. Free institutions were unknown. The laws passed by
one sovereign might be annulled by his successor. The personal
element, in fact, predominated everywhere. The only possible check on
the will of the sovereign lay in successful rebellion. But if the
sovereign were capable, successful rebellion was almost an
impossibility. If he were just as well as capable, he discerned that
the enforcement of justice constituted his surest safeguard against
any rebellion.

Babar, then, had found in the provinces of India which he had
conquered a system prevailing not at all dissimilar in principle to
that to which he had been accustomed in the more northern regions.
Had he been disposed to change it, he had not the time. Nor had his
successor either the time or the inclination. The system he had
pondered over just prior to his death shows no radical advance in
principle on that which had existed in Hindustan. He would have
parcelled out the empire into six great divisions, of which Delhi,
Agra, Kanauj, Jaunpur, Mandu, and Lahore should be the centres or
capitals. Each of these would have been likewise great military
commands, under a trusted general, whose army-corps should be so
strong as to render him independent of {78} outside aid: whilst the
Emperor should give unity to the whole by visiting each division in
turn with an army of twelve thousand horse, inspecting the local
forces and examining the general condition of the province. The
project was full of defects. It would have been a bad mode of
administration even had the sovereign been always more capable than
his generals. It could not have lasted a year had he been less so.

The sudden death of Humayun came to interfere with, to prevent the
execution of, this plan. Then followed the military events
culminating in the triumph of Panipat. That battle placed the young
Akbar in a position his grandfather Babar had occupied exactly thirty
years before. Then, it had given Babar the opportunity, of which he
availed himself, to conquer North-western India, Behar, and part of
Central India. A similar opportunity was given by the second battle
of Panipat to Akbar. On that field he had conquered the only enemy
capable of coping with him seriously. As far as conquest then was
concerned, his task was easy. But to make that conquest enduring, to
consolidate the different provinces and the diverse nationalities, to
devise and introduce a system so centralising as to make the
influence o