Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.123

c7.123

But there was a debit side to this account. The annual snow-melt flood fertilizes but, unrestrained, is also an angry destroyer. The extensive irrigation demanded by a large city of the plain involves tireless planning and co-ordination, and readily succumbs to indifferent control. Fevers are endemic to marsh and jungle. The arterial waterways which may carry trade may equally carry invasion. The benefits offered on so formidable a scale by an environment at the same time so vast, so exuberant, and so menacing are dependent, and dependent from the outset, upon the power of man to master and constrain. The situation was one which can have brooked no pusillanimity, no piecemeal compromise. A society strong in heart, disciplined, numerous and imaginatively led grasped the problem and, we may be sure, simultaneously solved it; else it had perished. Here if anywhere may we fairly discern in human affairs an example of that swift adaptation and progression which biologists know as ‘explosive evolution’.