THE INDIAN NATIVE STATES 477

ing war and peace; but they make their own laws and levy their own taxes; and the British treat their terri- tory as foreign, although the dividing border-line can hardly be called a frontier, since most of these states are entirely surrounded and shut in by British India. Nevertheless, their history serves to illustrate at every turn the bearing of this system of protectorates on the Anglo-Indian frontier; and what is now going on is chiefly the continuation of what went on from the be- ginning. It will be found that from the time when the Eng- lish became a power on the mainland of India, that is, from their acquisition of Bengal in 1765, they have con- stantly adopted the policy of interposing a border of protected country between their actual possessions and the possessions of formidable neighbours whom they desire to keep at arm's length. In the eighteenth cen- tury we supported and protected Oudh as a barrier against the Marathas; and early in the nineteenth cen- tury we preserved the Rajput states in Central India for the same reason. The feudatory states on the Sut- laj were originally maintained and strengthened by us, before we took the Panjab, as outworks and barricades against the formidable power of the Sikhs. The device has been likened to the invention of buffers; for a buf- fer is a mechanical contrivance for breaking or grad- uating the force of impact between two heavy bodies; and in the same way the political buffer checked the violence of political collisions, though it rarely pre- vented them altogether.