A History of Architecture in all Countries, Volume 1, 3rd ed. / From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

by James Fergusson

Government.

The most marked characteristic of the Aryans is their innate passion for self-government. If not absolutely republican, the tendency of all their institutions, at all times, has been towards that form, and in almost the exact ratio to the purity of the blood do they adopt this form of autocracy. If kingly power was ever introduced among them, it was always in the form of a limited monarchy; never the uncontrolled despotism of the other races; and every conceivable check was devised to prevent encroachments of the crown, even if such were possible among a people so organised as the Aryans always have been.

With them every town was a municipality, every village a little republic, and every trade a separate self-governing guild. Many of these institutions have died out, or else fallen into neglect, in those communities where equal rights and absolute laws have rendered each individual a king in his own person, and every family a republic in itself.

The village system which the Aryans introduced into India is still the most remarkable of its institutions. These little republican organisms have survived the revolutions of fifty centuries. Neither the devastations of war nor the indolence of peace seems to have affected them. Under Brahmin, Buddhist, or Moslem, they remain the same unchanged and unchangeable institutions, and neither despotism nor anarchy has been able to alter them. They alone have saved India from sinking into a state of savage imbecility, under the various hordes of conquerors who have at times overrun her; and they, with the Vedas and the laws afterwards embodied by Menu, alone remain as records of the old Aryan possessors of the Indian peninsula.

Municipalities, which are merely an enlargement of the Indian village system, exist wherever the Romans were settled, or where the Aryan races exist in Europe; and though guilds are fast losing their significance, it was the Teutonic guilds that alone checked and ultimately supplanted the feudal despotisms of the Celts.

Caste is another institution of these races, which has always more or less influenced all their actions. Where their blood has become so impure as it is in India, caste has degenerated into an abuse; but where it is a living institution, it is perhaps as conducive to the proper regulation of society as any with which we are acquainted. The one thing over which no man can have any control is the accident of his birth; but it is an immense gain to him that he should be satisfied with the station in which he finds himself, and content to do his duty in the sphere in which he was born. Caste, properly understood, never interferes with the accumulation of wealth or power within the limits of the class, and only recognises the inevitable accident of birth: while the fear of losing caste is one of the most salutary checks which has been devised to restrain men from acts unworthy of their social position. It is an enormous gain to society that each man should know his station and be prepared to perform the duties belonging to it, without the restless craving of a selfish ambition that would sacrifice everything for the sake of the personal aggrandisement of the individual. It is far better to acknowledge that there is no sphere in life in which man may not become as like unto the gods as in any other sphere; and it is everywhere better to respect the public good rather than to seek to gratify personal ambition.

The populations of modern Europe have become so mixed that neither caste nor any other Aryan institution now exists in its pristine purity; but in the ratio in which a people is Aryan do they possess an aristocracy and municipal institutions; and, what is almost of more importance, in that ratio are the people prepared to respect the gradations of caste in society, and to sacrifice their individual ambition to the less brilliant task of doing all the good that is possible in the spheres in which they have been placed.

It is true, and so has been found, that an uncontrolled despotism is a sharper, a quicker, and a better tool for warlike purposes, or where national vanity is to be gratified by conquest or the display of power; but the complicated, and it may be clumsy, institutions of the Aryans, are far more lasting and more conducive to individual self-respect, and far more likely to add to the sum of human happiness, and tend more clearly to the real greatness and moral elevation of mankind, than any human institution we are yet acquainted with.

So far as our experience now goes, the division of human society into classes or castes is not only the most natural concomitant of the division of labour, but is also the most beneficent of the institutions of man; while the organisation of a nation into self-governing municipalities is not only singularly conducive to individual well-being, but renders it practically indestructible by conquest, and even imperishable through lapse of time. These two are the most essentially characteristic institutions of the Aryans.