The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c10.s3.t8.3

c10.s3.t8.3

There is nothing exclusively oriental in this barbarity of the Maurya laws. Europe’s record in penal legislation down to very recent times has not been at all different from that of Asia. Let us ignore for the present the Roman XII Tables and the Christian Inquisition. The penal code of England during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries was fostered in the same psychology and was as inhuman and Draconian as was that of India of the third and fourth centuries B. C. During George III’s reign more than sixty offences were added to the list of capital crimes. In 1845 two hundred and fifty offences (including, of course, some of the most trivial, e. g. breaking a window and stealing two pence worth of paint) were punishable by death. The generation preceding this date witnessed 1400 executions among the English people for offences that have since then been removed from the capital list.²