in intr_i_gue: _o_, as in c_o_ld: _u_, as in b_u_ll: _u_, as in
s_u_re.

{5}

THE EMPEROR AKBAR

CHAPTER I
THE ARGUMENT

I crave the indulgence of the reader whilst I explain as briefly as
possible the plan upon which I have written this short life of the
great sovereign who firmly established the Mughal dynasty in
India.[1]

[Footnote 1: For the purposes of this sketch I have referred to the
following authorities: _Memoirs of Babar_, written by himself, and
translated by Leyden and Erskine; Erskine's _Babar and Humayun_; _The
Ain-i-Akbari_ (Blochmann's translation); _The History of India, as
told by its own Historians_, edited from the posthumous papers of Sir
H. M. Elliot, K.C.B., by Professor Dowson; Dow's _Ferishta_;
Elphinstone's _History of India_; Tod's _Annals of Rajast'han_, and
various other works.]

The original conception of such an empire was not Akbar's own. His
grandfather, Babar, had conquered a great portion of India, but
during the five years which elapsed between the conquest and his
death, Babar enjoyed but few opportunities of donning the robe of the
administrator. By the rivals whom he had overthrown and by the
children of the soil, Babar was alike regarded as a conqueror, and as
nothing more. A man of remarkable ability, who had spent all his life
in arms, he was really an adventurer, though a brilliant adventurer,
who, soaring above his contemporaries in genius, taught in the rough
school of adversity, had beheld from his eyrie at Kabul the
distracted condition {6} of fertile Hindustan, and had dashed down
upon her plains with a force that was irresistible. Such was Babar, a
man greatly in advance of his age, generous, affectionate, lofty in
his views, yet, in his connection with Hindustan, but little more
than a conqueror. He had no time to think of any other system of
administration than the system with which he had been familiar all
his life, and which had been the system introduced by his Afghan
predecessors into India, the system of governing by means of large
camps, each commanded by a general devoted to himself, and each
occupying a central position in a province. It is a question whether
the central idea of Babar's policy was not the creation of an empire
in Central Asia rather than of an empire in India.

Into this system the welfare of the children of the soil did not
enter. Possibly, if Babar had lived, and had lived in the enjoyment
of his great abilities, he m