Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/360

312 the moment when they were at bitter, irreconcilable enmity with the English, and were actually proclaiming their intention of striking, if possible, at the British possessions in the East. He received the plainest warning that the English would wrest the sword out of any hand that showed the slightest intention of drawing it against them in such a quarrel; and he might have reflected that while his friends were far distant, the English, backed by the native powers whom he had alarmed, were close on his frontier. But he knew that submission to the English demands meant subordination to their power, disarmament, the loss of his independence, and reduction to the rank of a prince, whose foreign relations and military establishments would be regulated strictly by English policy; and his fierce intractable temper drove him into a hopeless struggle.

The same situation has frequently recurred since, though not with the same intensity; the same option has been offered to other states and rulers. And the present form and constitution of the British Empire in India, with its vast provinces and numerous feudatories, represents historically the gradual incorporation under one dominion of states that have submitted and states that have been forcibly subdued. As the old Moghul Empire had been built up by a very similar process of gradual conquest, so, when that great edifice fell to pieces, it was certain that the fragments would soon gravitate again toward the attraction of some central rulership, whose protection would be sought by all the weaker chiefships, and whose superiority the