A History of the Mahrattas v2.c35.17

v2.c35.17

After the dispatch of the first letters, the Supreme Government, even for the sake of consistency, would have been obliged to regulate their future measures by the tenor of those orders. Advices having been received of the successes in Guzerat, it seemed not improbable that a revolution might have taken place before Colonel Upton’s arrival at Poona. Adopting, therefore, the same equitable principle with which they had professed to set out, that a substantive state has a right to make any change in its internal government which only affects itself, the envoy was instructed to negotiate a peace with either party whom he might find the acknowledged authority in the empire. But the Governor-General and Council had in effect already become parties; and the members of the Bombay Government, who felt and wrote as if the Supreme Government had ranged themselves on the side of their enemies, remark with some justice in one of their dispatches to the Court of Directors, ‘they have acknowledged the legitimacy of the government of the ministers, before they could have any competent knowledge of the justice of their pretensions.’