But the creation of a Chamber of Princes at this particular juncture raises very difficult issues. In the first place, though it has been engineered with great skill and energy by a small group of very distinguished Princes, mostly Rajput, it is viewed with deep suspicion by other chiefs who, not being Rajputs, scent in it a scheme for promoting Rajput ascendancy, and it has received no support at all from other and more powerful Princes such as the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Gaikwar of Baroda, the Maharajah of Mysore. Some have always held aloof from the Delhi Conferences and have intimated plainly that they have no desire to see any alteration introduced into their treaty relationships with the Paramount Power. Without their participation no Chamber of Princes can pull its full weight, and even if most of them considered themselves bound out of loyalty to the Sovereign to attend an inaugural ceremony performed by the Duke of Connaught in the name of the King-Emperor himself, it would be premature to infer that their opposition has been permanently overcome. The Supreme Government has of course reiterated the pledges already embodied in the treaties that there shall be no interference with the ancient rights and privileges of the Native States and their rulers, but its eminent right to interfere in cases of extreme urgency has not and cannot be surrendered. It has been exercised very rarely, and only when administration and government have fallen flagrantly short of certain standards, established by usage and generally understood and accepted, which it is perhaps easier to describe negatively than positively. Misrule cannot be tolerated when it amounts to a public scandal or takes the form of criminal acts. The whole question has always bristled with difficulties, and still does. The tendency, since Lord Curzon's time, has been to relax the control of the Supreme Government even in matters of slighter moment on which it had been accustomed to tender advice not always distinguishable from commands. That some of the Native States, and not the least powerful, are badly governed is of common notoriety. But if the Supreme Government has been sometimes inclined to turn a blind eye in such cases, and even to forget that it has moral obligations towards the subjects as well as towards the rulers of the Native States, it has been free hitherto to obey considerations of political expediency which may conceivably not weigh so much in the future. For the same forces that have obtained the surrender of the autocratic principle in British India, may demand with equal insistency its surrender throughout the Native States. Should the more irresponsible chiefs rely on the solidarity of a Chamber of Princes to secure for them greater immunity than ever from the just consequences of misgovernment, they would merely hasten a conflict which undoubtedly most of their caste have begun to dread between their own archaic