The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c11.t29.7

c11.t29.7

No conceivable resource of the people appears thus to have been left untapped by the Maurya Empire. The all-reaching tentacles of Hindu finance lie on the surface. And if, as Adam Smith remarks, there be nothing in which governments are so prone to learn of one another as in the matter of new taxes, the first and the last empires of pre-Moslem India can still give points to the latest specialists in public finance. For, the methods and principles of statesmen from Kautilya to Kulottuṅga were eminently matter-of-fact and realistic. Indeed, with the exception of stamp duties, national debt, postal receipts and a few others characteristically modern, the assets schedule of the first class powers of today can hardly exhibit any taxes and non-tax revenues in addition to what the Hindu *sumantra* (finance minister) and his board of experts hit upon pragmatically in the third and fourth centuries B. C. in order to "cover" the appropriations on the governmental machinery of what would hardly fall short of the largest and most extensive of all empires in the world's history.¹