minor principalities, were placed under the immediate protection and guarantee of the British government. The tributes claimed from the lesser States by the Maratha rulers were fixed and confirmed, upon the condition 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 us-Sindia, Holkar, and the Bhonsla of Nágpore-were definitely bound over to keep the peace of India. The Pindáris, 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 shut up within 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 our own 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 been also taken against their revival. Henceforward it became the universal principle of public policy that every State in India (outside the Punjab and Sinde) should make over the control of its foreign relations to the British govern. ment, should submit all external disputes to British arbitration, and should defer to British advice regarding internal management so far as might be necessary to cure disorders or scandalous misrule. A British

Resident was appointed to the courts of all the greater prinçes as the agency for the exercise of these high functions; while the subsidiary forces and the contingents furnished by the States placed the supreme military command everywhere under British direction.

This great political settlement of central India-the disarmament and pacification of the military chiefships, and the adjustment of distinct relations of supremacy and subordination-established universal recognition of the cardinal principle upon which the fabric of British dominion in India has been built up. It completed and consolidated the policy of Lord Wellesley. The last shadow of interference by any European rival had now for the time faded away. The contest with the native States for ascendancy was finally decided, and not only the right but the duty of intervention for the security and tranquillity of the Indian people was now everywhere acknowledged, from the two seas northward up to Sinde and the Sutlej river. From the Sinde frontier at the mouths of the Indus river, down the west coast of the peninsula to Cape Comorin, and thence north-eastward again along the Bay of Bengal to the frontier of Burmah, the whole sea-line of India was under our authority. On the north we held a long belt of the Himalayan highlands, and our political jurisdiction extended to the western edge of the deserts bordering on upper Sinde and the Punjab. The largest, most important, and by far the most valuable portion of this region was now under our direct administration; the rest was under our sovereign influence. Taking the natural boundaries of India to be the ocean and the mountains, it may be said that our empire now commanded the whole circuit of its sea frontier, that it was securely settled upon

a base in the Himalayas, and that its western flank was to a great extent covered by the cis-Indus desert. On two sections, and two only, the frontier was still unstable and liable to disturbance-on the north-east, where the Burmese were advancing into Assam, and on the north-west, where the Sikh kingdom beyond the Sutlej had acquired formidable fighting strength under Ranjit Singh.

CHAPTER XVII

COMPLETION OF DOMINION (1823-1849).

SECTION I. The First Burmese War.

Up to this epoch the scene of all the East India Company's wars has been within India; and for the last fifty years-from the withdrawal of the French in 1763 to the end of the Pindári war in 1818 our antagonists have been the native Indian powers. As the expansion of our dominion carried us so much nearer to foreign Asiatic countries, our rapid approach to the geographical limits of India proper discovered for us fresh complications, and we were now on the brink of collision with new races. The first non-Indian power that provoked us to actual hostility had been the Gurkha chiefship; but as Nepal lies on the southern slopes of the Himalayas its population belongs, by blood and religion, for the most part to Hinduism. The second non-Indian State that challenged us from beyond the Indian frontier was the kingdom of a people differing entirely from Indian races, the Burmese.

It is a remarkable coincidence that during the first fifty years occupied by the rise of the English dominion. in India, other rulerships were being founded simultaneously, by a not dissimilar process, around us. In the course of that period (1757-1805) the tribes of

Afghanistan had been collected into subjection to one kingdom under the dynasty of Ahmed Shah; the petty chiefships, Hindu and Mahomedan, of the Punjab had been welded into a military despotism by the strong hand of Ranjit Singh; and the Rájas on the lower highlands of the Himalayas had submitted to the domination of Nepal. Lastly, about the time when Clive was subduing Bengal, a Burmese military leader had established by conquest a rulership which had its capital in the plains traversed by the Irawádi river and its principal affluents, from the upper waters of those rivers down to the sea. The kingdom of Burmah, founded in 1757 by Alompra's subjugation of Pegu, now included not only the open tracts about the Irawádi and the Salween-extending from the hills out of which these rivers issue to the low-lying sea-coast at their mouths-it also stretched far southward down the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal. It was absorbing all the mountainous region overhanging the eastern land frontier of India; and the Burmese armies were pressing westward across the watershed of those mountains through the upland country about the Brahmaputra towards the great alluvial plains of eastern Bengal. There had consequently been frequent disputes on that border between the Anglo-Indian and the Burmese authorities, for the dividing-line was unsettled and variable, and on both sides the landmarks had been unavoidably set forward in pioneering fashion, until they were separated only by strips of semi-dependent tribal lands and spheres of influence from which each party desired to exclude the other. It will be remembered that along all the ranges of the mountains that cut off the Indian plains from the rest of the Asiatic continent, there runs an unbroken fringe of rugged