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 CHAPTER VI

Annexation of Hindu States

I have, according to the plan of this little volume as set forth in Chapter I, exhibited Lord Dalhousie's frontier conquests in the form of a consecutive narrative, in order that I may now deal with his internal policy of consolidation without interruption and as a whole. The most conspicuous, although not the most important or most permanent, feature of that policy of consolidation was his treatment of the dependent Native States.

In applying the doctrine of lapse to the Hindu chiefdoms, on default of natural successors or of an heir legally adopted with the sanction of the Ruling Power, Lord Dalhousie merely carried out the declared law of the case, and the deliberately formulated policy of the Government of India, years before he arrived in the country.

In so doing, however, Lord Dalhousie became the unconscious but effective instrument by which the old India of Lord Wellesley at the beginning of the century was prepared for its conversion, in 1858, into the new India of the Queen. The Government in India, the Court of Directors at