of society where the means of cultivation were directly dependent on the village organisation, and famine and desolation would have been the instant and inevitable consequences of any commotions which interfered with the conservancy and repair of the tanks and means of irrigation, and the prompt application of labour to the raising and saving of produce at the instant when the fall of the rains or the ripening of the crops demanded its employment with the utmost vigour.]

[Footnote 2:  In theory the Singhalese monarchy was elective in the descendants of the Solar race:  in practice, primogeniture had a preference, and the crown was either hereditary or became the prize of those who claimed to be of royal lineage.  On reviewing the succession of kings from B.C. 307 to A.D. 1815, thirty-nine eldest sons (or nearly one fourth), succeeded to their fathers:  and twenty-nine kings (or more than one fifth), were succeeded by brothers. Fifteen reigned for a period less than one year, and thirty for more than one year, and less than four.  Of the Singhalese kings who died by violence, twenty-two were murdered by their successors; six were killed by other individuals; thirteen fell in feuds and war, and four committed suicide; eleven were dethroned, and their subsequent fate is unknown.  Not more than two-thirds of the Singhalese kings retained sovereign authority to their decease, or reached the funeral pile without a violent death.—­FORBES’ Eleven Years in Ceylon, vol. i. ch. iv. p. 80, 97; JOINVILLE, Religion and Manners of the People of Ceylon; Asiat.  Res. vol. vii. p. 423.  See also Mahawanso, ch. xxiii. p. 201.]

[Sidenote:  B.C. 119.]

One source of royal contention arose on the death of Dutugaimunu; his son, having forfeited his birthright by an alliance with a wife of lower caste, was set aside from the succession; Saidaitissa, a brother of the deceased king, being raised to the throne in his stead.  The priests, on the death of Saidaitissa, B.C. 119, hastened to proclaim his youngest son Thullatthanako[1], to the prejudice of his elder brother Laiminitissa, but the latter established his just claim by the sword, and hence arose two rival lines, which for centuries afterwards were prompt on every opportunity to advance adverse pretensions to the throne, and assert them by force of arms.

[Footnote 1:  Mahawanso, ch. xxxiii. p. 201.]

In such contests the priesthood brought a preponderant influence to whatever side they inclined [1]; and thus the royal authority, though not strictly sacerdotal, became so closely identified with the hierarchy, and so guided by its will, that each sovereign’s attention was chiefly devoted to forwarding such measures as most conduced to the exaltation of Buddhism and the maintenance of its monasteries and temples.

[Footnote 1:  It was the dying boast of Dutugaimunu that he had lived “a slave to the priesthood.”  The expression was figurative in his case; but so abject did the subserviency of the kings become, and so rapid was its growth, that Bhatiya Tissa, who reigned A.D. 8, rendered it literal, and “dedicated himself, his queen, and two sons, as well as his charger, and state elephant, as slaves to the priesthood.”  The Mahawanso intimates that the priests themselves protested against this debasement, ch. xxxiv. p. 214.]