How important it is to associate the Princes of India with the purposes of our Indian policy has seldom been more clearly shown than during these last troublous years when the forces of disaffection have revealed themselves as a serious public danger.  The principle of authority cannot be attacked in British India without suffering diminution in the Native States.  They are not shut up in watertight compartments and sedition cannot be preached on one side of a border, which in most cases is merely an administrative boundary line, without finding an echo on the other side.  The prestige of an Indian Prince in his own land is great.  It is rooted in most cases in ancient traditions to which no alien rulers can appeal.  Nevertheless some of the most experienced and enlightened of the ruling chiefs showed a much earlier and livelier appreciation of the subversive tendencies of Indian unrest than those responsible for the governance of British India.  Some of them, like the Maharajahs of Kolhapur and of Patiala, have been brought face to face with the same violent, and even with the same criminal, methods of agitation as the Government of India has had to deal with in provinces under British administration.  The Maharajah of Jaipur and Maharajah Scindia felt themselves constrained just about a year ago to enact vigorous measures on their own account against sedition and against the importation into their States of seditious literature which was still allowed to circulate with impunity in British India, whilst the State of Bikanir was the first to introduce an Explosive Substances Act immediately after the epidemic of bomb-throwing had broken out in Bengal.  Other States have also taken strong preventive measures, but many have fortunately been spared so far any serious trouble within their own borders, and their rulers have been able to study the problem merely as interested observers and from the point of view of the general welfare of the country.

On August 65 1909, the Viceroy took the unusual step of communicating direct with all the principal ruling Princes and Chiefs of India on the subject of the Active unrest prevalent in many parts of the country, and invited an exchange of opinions “with a view to mutual co-operation against a common danger.”  Some doubts were then expressed as to the wisdom of such a course, on the ground that it might create in the protected States an impression of exaggerated alarm.  ’But the tone and substance of the replies which his Excellency’s communication elicited showed that there was no reason for any such apprehensions.  The Ruling Chiefs, on the contrary, appreciated and reciprocated the confidence reposed in them, and their replies, indeed, constitute an exceptionally interesting and instructive set of documents; for the very diversity of origin and traditions and influence gives peculiar weight to the position assumed by the rulers of the Native States towards the forces of active unrest in India.  Had those forces merely been engaged in a legitimate struggle for the enlargement of Indian rights and liberties, it is scarcely conceivable that the Ruling Princes and Chiefs should have passed judgment against them with such overwhelming unanimity.