Court of Delhi, it is very probable that it might have escaped the guilt and misery which hastened its destruction. Men in high or low station cannot violate the laws of God, even when their creed sanctions that violation, without incurring the penalty which is sure to come, sooner or later. Of this truth there never was a more marked example than was exhibited within these high and bastioned walls. The three generations during which this wrath was “treasuring up” its force but made it more overwhelming when its overthrow of desolation came. It was expressly stipulated in the treaty that the munificent provision made for the Emperor was to cover all claims. Out of the $675,000 per annum he was required to support the retinue of relations and dependents collected within the walls of the imperial residence. But fifty years of idleness, and the license of a sensual creed, which permitted unlimited polygamy, made that which would have been easy to virtue impossible to vice.
The Eden of God had but one Eve in it, and she reigned as queen in the pure affections of the happy and noble man for whom God had made her. Within the walls of that Delhi palace Shah Jehan could inscribe the words,
“If there be a paradise on the face of the earth,
It is this—it is this—it is this!”
For he loved one only, and was faithful to her, and has enshrined her memory while the world stands in the matchless Taj Mahal. Few, if any, of his race imitated his virtue in this regard; and least of all his last descendants. Fifteen years ago the Delhi “paradise” had become changed into a very pandemonium. Here were crowded together twelve hundred kings and queens—for all the descendants of the Emperors assumed the title of “Sulateens”—with ten times as many persons to wait upon them, so that the population of the palaces were actually estimated at twelve thousand persons. Glorying in their “royal blood,” they held themselves superior to all efforts to earn their living by honest labor, and fastened, like so many parasites, upon the old Emperor's yearly allowance. “But what was that among so many,” and they
