Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/545

 Reviezus. 235

by whom ? When the throne is vacant by failure of heirs, there is no machinery for the constitutional election of a new line. Only once is there any allusion to a " king-maker " or elector, and it is not clear whether he was an official, a subject or a relative of the king. Indeed it is likely enough that the selection of a ruler was a family affair from the instance cited by Mr. Law of all the members of a royal house having equal rights. But even when the distinction between a State and a private estate had been fully grasped and the rule established that the former must not be split up like a mere heritage, by what system was the successor's fitness tested and determined .'' Nothing is said about his choice by Brahmans or by augury or by lot. When we come to the second chapter, on the State- Council, or preferably the King's Council, no explanation of this omission is to be found. So, after all, we learn very little about royal elections, presumably because there is so little to learn.

It ought perhaps to be said at once that in the present writer's view the Indian mind seems to have conceived a King to be an absolute monarch as far as political restraints go, but a limited ruler, controlled by religion in lieu of a Constitution. This comes out in the description of the Council. The monarch is no more bound to act on its advice than he is apparently dependant on its election. But he is enjoined to abide by the advice of the family priest and tutor, at least in the Mahd- bhdrata, the didactic part of which tries to make those func- tionaries controllers of the King's mind. Parallels to all this could be cited from the West, but the difference between it and the East seems to be in the capacity to make an ideal more or less effective. Not that in India there were no upholders of the secular power. It is apparent that there was occasionally an anti-Brahmanical party of some influence — just as in some modern Hindu States such a party is to be found — though it failed to devise any constitutional checks on absolutism in precisely the same way as the Brahmanical ideal failed to devise any practical method of getting itself realised. But the truth is that we are still much in the dark as to what the Council was. We find an abundance of names for it, but hardly any definition of its functions. E.g., the mantri-parisad seems to have been