The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c16.s2.t1.21

c16.s2.t1.21

The *vijigîsu*, then, cannot by any means afford to indulge in pious wishes or have faith in the Utopian statecraft of idealistic dreamers. What under these conditions are likely to be the relations between the hypothetical Siegfrieds of the *nîti-śâstras*? These firebrands are normally endowed with a war-mentality and a bellicose attitude. The world in their eyes is a theater of warfare and equipment for warfare, as it has really been since the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu's *Art of War*; and they proceed on the assumption that nothing can be unfair in war. The student of political science must therefore have to make almost the same remarks about the "aspirants" of Hindu political speculation as those of Grotius in the prolegomena to his epoch-making *Laws of War and Peace* (1625). "I saw prevailing throughout the Christian world", writes the father of international law, in regard to the European international politics of the early seventeenth century, "a license in making war of which even barbarous nations would have been ashamed. Recourse was had to arms for slight reason or no reason, and when arms were taken up, all reverence for divine and human law thrown away, just as if men were henceforth authorized to commit all crimes without restraint".