Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c59.s3.2

v4.c59.s3.2

The subsidiary alliance system, while it fully met the dangers of foreign invasion and civil war, was not an un- *mixed blessing.* It robbed the people of the Protected States of the power of rebellion as the natural curative of misgovernment. Now began a rapid and hopeless decline in the moral character of our ruling Rajas and Nawābs. They continued to live as autocrats without the moral justification of being the leaders in war and fathers of clans that the founders of their dynasties had been. Civil war, as a test for the survival of the fittest to rule, was now barred out by British bayonets. As Sir Thomas Munro justly observed, “A subsidiary force has a natural tendency to render the government of every country in which it exists, weak and oppressive; to extinguish all honourable spirit among the higher classes of society. . . . It renders the prince on the throne indolent by teaching him to trust to strangers for his security; and cruel and avaricious by showing him that he has nothing to fear from the hatred of his subjects.”* Thus, as the result of a century and a half of enlightened British rule, the case of the Protected Princes in India was hopeless. Nothing could possibly keep them alive in the modern order which burst upon India on 16th August 1947.