Hindu Administrative Institutions c10.s4.4

c10.s4.4

1926: ‘The arguments on page 626 regarding the punishment of evil-doers do not strike me as very convincing. I think that we of the twentieth century with our views about the liberty of the subjects and the right of every man to receive justice by open trial are apt to forget that these ideas have gradually been evolved in the course of many centuries and we are in danger of trying to ascribe anachronistically somewhat similar ideas to the people of vanished epochs. I cannot bring myself to believe that justice under the Mughals, for example, was other than capricious and liable to be marred by corruption, or that the savage punishments in vogue always fitted the crime. And if that is true of the Mughal age, surely we cannot expect a higher standard under a despotism of much earlier times like that of the Mauryas.’