of their princes and himself took a consort from among
their daughters. With their help he reduced the independent Mahomedan
kings of Middle India, from Gujerat in the West to Bengal in the East.
He created a homogeneous system of civil administration which our own
still in many respects resembles, the revenue system especially, which
was based on ancient Hindu custom, having survived with relatively
slight modifications to the present day.

Political uniformity had been achieved, at least over a very large area
of India. A great stride had been made towards real unity and social
fusion. Nevertheless Akbar felt that, so long as the fierce religious
exclusivism of Islam on the one hand, and the rigidity of the Hindu
caste system on the other, were not fundamentally modified there could
be no security for the future against the revival of the old and
deep-seated antagonism between the two races and creeds. He was himself
learned in Islamic doctrine; he caused some of the Brahmanical sacred
books to be translated into Persian--the cultured language of his
court--so that he could study them for himself; and he invited
Christians and Zoroastrians, as well as Hindus and Mahomedans of
different schools of thought, to confer with him and discuss in his
presence the relative merits of their religious systems. The deserted
palaces of Fatehpur Sikri, which he planned out and built with all his
characteristic energy as a royal residence, only about twenty-two miles
distant from the imperial city of Agra, still stand in a singularly
perfect state of preservation that enables one to reconstruct with
exceptional vividness the life of the splendid court over which the
greatest of the Moghul Emperors--the contemporary of our own great Queen
Elizabeth--presided during perhaps the most characteristic years of his
long reign. Within the enceinte of his palace were grouped the chief
offices of the State, the Treasury, the Record Office, the Council
Chamber, the Audience Hall, some of them monuments of architectural
skill and of decorative taste, more often bearing the impress of Hindu
than of Mahomedan inspiration. For his first wife, Sultana Rakhina, who
was also his first cousin, Akbar built the Jodh Bai palace, whilst over
against it, in the beautiful "Golden House," dwelt his Rajput consort,
Miriam-uz-Zemani, who bore him the future Emperor Jehanghir. Nor did he
forget his favourite friends and counsellors. Upon no building in
Fatehpur