A history of the Sikhs, from the origin of the nation to the battles of the Sutlej.

240

HISTORY OF THE SIKHS

CIIAP. VIII

1841. their native villages.' The system of Panchayats is common
throughout India, and every tribe, or section of a tribe,
or trade, or calling, readily submits to the decisions of its
elders or superiors seated together in consultation. In the
Punjab the custom received a further development from
the organization necessary to an army; and even in the
crude form of representation thus achieved, the Sikh people
were enabled to interfere with effect, and with some degree
of consistency, in the nomination and in the removal of their
rulers. But these large assemblies sometimes added military
licence to popular tumult, and the corrupt spirit of mercenaries to the barbarous ignorance of ploughmen. Their
resolutions were often unstable or unwise, and the representatives of different divisions might take opposite sides from
sober conviction or self-willed prejudice, or they might be
bribed and cajoled by such able and unscrupulous men as
Raja Gulab Singh.2
Negotia- The partial repose in the autumn of 1841 was taken
tions with advantage of to recur to those mercantile objects, of which
the English
about in- the British Government never lost sight. The facilities of
land trade, navigating the Indus and Sutlej had been increased, and
it was now sought to extend corresponding advantages to
the land trade of the Punjab. Twenty years before, Mr.
Moorcroft had, of his own instance, made proposals to
Ranjit Singh for the admission of British goods into the
Lahore dominions at fixed rates of duty.3 In 1832, Col.
Wade again brought forward the subject of a general tariff
for the Punjab, and the Maharaja appeared to be not indisposed to meet the views of his allies; but he really
disliked to make arrangements of which he did not fully see
the scope and tendency, and he thus tried to evade even a
settlement of the river tolls, by saying that the prosperity
[1 One is strongly remindedofthe organization of the Parliamentary
army under Cromwell, with its regimental' elders', &c.-ED.]
2 See Mr. Clerk's letter of the 14th March 1841, for Fakir Azizud-din's admission, that even then the army was united and ruled
by its panchayats. With reference to the Panchayats of India, it
may be observed that Hallam shows, chiefly from Palgrave, that
English juries likewise were originally as much arbitrators as investigators of facts. (Middle Ages, Notes to Chap, VIII.)
3 Moorcroft, Travels, i. 103,