Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/148

140 sovereignty of the State should be permitted to pass to an adopted child.

Lord Dalhousie and his advisers decided the question by reference to the misery which the misgovernment of the subordinate native princes had brought upon the people of Jhánsí, and its present Northern district Jaláun, during the previous thirty years. The British Government as the Paramount Power had been responsible for that misgovernment, and yet had been unable to prevent it. The misrule of the two first Rajas, whom we set up in Jhánsí, ruined and drove away the cultivators, and reduced the revenues from £180,000 to £30,000 a year. In Jaláun, where a succession by adoption had been permitted in 1832, Lord Auckland thus described the results in 1840. 'In the course of nine or ten years, the land had been most profusely alienated; debts to the amount of thirty lacs had been contracted; extensive districts had been mortgaged as a security for them; there was neither order nor security in the territory; every village was exposed to the attacks of plunderers; cultivation was deserted; and a country which had been fruitful and prosperous, was from day to day becoming desolate .'

'Warned by these results, I hold,' wrote Lord Dalhousie, 'that sound policy combines with duty