Governor of the North-Western Provinces, Sir Charles
Metcalfe.[1] It was, when I was there, the residence of a civil
commissioner, a judge, a magistrate, a collector of land revenue, a
collector of customs, and all their assistants and establishments. A
brigadier commands the station, which contained a park of artillery,
one regiment of European and four regiments of native infantry.[2]

Near the artillery practice-ground, we passed the tomb of Jodh Bai,
the wife of the Emperor Akbar, and the mother of Jahangir. She was of
Rajput caste, daughter of the Hindoo chief of Jodhpur, a very
beautiful, and, it is said, a very amiable woman.[3] The Mogul
Emperors, though Muhammadans, were then in the habit of taking their
wives from among the Rajput princes of the country, with a view to
secure their allegiance. The tomb itself is in ruins, having only
part of the dome standing, and the walls and magnificent gateway that
at one time surrounded it have been all taken away and sold by a
thrifty Government, or appropriated to purposes of more practical
utility.[4]

I have heard many Muhammadans say that they could trace the decline
of their empire in Hindustan to the loss of the Rajput blood in the
veins of their princes.[5] 'Better blood' than that of the Rajputs of
India certainly never flowed in the veins of any human beings; or,
what is the same thing, no blood was ever believed to be finer by the
people themselves and those they had to deal with. The difference is
all in the imagination, and the imagination is all-powerful with
nations as with individuals. The Britons thought their blood the
finest in the world till they were conquered by the Romans, the
Picts, the Scots, and the Saxons. The Saxons thought theirs the
finest in the world till they were conquered by the Danes and the
Normans. This is the history of the human race. The quality of the
blood of a whole people has depended often upon the fate of a battle,
which in the ancient world doomed the vanquished to the hammer; and
the hammer changed the blood of those sold by it from generation to
generation. How many Norman robbers got their blood ennobled, and how
many Saxon nobles got theirs plebeianized by the Battle of Hastings;
and how difficult it would be for any of us to say from which we
descended--the Britons or the Saxons, the Danes or the Normans; or in
what particular action our ancestors were the victors or the
vanquished, and became ennobled or plebe