Sometimes even decisions are taken without their knowledge on matters that directly affect their own exchequers, as in the matter of the opium trade with China. Some of the native States are the largest producers of the Indian poppy, and in order to satisfy the susceptibilities, very meritorious in themselves, of our national conscience, we lightheartedly impose upon them, without consultation or prospect of compensation, the sacrifice, which costs us nothing, of one of the most valuable products of their soil and chief sources of revenue. Can they do otherwise than draw unfavourable comparisons between the harsh measure meted out to them in this matter and the generous treatment of the West Indies by the Mother Country when L20,000,000 were voted out of the Imperial Exchequer towards compensation for the material losses arising out of the abolition of slavery? How important it is to associate the Princes of India with the purposes of our Indian policy has seldom been more clearly shown than during these last troublous years when the forces of disaffection have revealed themselves as a serious public danger. The principle of authority cannot be attacked in British India without suffering diminution in the Native States. They are not shut up in watertight compartments and sedition cannot be preached on one side of a border, which in most cases is merely an administrative boundary line, without finding an echo on the other side. The prestige of an Indian Prince in his own land is great. It is rooted in most cases in ancient traditions to which no alien rulers can appeal. Nevertheless some of the most experienced and enlightened of the ruling chiefs showed a much earlier and livelier appreciation of the subversive tendencies of Indian unrest than those responsible for the governance of British India. Some of them, like the Maharajahs of Kolhapur and of Patiala, have been brought face to face with the same violent, and even with the same criminal, methods of agitation as the Government of India has had to deal with in provinces under British administration. The Maharajah of Jaipur and Maharajah Scindia felt themselves constrained just about a year ago to enact vigorous measures on their own account against sedition and against the importation into their States of seditious literature which was still allowed to circulate with impunity in British India, whilst the State of Bikanir was the first to introduce an Explosive Substances Act immediately after the epidemic of bomb-throwing had broken out in Bengal. Other States have also taken strong preventive measures, but many have fortunately been spared so far any serious trouble within their own borders, and their rulers have been able to study the problem merely as interested observers and from the point of view of the general welfare of the country.