The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c35.s4.52

c35.s4.52

The political history of India cannot vie with that of Greece, Rome, or modern Europe as illustrating the evolution of constitutions in city or state. Indians, like other Asiatic peoples, usually have been content with simple despotic rule, so that the difference between one government and another has lain in the personal characters and abilities of the several despots rather than in the changes consequent upon the gradual development of institutions. The regulations devised by able individual autocrats, such as Chandragupta Maurya, Asoka, and Akbar, have mostly perished with their authors. The nascent Indian constitution now in course of construction is a foreign importation, imperfectly intelligible to the people for whose benefit it is intended, and perhaps will never be thoroughly acclimatized.