Page:History of India Vol 3.djvu/93

 ORIENTAL IDEAS OF GOVERNMENT 65 tory in the East does not mean the growth of consti- tutions, the development of civic " rights," the vin- dication of individual liberty, or the evolution of self- government. These are Western ideas which have no meaning in India. If translated into Hindustani they represent nothing that the natural Hindu comprehends or desires. The European assumption that every man is more or less competent to carry on the work of gov- ernment is flatly denied in the East. The Western panacea of self-government possesses no attraction to the unsophisticated Oriental. To the Hindu, power is a divine gift, to be exercised absolutely by God's anointed, and obeyed unquestioned by every one else. A king who is not absolute loses in the Oriental mind the essential quality of kingship. Every Eastern people, if left to itself, sets up a despot, to whose decrees of life and death it submits with the same resignation and assent that it shows toward the fat of destiny. In the East the King is the State Vetat c'est moiits min- isters are his instruments, its people are his slaves. His worst excesses and most savage cruelties are endured in the same way as plague and famine; all belong to the irresistible and inscrutable manifestations of the divine order of the universe. The only kind of king that the East tolerates with difficulty is the faineant. Let him be strong and masterful, and he may do as he pleases; but the weak sovereign rarely keeps his throne long, and holds it only by force of traditional loyalty or dread of the unknown risks of revolution. In the history of Mohammedan India, then, we have