ctice, heretofore prevailing, by which the
troops of the conqueror were permitted to forcibly sell or keep in
slavery the wives, children, and dependants of the conquered.
Whatever might be the delinquencies of an enemy, his children and the
people belonging to him were, according to the proclamation of the
sovereign, to be free to go as they pleased to their own houses, or
to the houses of their relatives. No one, great or small, was to be
made a slave. 'If the husband pursue an evil course,' argued the
liberal-minded prince, 'what fault is it of the wife? And if the
father rebel, how can the children be blamed?'

The same generous and far-seeing policy was {173} pursued with
unabated vigour in the reform of other abuses. The very next year,
the eighth of his reign, the Emperor determined to abolish a tax,
which, though extremely productive, inflicted, as he considered, a
wrong on the consciences of his Hindu subjects. There are no people
in the world more given to pilgrimages than are the Hindus. Their
sacred shrines, each with its peculiar saint and its specific virtue,
abound in every province of Hindustan. The journeys the pilgrims have
to make are often long and tedious, their length being often
proportioned to the value of the boon to be acquired. In these
pilgrimages the Afghan predecessors of the Mughal had recognised a
large and permanent source of revenue, and they had imposed,
therefore, a tax on all pilgrims according to the ascertained or
reputed means of each.

Abulfazl tells us that this tax was extremely prolific, amounting to
millions of rupees annually. But it was felt as a great grievance. In
the eyes of the Hindu a pilgrimage was often an inculcated duty,
imposed upon him by his religion, or its interpreter, the Brahman
priest. Why, he argued, because he submitted his body to the greatest
inconvenience, measuring his own length along the ground, possibly
for hundreds of miles, should he be despoiled by the State? The
feelings of his Hindu subjects on this subject soon reached the ears
of Akbar. It was submitted to him by those who saw in the tax only an
easy source of revenue that the making of pilgrimages was a vain
superstition which the Hindus would not forego, and {174} therefore
the payment being certain and continuous, it would be bad financial
policy to abolish the tax. Akbar, admitting that it was a tax on the
superstitions of the multitude, and that a Hindu might escape paying
it by stay