some generations it seems to have kept everybody quiet under the rule of priests and kings: and, by appointing the hard work of life to be done by a race of virtual slaves, Hindoo legislators secured for the higher classes leisure for study, and for the cultivation of the finer arts of life. This could not last for ever, while numbers were increasing and multiplying; and at the best it did not secure the general welfare.
We can hardly imagine a territory so vast,—as large as half-a-dozen European kingdoms in one,—without any such thing as a town, except two or three capital cities. The people lived rather more thickly within reach of any good spring of water; or where two or three tracks ran near together: and we know that they met at such points owing to the prohibitions of the priests and the law about celibate young men, and any respectable people enjoying themselves at the doors of bakehouses, or under any well-known tree, or at the cistern of the neighbourhood, or at public spectacles. It is clear that there was sociability elsewhere than at religious festivals, though there were no towns. How the buying and selling was managed we can only conjecture: but there was certainly a good deal of wealth in the citizens’ families,—especially in gold, jewels, and embroidery. But the bulk of the people had no property beyond the cotton wrapper which they wore, and the bench or mat on which they sat, and the bowl from which they ate their rice. The most important feature in the whole case to us, is the enormous destruction of human life, at short intervals. The best lot that lay before all but the higher castes was to live out life in a bamboo hut, in a wood or among the tall grass, with rice enough to eat, spiced with peppers from the jungle, and a new wrapper when needed, picked from the cotton-plant, spun at home, and woven in the pit under the tree. This was all that any man had to look forward to for himself or his children; for nobody could, under any circumstances, rise above the fortune to which he was born, or make property, or use it if he got it. On the other hand, no man expected so good a lot as even this. Every few years there came an awful famine, under which high and low died off together. Sometimes there was a flood; and then the people might be seen driven together on any rising ground, waiting in hunger till the waters went down, and knowing that they should find everything washed away,—huts, and crops, and everything,—when they returned. Oftener there was drought: and then the country was strewn with corpses, and reeking with the stench of the mortality. In these calamities all classes suffered; for the gold and jewels would not buy rice or grain when none was growing. Such was life to the multitude during a thousand years of a civilisation supposed to have been the foremost in the world in its day.
In course of time we observe great changes. There are great men who are lords of ten towns, or twenty, or a hundred or more; and the inhabitants of these settlements are parcelled out among different occupations, which they and their children are to pursue for ever and ever. The village watchman’s family is to keep the watch of the village to the end of the world; and so on. Here is more organisation, a fuller distribution of industry, somewhat more variety in daily life, and further facility for making gains and enjoying them,—if the inclination were once roused: but there is no evidence that the stimulus operated: and the evils of famine remained; and to these was in time added war, and great suffering and death from religious pilgrimages and festivals.
Some sort of trade they must have had, though we hear nothing of commercial transactions, or of any money beyond the rudest currency, answering to the cowry cash of Africa. There was a sale of Indian products by Arabs and Chinese in foreign lands; and these traders carried back woollen cloth, gold and silver, brass, tin and lead, coral, glass, antimony, and perfumes, and some wines. There was a use of these things among the higher classes, and they were paid for by the fine cotton fabrics of India, by silk cloth and thread, dyes, spices, sugar and aromatics, gems, and sometimes female slaves. There must have been ox-carts and pack-oxen on the roads, and boats on the rivers, carrying these commodities between the interior and the coast: but the traders were themselves a caste, and no chance was opened to any order of men by the expansion of any industry but their own, because no man could choose or change his own lot. He was locked into his own niche in the social fabric. There he might be starved, or killed off by pestilence, or seized on for the service of a war; he might suffer any amount of evil, but he could obtain no good for himself or his children after him. He was the slave of ignorance and of superstition,—of the officers set over him and of the priests. Yet there was worse in store for him. The time came when he was deprived of the negative good of a quiet life.
When the Greeks penetrated into Hindostan they found a country and people externally prosperous. The territory contained a multitude of kingdoms—above a hundred, we are told—and the kings were warlike. The soldiery were a caste of themselves, but everybody could suffer from warfare. Everybody paid taxes,—and heavy ones,—and all were subject to ravage by invasion. Kings and chiefs rode on elephants, and glittered with gems, and spent fortunes in perfumes and rich garments ; but the bulk of the population was toiling on as of old. One great good was the provision of public works,—the cisterns and aqueducts by which the people and their land were supplied with water; the good road and resting-places for travellers ; the fine approaches to the chief rivers, and the defences of towns and villages. On the other hand, we hear of the evil of usury,—the curse of Indian industry to this day. Heavy taxes and the claims of village potentates must be supposed the causes of the pressure under which men seem to have been always borrowing money which they could never repay. The process makes the modern Hindoo into a hopeless slave, and the same cause must have produced the same effect in the ancient days.
All this time there was, instead of any principle of nationality like that of the Chinese, a peculiar religion which comprehended the entire population