deration under this Muhammadan
sovereign far greater and wider-reaching than that which would have
accrued to them as independent rulers of their ancestral dominions.
They governed imperial provinces and commanded imperial armies. They
were admitted to the closest councils of the prince whose main object
was to obliterate all the dissensions and prejudices of the past,
and, without diminishing the real power of the local princes who
entered into his scheme, to weld together, to unite under one supreme
head, without loss of dignity and self-respect to anyone, the
provinces till then disunited and hostile to one another.

One of the means which Akbar employed to this end was that of
marriage between himself, his family, {130} and the daughters of the
indigenous princes. There was, he well knew, no such equaliser as
marriage. The Rajput princes could not fail to feel that their
relationship to the heir to the throne, often to the throne itself,
assured their position. When they reflected on the condition of
Hindustan prior to his rule; how the Muhammadan conquests of the
preceding five centuries had introduced strife and disorder without
cohesion, and that this man, coming upon them as a boy, inexperienced
and untried in the art of ruling, had introduced order and good
government, toleration and justice, wherever he conquered; that he
conquered only that he might introduce those principles; that he made
no distinction between men on account of their diversity of race or
of religious belief; they, apt to believe in the incarnation of the
deity, must have recognised something more than ordinarily human,
something approaching to the divine and beneficent, in the conduct of
Akbar.

His toleration was so absolute, his trust, once given, so thorough,
his principles so large and so generous, that, despite the prejudices
of their birth, their religion, their surroundings, they yielded to
the fascination. And when, in return, Akbar asked them to renounce
one long-standing prejudice which went counter to the great principle
which they recognised as the corner-stone of the new system, the
prejudice which taught them to regard other men, because they were
not Hindus, as impure and unclean, they all, with one marked
exception, gave way. They recognised that {131} a principle such as
that was not to be limited; that their practical renunciation of that
portion of their narrow creed which forbade marriages with those of a
different ra