A Mine of Faults

A Mine of Faults

Though the old literature of the Hindoos is deficient in the department of politicsit has no history, no orators, no Demosthenes, no Polybius, no Aristotle; for the dialectic of politics appears to have been invented by the divinely discontented Greekthough, I say, it has no politics, it is permeated with policy. The ancients, says Aristotle, wrote politically, but we rhetorically: and his remark is admirably illustrated by e.g. the old Panchatantra, whose author certainly had in him as much policy as Thucydides, although he chose to deliver his wisdom in apologues, rather than in the prosaic and somewhat pedantic photography of actual affairs. The Hindoo term, nti, means, not so much policy, as diplomacy, and so their nti-shastra, or doctrine of policy, refers rather to the clever conduct of affairs in negotiation, than to anything else. And therefore, love-affairs, which we should hardly include under politics, fall in with the Hindoo conception, and in this sense women are, as the Hindoos think, and their annals abundantly testify, at least the equals, in policy, of men. When the author of Eothen commended certain women of the gan isles for their admirable [Greek: politiue], he was using the term exactly in the sense of nti. And this correlation of diplomacy and love is the substance of the present story, the story of a love-affair, in which, if we may believe a great authority, the poet-king, Bhartrihari, the special quality required and exhibited is craft. The Hindoos in fact resemble women, and women the Hindoos, in this particular, that they are both of them apt to identify policy with craft, and like rivers, generally prefer to reach desired ends by crooked ways: and this is why both of them, though often very dexterous negotiators (like Wellington's "Old Brag," whom he thought superior to Talleyrand), have too much finesse to make really solid statesmen. For intrigue may be good, in war, and it may be good, in love, but it is not good, save in a subordinate and secondary sense, in state-affairs. Nothing durable was ever built upon it. Strength is simple, but cunning is the weapon of the weak: and there is probably more consummate "policy," i.e. diplomacy and tact, exhibited by women in the conduct of their love-affairs in every century, than has ever been displayed by men on the great stage of politics in the whole of human history. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 48911
Author: Bain, F. W. (Francis William)
Release Date: May 9, 2015
Format: eBook
Language: English