Fall of the Mughal Empire v1.c2.3

v1.c2.3

The light of our fathers' experience is indispensably necessary for guiding aright the steps of those who would rule the destinies of our people in the present. Happily, such light is available in unthought of profusion. The dissolution of the old order in India did not form a dark age, during which the activity of the human mind ceased or the human brain and the human hand left no memorial of their working. On the contrary, the Eighteenth Century in India is illumined for its historian by a host of witnesses of the most diverse races, creeds and tongues and recording events as looked at from all different points of view. We, no doubt, lack detailed official annals like those written for Akbar and his four immediate successors; but the Indian actors in the scenes and detached foreign observers alike have left a multitude of private memoirs and journals which are in some respects of even greater value than the former class of works though lacking in their minuteness of dates and names. For this century masses of manuscript news-letters have been preserved, giving us the current news in the freshest form. The records of the Maratha Government have at last been made available to students in their entirety. The State-papers of the English and the French have been printed in our own lifetime, and of the still unprinted material in these languages preserved in public libraries, most helpful lists have been published (notably Hills' Home Miscellaneous and the Calendar of Persian Correspondence ) The travel-books, diaries and memoirs of the early Europeans in India form a vast literature, now mostly too rare to be obtained easily, but often giving priceless information on specific points and lighting up the economic and social condition of the age as no native work does.