Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/394

 346 THE STATIONARY PERIOD sacrificed for tranquillity and security within a con- tracted circle; and lie withdrew from every kind of relation with the native states to which the English were not specifically pledged by treaty. It will be found that whenever the Governor-Generalship has been held by an Anglo-Indian official, annexations have been exceedingly rare and the expanding movement has slackened; but Sir George Barlow even took a step backward. The subsidiary alliance with Sindhia, pro- jected by Lord Wellesley, was abandoned; the minor principalities adjacent to or intermixed with the Maratha possessions were left to their fate ; the English proclaimed an intention of living apart from broils, of dissociating themselves from the general concerns of India at large, and of improving their own property without taking part in the quarrels or grievances of their neighbours. If, indeed, Sir George Barlow had adopted to their full extent the views that were pressed upon him by the authorities in England at this period, he would have disconnected the British government from the sub- sidiary treaties which invested it with paramount in- fluence in the affairs of the two great Maratha and Mohammedan states, ruled by the Peshwa at Poona and by the Nizam at Haidarabad. But the result would have been to undo the work of Lord Wellesley, to ab- dicate the ascendency that the British had attained, and to throw open again the field of Central India to the Marathas, who would at once have reoccupied all the ground that the English should have abandoned.