The Historical Inscriptions of Southern India (collected till 1923) and Outlines of Political History c7.36

c7.36

If the *Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra*, as we have it, was really, as alleged, the work of Chandragupta's Brahman Minister Chāṇakya, alias Kauṭilya alias Viṣṇugupta, we should learn a great deal from it concerning the condition in his day of the mass of the king's subjects, and of the mode of government of the country; but there seems to be some doubt as to its genuineness, and an opinion has been growing up that it may be, in part at least, a composition of later years.¹ This being so I refrain from quoting from it passages which, if genuinely the production of a minister of the crown, would prove that the people of the time must have led most miserable lives owing to State persecution.² The late Dr. Vincent Smith's remarks in his *Oxford History of India*, p. 92, are very much to the point if the *Śastra* was actually written by Kauṭilya, as the author believed. ‘The dark spots on the picture’, he writes, ‘are the appalling wickedness of the statecraft taught in the *Arthaśāstra* and the hateful espionage which tainted the whole administration’. The work has been translated by R. Shamasastri in the *Indian Antiquary* for 1905 (pp. 5, 47, 110), and I would especially call attention to the section in Book V, *The Conduct of Government Officers*, sub-section ‘Replenishment of the Treasury.’ (*p. 301 Ed. of 1915*).