by no means so clear. The actual practice had varied in British India, from Lord Wellesley's system of deliberately raising up and perpetuating intermediate States, to Sir John Malcolm's rough and ready suggestions of using the right to sanction adoptions as a means of raising revenue, and the Court of Directors' more discriminating orders to recognise adoptions only 'as a special mark of favour.'
What Lord Dalhousie did, therefore, was not to invent a new principle of Indian law but to steadily apply an old principle. In so doing he carried out a deliberate decision arrived at seven years before he came to India, by the Governor-General in Council. He perceived the real issue to be, whether it was, or was not, expedient to artificially prolong the system of governing India by irresponsible intermediate princes. For in each case of permitting a subordinate State to devolve by adoption, Lord Dalhousie held that he was artificially prolonging that system, by reconstituting the dependent government or State in new hands. It was not a question of inheritance, but of the expediency of creating afresh an intermediate power between the British Government and the people.
The first case in which this principle came to be applied, shortly after Lord Dalhousie's arrival, was the Native State of Sátára. That Maráthá principality had been constituted by the British Govern-
