ight have come to see, as his grandson
saw, that such a system was practically unsound; that it was wanting
in the great principle of cohesion, of uniting the interests of the
conquering and the conquered; that it secured no attachment, and
conciliated no prejudices; that it remained, without roots, exposed
to all the storms of fortune. We, who know Babar by his memoirs, in
which he unfolds the secrets of his heart, confesses all his faults,
and details all his ambitions, may think that he might have done this
if he had had the opportunity. But the opportunity was denied to him.
The time between the first battle of Panipat, which gave him {7} the
north-western provinces of India, and his death, was too short to
allow him to think of much more than the securing of his conquests,
and the adding to them of additional provinces. He entered India a
conqueror. He remained a conqueror, and nothing more, during the five
years he ruled at Agra.

His son, Humayun, was not qualified by nature to perform the task
which Babar had been obliged to neglect. His character, flighty and
unstable, and his abilities, wanting in the constructive faculty,
alike unfitted him for the duty. He ruled eight years in India
without contributing a single stone to the foundation of an empire
that was to remain. When, at the end of that period, his empire fell,
as had fallen the kingdoms of his Afghan predecessors, and from the
same cause, the absence of any roots in the soil, the result of a
single defeat in the field, he lost at one blow all that Babar had
gained south of the Indus. India disappeared, apparently for ever,
from the grasp of the Mughal.

The son of Babar had succumbed to an abler general, and that abler
general had at once completely supplanted him. Fortunately for the
Mughal, more fortunately still for the people of India, that abler
general, though a man of great ability, had inherited views not
differing in any one degree from those of the Afghan chiefs who had
preceded him in the art of establishing a dynasty. The conciliation
of the millions of Hindustan did not enter into his system. He, too,
was content to govern by camps {8} located in the districts he had
conquered. The consequence was that when he died other men rose to
compete for the empire. The confusion rose in the course of a few
years to such a height, that in 1554, just fourteen years after he
had fled from the field of Kanauj, Humayun recrossed the Indus, and
recov