Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/432

382 The tributes claimed from the lesser states by the Maratha rulers were fixed and confirmed, upon conditions that payment should be made through the British treasury.

By these measures the Maratha rulership of the Peshwa was now finally extinguished, and the three leading families that had so often opposed the British, Sindhia, Holkar, and the Bhonsla of Nagpur, were definitely bound over to keep the peace of India. The Pindaris, who were merely the remnants of the once flourishing predatory system, the dregs of the roving bands that had harried India during a century of anarchy, were dispersed or exterminated. The Maratha states were restricted to carefully demarcated limits; the trades of marauding conquest and of mere brigandage on a large scale alike disappeared; the whole species vanished with the change of those conditions of government and society by which it had been engendered.

The result was to secure for the British provinces unbroken immunity from the hostile attacks or plundering inroads to which they were always exposed so long as rapine and violence thrived in the centre of India. But it would have been useless to put down these enormous evils unless precautions had also been taken against their revival. Henceforward it became the universal principle of public policy that every state in India (outside the Panjab and Sind) should make over the control of its foreign relations to the British government, should submit all external disputes to British arbitration, and should defer to British advice