d commissariat
services. No less scientific was the system of civil government as
illustrated by the municipal institutions of Pataliputra. There, again,
there were six boards dealing respectively with trade, industries,
wages, local taxation, the control of foreign residents and visitors,
and, perhaps most extraordinary of all, with vital statistics. Equally
admirable was the solicitude displayed for agriculture, then, as now,
the greatest of Indian industries, and for its handmaid, irrigation. The
people themselves, if we may believe Megasthenes, were a model people
well worthy of a model government, though if he does not exaggerate, one
is driven to wonder at the necessity for such fearful penalties as were
inflicted for the most trivial breaches of the law. But behind
Chandragupta the power of the Brahman was still clearly entrenched, for
his chief minister was a Brahman, Chanakya, who had followed his
fortunes from their first adventurous beginnings.

The stately fabric which Chandragupta built up during his own
twenty-five years' reign, _circa_ 322-297 B.C., endured during the reign
of his son Bendusara, of whom scarcely anything is known, and at the end
of another twenty-five years passed on, undiminished, to his great
successor, Asoka, whose unique experiment would have been scarcely
possible had he not succeeded to an empire already firmly consolidated
at home and abroad. When he came to the throne, about 272 B.C., Asoka
had served his apprenticeship in the art of government as viceroy, first
in the north at Taxila, and then in the west at Ujjain. He had been
brought up by Brahmans in the manner befitting his rank. Buddhist
tradition would have us believe that until his conversion he was a
monster of cruelty; but there is scarcely enough to warrant that
indictment in the fact that he began his reign with a war of aggression,
for which he afterwards expressed the deepest remorse. It was, indeed,
from that moment that he determined to be henceforth a prince of peace;
but it is quite as probable that his determination inclined him more and
more to turn his ear to Buddhist teaching as that Buddhist teaching
prompted his determination.

No monarch has ever recorded the laws which he gave to his people in
such imperishable shape. They are to be seen to the present day cut into
granite pillars or chiselled into the face of the living rock in almost
every part of what was then the Empire of the Mauryas, from the Pesha