The Greeks, they say, were very gifted liars; but I do not see why we should suppose them lying, when they sang the superiorities of Indian things and people;—­as they did. The Indians, says Megasthenes, were taller than other men, and of greater distinction and prouder bearing.  The air and water of their land were the purest in the world; so you would expect in the people, the finest culture and skill in the arts.  Almost always they gathered two harvests in the years; and famine had never visited India.—­You see, railways, quick communications, and all the appliances of modern science and invention cannot do as much for India in pralaya, as her own native civilization could do for her in manvantara.—­Then he goes on to show how that civilization guarded against famine and many other things; and incidentally to prove it not only much higher than the Greek, but much higher than our own.  I said Manu provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war:  here was the custom, which may have been dishonored in the breach sometimes, but still was the custom.—­The whole continent was divided into any number of kingdoms; mutually antagonistic often, but with certain features of homogeneity that made the name Aryavarta more than a geographical expression.  I am speaking of the India Megasthenes saw, and as it had been then for dear knows how long.  It had made concessions to human weakness, yes; had fallen, as I think, from an ancient unity; it had not succeeded in abolishing war.  It was open to any king to make himself a Chakravartin, or world-sovereign, if he disposed of the means for doing so:  which means were military.  As this was a well-recognised principle, wars were by no means rare.  But with them all, what a Utopia it was, compared to Christendom!  There was never a draft or conscription.  Of the four castes, the Kshatriya or warrior alone did the fighting.  While the conches brayed, and the war-cars thundered over Kurukshetra; while the pantheons held their breath, watching Arjun and mightiest Karna at battle—­the peasants in the next field went on hoeing their rice; they knew no one was making war on them.  They trusted Gandiva, the goodly bow, to send no arrows their way; their caste was inviolable, and sacred to the tilling of the soil.  Megasthenes notes it with wonder.  War implied no ravaging of the land, no destruction of crops, no battering down of buildings, no harm whatever to non-combatants.

Kshatriya fought Kshatriya.  If you were a Brahmin:  which is to say, a theological student, or a man of letters, a teacher or what not of the kind—­you were not even called up for physical examination.  If you were a merchant, you went on quietly with your ‘business as usual.’  A mere patch of garden, or a peddler’s tray, saved you from all the horrors of a questionnaire.  Kshatriya fought Kshatriya, and no one else; and on the battlefield, and nowhere else.  The victor became possessed of the territory of the vanquished; and there was no more fuss or botheration about it.