Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/242

 196 THE EMPEROR BABAR subduing Bihar, where Husain, the last King of Jaunpur, had taken refuge, and by a treaty of alliance with the King of Bengal it was arranged that the dominion of Delhi should bound that of Bengal, as in former times. The Bajputs of Dholpur, Chanderi, and Gwalior sub- mitted; and Sikandar's kingdom, including the Panjab, the Doab, Jaunpur, Oudh, Bihar, Tirhut, and the country between the Sutlaj and Bandelkhand, began to recall the earlier supremacy of Delhi. The resemblance was only on the surface, however, and, as Erskine has pointed out in his judicious history, " these extensive possessions, though under one king, had no very strong principle of cohesion. The monarchy was a congeries of nearly independent principalities, jagirs, and provinces, each ruled by a hereditary chief, or by a zamindar or delegate from Delhi; and the inhabi- tants looked more to their immediate governors, who had absolute power in the province and in whose hands con- sequently lay their happiness or misery, than to a distant and little known sovereign. It was the individual, not the law, that reigned. The Lodi princes, not merely to strengthen their own power, but from necessity, had in general committed the government of the provinces and the chief offices of trust to their own countrymen, the Afghans; so that men of the Lodi, Fermuli, and Lohani tribes held all the principal jagirs; which from the habitual modes of thinking of their race they con- sidered as their own of right and purchased by their swords rather than as due to any bounty or liberality on the part of the sovereign."