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ON THE SIKHS.
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ambition of Ranjit Sing, and those between the Setlej and the Jamná spontaneously dissolved innder the protection of the British Government. The last general diet of the Siklis was held in 1805, when the fugitive Holkar, and his pursuer Lord Lake, penetrated into the Panjáb.
This notion of a unity of interests, or national identity among the Sikls, as forming part also of a community of religion, was designated as the Khálsa, the Church Militant, if it might be so interpreted, for it expressed a vague notion of the Sikhs being under one spiritual guidance in temporal as well as spiritual affairs --a sort of abstract theocracy. Tlie term has since come to be applied to the temporal government alone, and the late Maharaja deposed Guru Govind, Nának, and the Supreme Being, whom the Sikhs professed to look up to, from even their abstract or typical participation in the Khálsa. At no time, indeed, was this imaginary unity so well maintained as by Ranjit, whose elevation was in a great degree ascribable to the disunion which prevailed among the several Misals, and the conflicting pretensions of their members: a sketch of his rise will best illustrate the characteristics of the Sikh confederacy.
The first of the family of the late Maharaja Ranjit Sing, of whom any record has been preserved, was a Ját farmer, whose patrimony, it is said, consisted of three ploughs and a well. His son was a convert to the Sikh faith, and abandoning agriculture enlisted as a private horseman in the service of a Sikh chief.
