Fall of the Mughal Empire v1.c6.s3.4

v1.c6.s3.4

Where the king has no inborn capacity to rule a realm, government by a responsible prime minister is the only alternative, unless administration is to disappear from the country and the State to break up. But no *fainéant* Mughal Emperor would give his wazir the same chance of working that George II gave to Walpole or Pitt with the happiest results for both king and people. Muhammad Shāh, like Farrukh-siyar, was too imbecile and inconstant to inaugurate any statesmanlike policy, conduct operations in the field, or control his officers; but he had cunning enough to countenance and even initiate conspiracies among his personal favourites against the publicly responsible wazir and secretly to lend the prestige of his name to the rebellions of the wazir's rivals. Therefore, an honest and capable wazir, under such a sovereign, would soon discover that if he insisted on administrative vigour and purity or tried to force honesty and consistency of policy on the Emperor, he would be only courting his own death, and that if he wished to escape the fate of the Sayyid brothers he must give up all noble ambitions and statesmanly projects and swim with the current, leaving the realm to drift. He would probably console himself with the belief that if the State escaped a catastrophe in his own time, he had done enough for one man.