Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c51.s6.11

v4.c51.s6.11

The effect of this financial stringency was aggravated by the short-sighted selfishness of every Maratha prince; he built up a private treasure-hoard of his own while letting his State go to the dogs for lack of the necessary income. As Captain Broughton wrote from Daulat Rao Sindhia's camp in May 1809,—"While Sindhia is daily submitting to these and similar insults [from his starving unpaid soldiery and servants], he possesses a privy purse, stocked, it is said, to the amount of fifty lakhs; which no distress either to himself or his troops is sufficiently powerful to induce him to violate, it being an established rule to put as much as possible into it, but never to take anything out." [Letters from a Maratha Camp, p. 106.]