them, I much fear that the boasted sovereignty of Benares, which was held up as an acquisition almost obtruded on the Company against my consent and opinion, (for I acknowledge that even then I foresaw many difficulties and inconveniences in its future exercise,)—­I fear, I say, that this sovereignty will be found a burden instead of a benefit, a heavy clog rather than a precious gem to its present possessors:  I mean, unless the whole of our territory in that quarter shall be rounded and made an uniform compact body by one grand and systematic arrangement,—­such an arrangement as shall do away all the mischiefs, doubts, and inconveniences (both to the governors and the governed) arising from the variety of tenures, rights, and claims in all cases of landed property and feudal jurisdiction in India, from the informality, invalidity, and instability of all engagements in so divided and unsettled a state of society, and from the unavoidable anarchy and confusion of different laws, religions, and prejudices, moral, civil, and political, all jumbled together in one unnatural and discordant mass.  Every part of Hindostan has been constantly exposed to these and similar disadvantages ever since the Mahometan conquests.  The Hindoos, who never incorporated with their conquerors, were kept in order only by the strong hand of power.  The constant necessity of similar exertions would increase at once their energy and extent.  So that rebellion itself is the parent and promoter of despotism.  Sovereignty in India implies nothing else.  For I know not how we can form an estimate of its powers, but from its visible effects; and those are everywhere the same from Cabool to Assam.  The whole history of Asia is nothing more than precedents to prove the invariable exercise of arbitrary power.  To all this I strongly alluded in the minutes I delivered in Council, when the treaty with the new Vizier was on foot in 1775; and I wished to make Cheyt Sing independent, because in India dependence included a thousand evils, many of which I enumerated at that time, and they are entered in the ninth clause of the first section of this charge.  I knew the powers with which an Indian sovereignty is armed, and the dangers to which tributaries are exposed.  I knew, that, from the history of Asia, and from the very nature of mankind, the subjects of a despotic empire are always vigilant for the moment to rebel, and the sovereign is ever jealous of rebellious intentions.  A zemindar is an Indian subject, and as such exposed to the common lot of his fellows. The mean and depraved state of a mere zemindar is therefore this very dependence above mentioned on a despotic government, this very proneness to shake off his allegiance, and this very exposure to continual danger from his sovereign’s jealousy, which are consequent on the political state of Hindostanic governments.  Bulwant Sing, if he had been, and Cheyt Sing, as long as he was, a zemindar, stood exactly in this mean and depraved state by the constitution of his country.  I did not make it for him, but would have secured him from it.  Those who made him a zemindar entailed upon him the consequences of so mean and depraved a tenure.  Aliverdy Khan and Cossim Ali fined all their zemindars on the necessities of war, and on every pretence either of court necessity or court extravagance.”