of these little communities, when left unmolested, was in itself sufficient to secure the rights and enforce the duties of all the different members; and all they wanted from their government was moderation in the land taxes, and protection from external violence.  Arrian says:  ’If any intestine war happens to break forth among the Indians, it is deemed a heinous crime either to seize the husbandmen or spoil their harvest.  All the rest wage war against each other, and kill and slay as they think convenient, while they live quietly and peaceably among them, and employ themselves at their rural affairs either in their fields or vineyards.’[13] I am afraid armies were not much more disposed to forbearance in the days of Alexander than at present, and that his followers must have supposed they remained untouched, merely because they heard of their sudden rise again from their ruins by that spirit of moral and political vitality with which necessity seems to have endowed them.[14]

During the early part of his life and reign, Aurangzeb was employed in conquering and destroying the two independent kingdoms of Golconda and Bijapur in the Deccan, which he formed into two provinces governed by viceroys.  Each had had an army of above a hundred thousand men while independent.  The officers and soldiers of these armies had nothing but their courage and their swords to depend upon for their subsistence.  Finding no longer any employment under settled and legitimate authority in defending the life, property, and independence of the people, they were obliged to seek it around the standards of lawless freebooters; and upon the ruins of these independent kingdoms and their disbanded armies rose the Maratha power, the hydra-headed monster which Aurangzeb thus created by his ambition, and spent the last twenty years of his life in vain attempts to crush.[15] The monster has been since crushed by being deprived of its Peshwa, the head which alone could infuse into all the members of the confederacy a feeling of nationality, and direct all their efforts, when required, to one common object.  Sindhia, the chief of Gwalior, is one of the surviving members of this great confederacy—­the rest are the Holkars of Indore, the Bhonslas of Nagpur, and the Gaikwars of Baroda,[16] the grandchildren of the commandants of predatory armies, who formed capital cities out of their standing camps in the countries they invaded and conquered in the name of their head, the Satara Raja,[17] and afterwards in that of his mayor of the palace, the Peshwa.  There is not now the slightest feeling of nationality left among the Maratha States, either collectively or individually.[18] There is not the slightest feeling of sympathy between the mass of the people and the chief who rules over them, and his public establishments.  To maintain these public establishments he everywhere plunders the people, who most heartily detest him and them.  These public establishments are composed of men of