Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/379

Rh for resistance in the field was thus broken in their hands. In the place of the numerous battalions, many thousands strong, that had been maintained under foreign officers by the foremost Mohammedan and Maratha states, Lord Wellesley's subsidiary treaties now substituted several divisions of Anglo-Indian troops, amounting in all to twenty-two thousand men, cantoned within the jurisdictions or on the borders of these very native states, and paid from their revenues. The employment of foreign officers, unless by permission, was thenceforward prohibited; while the effect of the treaties was to interdict any hostilities between state and state – since all disputes must be referred to British arbitration – to confine their rulers within the territorial limits authorized by the supreme government, to prevent their future combination for any purpose injurious to British interests, and finally to block up all avenues of communication between these states and any foreign power.

Up to this time the acquisitions of the Maratha chiefs in Central India, which had been wrested bit by bit from different owners at various times, had been so intermixed with the lands of the Nizam, of the Peshwa, and of the Rajput princes as to produce an entanglement of territorial and revenue rights that furnished, as it was intended to furnish, ample pretexts for further quarrel and encroachment. Lord Wellesley's policy was, in the first place, to rearrange the political map in this part of India so as to circumscribe each Maratha chiefship within distinct boundaries. His