368 GOVERNOR -GENERALSHIP OF LORD HASTINGS

their military forces. Secondly, the enforcement of sys- tematic order all round them, and of restriction within fixed boundaries, was irreconcilable with the conditions that had engendered their power and that were still necessary to its existence; for the Maratha princes could maintain large armies only by levying exactions from their neighbours and by constantly taking the field upon marauding excursions. And, thirdly, it was evident that the cessation of irregular warfare and the establishment of a steady protectorate over the greater portion of India must inevitably aggravate the suffer- ings and intensify the confusion in those parts where the supreme pacifying authority disclaimed jurisdiction and formally abdicated every right of interference. Large bodies of troops were disbanded by the British government and by its allies. But as all this multitude of men who lived by the sword and the free lance found their occupation gone within the pale of orderly gov- ernment, they poured out of the pacified districts into the kingdoms of misrule like water draining from a cultivated upland into the low-lying marshes. It was indeed impossible that a kind of political Alsatia, full of brigands and roving banditti, could long be tolerated in the midst of a country just settling down into the peaceful and industrious stage. Such a situa- tion, nevertheless, necessarily followed upon the intro- duction of the new principle by a sharp turn of policy. The British government could not now stay at home or stand aloof without stopping half-way in the pacifi- cation of India and leaving one great homogeneous