Page:Ranjit Singh (Griffin).djvu/20

14 questions their right to rule than he rebels against the sunshine which ripens his harvest or the storm which blasts it.

There are many principalities to-day in India, some of them of the first rank, whose history would seem, on superficial examination, to refute the idea that for the military adventurer the path of success is a difficult one. The great State of Haidarábád was founded by a rebellious viceroy of the Delhi emperors; the Maráthá States of Baroda, Gwalior, and Indore, and the Muhammadan chiefship of Bhopal were formed, in the last century, by successful generals of obscure origin; and the Mahárájás of Kashmír were created by the British Government in 1846. But it is most improbable that the ruling families in these States would have retained the power which was seized by their founders, had it not been for the circumstance that a strange and unknown volcanic force made its way through the soft and yielding strata of Indian society and crystallised them into their present form. This force was the rising power of the English, which, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ever increased in intensity. The victories of the British Government were won by gallantry or diplomacy, by force or by fraud; but its advance, though sometimes checked, was never long delayed. All the warlike races in India threw themselves by turns on this new and terrible enemy and were shattered and repulsed; till, at last, it stood revealed as the sole inheritor of the Empire of the Mughals and