=Hesitation to accept the Treaty.=—Various considerations combined to check the ardour with which we naturally expected our offer of protection would be embraced. The Jaipur court retained a lively, but no grateful remembrance, of the solemn obligations we contracted with her in 1803, and the facility with which we extricated ourselves from them when expediency demanded, whilst we vainly attempted to throw the blame of violating the treaty upon our ally. To use the words of one who has been mixed up with all the political transactions of that eventful period, with reference to the letter delivered by the envoy at the Jaipur court from our viceroy in the East, notifying the dissolution of the alliance: “The justice of these grounds was warmly disputed by the court, which, under a lively sense of that imminent danger to which it had become exposed from this measure, almost forgot for a moment the temper and respect which it owed to the English nation.” But the native envoy from Jaipur, attending the camp of the gallant Lake, took a still higher tone, and with a manly indignation observed, that “this was the first time, since the English government was established in India, that it had been known to make its faith subservient to its convenience”: a reproach the more bitter and unpalatable from its truth.[9.4.2] The enlarged and prophetic views of Marquess Wellesley, which suggested the policy of uniting all these regular governments in a league against the predatory powers, were counteracted by the timid, temporizing policy of Lord Cornwallis, who could discover nothing but weakness in this extension of our influence.[9.4.3] What misery would not these States have been spared, had those engagements, executed through the noble Lake (a name never mentioned in India, by European or native, without reverence), been maintained; for the fifteen years which intervened between the two periods produced more mischief to Rajwara than the preceding half century, and half a century more will not repair it! A circumstance that tended to increase this distrust was our tearing Wazir Ali from his sanctuary at Jaipur, which has cast an indelible stain upon the Kachhwaha name.[9.4.4] We have elsewhere[9.4.5] explained the privileges of _saran_, or ‘sanctuary,’ which, when claimed by the unfortunate or criminal, is sacred in the eye of the Rajput [379]. This trust we forced the Jaipur State to violate, though she was then independent of us. It was no excuse for the act that the fugitive was a foul assassin: we had no right to demand his surrender.[9.4.6]