Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajput States of India v3.c42.s2.t1.120

v3.c42.s2.t1.120

Yet vast as this system is, overwhelming as it would seem to most minds, it formed but a part of the political engine conducted and kept in action by his single powers. The details of his administration, internal as well as external, demanded unremitted vigilance. The formation, the maintenance, and discipline of an army of twenty thousand men, his fortresses, arsenals, and their complicated minutiae, were amply sufficient for one mind. The daily account from his police, consisting of several hundred emissaries, besides the equally numerous reports from the head of each district, would have distracted an ordinary head, “for the winds could not enter and leave Haraoti without being reported.” But when, in addition to all this, it is known that the regent was a practical merchant, a speculator in exchanges, that he encouraged the mechanical arts, fostered foreign industry, pursued even horticulture, and, to use his own words, “considered no trouble thrown away which made the rupee return sixteen and a half annas, with whom can he be compared ? ” 1 Literature, philosophy, and *excerptae* from the grand historical epics, were the amusements of his hours of relaxation ; but here we anticipate, for we have not yet finished the review of his economical character. His monopolies, especially that of grain, not only influenced his own market, but affected all the adjacent countries ; and when speculation in opium ran to such a demoralizing excess in consequence of the British Government monopolizing the entire produce of the poppy cultivated throughout Malwa, he took advantage of the mania, and by his sales or purchases raised or depressed the market at pleasure. His gardens, scattered throughout the country, still supply the markets of the towns and capital with vegetables, and his forests furnish them with fuel.