242

INDIA

admit of non-interference for a period much longer than
the living authority of some prince whose strength of
character is sufficiently exceptional to lift him above the
temptations that beset him on every side, and whose
governing powers are exercised in a spirit of justice and
mercy. Too often a wise and beneficent rule is followed
by the haphazard administration of the vicious spendthrift,
and the ruin of a country is only to be averted by firm
and judicious interference. But it is not until the internal
affairs of a state have become scandalously bad that the
Indian . Government ever exercises its right of direct
control.
There are, indeed, certain rights which the supreme
Government must always assert. Political communications
between the various native states or with any foreign power
can only be carried on through its agency; and no native
state can maintain an army which is obviously unnecessary
 for purposes of internal administration. Also any
native chief can be arraigned and “tried for a crime of
special atrocity by a tribunal constituted by the British
Government,” and it is unfortunately the fact that such
rights have often had to be asserted.
“There is always much misunderstanding about the
status of native states, and of the chief who governs
them. It is often believed that they are principalities
which for some reason or other have been omitted from
the general confiscation attendant on our advance in
[ndia, and that they represent the rights of ancient
dynasties, or the glorious heritage of a nobility whose
patent is so old as to be prehistoric, and who have escaped,
more by good fortune than anything else, the imposition
of a rule which elsewhere has been forced on peoples who
hitherto had been governed by princes of their own race.
In the majority of cases nothing can be further from the
truth. Some of them indeed have existed in something
of the same form that they exist to-day for many centuries,
and their chiefs represent a race of departed princes who
trace their lineage back into the obscurity of the prehistoric
 past. These are the states that are thoroughly