BUDDHISM AND HINDUISM 153
make a nationality in India. He could only establish that political unity and centralisation in whose soil an Indian nationality might grow and come to recognise itself. Little did he dream that the germ of that Indian solidarity which was to establish his throne on adamantine foundations lay, not with himself, but with those yellow-clad beggars who came and went about his dominions, and threaded their way through the gates and streets of Pataliputra itself. Yet time and the hour were with him. He builded better than he knew. From the day of the accession of this Chandra Gupta, India was potentially mature. With the conversion of Asoka she becomes aware of her own maturity. Nothing appears more clearly in the mind of the great Asoka than his consciousness of the geographical extent and unity of his territory, and his sense of the human and democratic value of the populated centres. We find these tAings in the truly imperial distribution of his decrees; in the deep social value of his public works—roads, wells, hospitals, and the rest; and, above all, in the fact that he published decrees at all. Here was no throne-proud autocrat, governing by means of secret orders, but a sovereign, publishing to his people his notion of that highest law which bound him and them alike. Never did monarch live who so called his subjects into his councils. Never was there a father who more deeply gave his confidence to his children. Yet without the work done by Chandra Gupta the grandfather and completed by Asoka himself in
