Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/185

Rh nor increase the yearly allowance. The country would not endure it.

The humiliating ceremonies, so tenaciously required by the Emperor on receiving any member of the English Government, had become increasingly irksome and annoying as time rolled on and this condition of things developed, until it began to be felt that the Great Mogul pageant was a bore. Lord Amherst, a former Governor-General, at length refused to visit the Emperor if expected, according to Delhi court etiquette, to do so with bare feet, bowed head, and joined hands. He declared he would only visit him on terms of honorable equality, and not as an inferior. Both he and Lord Bentinck refused any longer to stand in “the Presence,” but demanded a State chair on the right hand of the Emperor, and to be received as an equal. This shocked the Emperor's feelings, but he had to give in. Then came the suspension of the “Nuzzer”—the yearly present—a symbol of allegiance or confession of suzerainty. The value was not withheld, but added to the yearly allowance; but the Emperor refused to accept it in this form.

In 1849, on the death of the heir apparent, Lord Dalhousie, then Governor-General, opened negotiations designed to abolish this pageant of the Great Mogul, and offered terms to the next heir to abdicate the throne, vacate the Delhi Palace, and sink their high titles, retiring to the Kootub Palace and a private position, so that the large family might be placed under proper restrictions and required to obtain education, and fit themselves for stations where they could earn their living. But the merciful and wise proposal was misapprehended by them: instead of appreciating it, it thoroughly alarmed them. They chose to consider that their very existence was attacked. They would rather continue to fester and starve together within those walls than to separate and rouse themselves to action and honest employment; so they began to talk louder than ever about their “wrongs,” and the “insults” offered them by the English Government, prominent among which was the refusal any longer to give to each of these princes, whenever