end was deliberately planned by the son may have set the people against him; but neither Barani nor Firishta support the story, and it is not certain that it was generally believed. Even if it were, such murders were too common to form an ineffaceable stigma. Mo- hammad Taghlak failed by his own mistaken govern- ment, not on account of an initial crime. As a rule he never consulted anybody, and formed his projects unassisted; but one day he sent for the historian Barani, who was often in attendance at court, and frankly discussed affairs with him. " My kingdom is diseased," he complained, " and no treatment cures it. The physician cures the headache, and fever fol- lows; he strives to allay the fever, and something else supervenes. So in my kingdom disorders have broken out; if I suppress them in one place, they appear in another; if I allay them in one district, another becomes disturbed. What have former kings said about these disorders'? ' : The man of history cited instances of the abdication of kings in favour of their sons, and of a sovereign's retirement from the affairs of state, which were left to wise vizirs. The Sultan seemed to approve