________________ The Heritage of Vaisali 55 methods, be rendered infertile, retaining them for other uses,-and similarly animal population too can be successfully controlled, very much more indeed than human population. But these scientific steps require financing, and here too our main hope lies with the Jaina mercantile community.--Again, it is they who can take the initiative in reconstructing the ship-yards and docks of Vaisali along the Gandaki and the Ganga,and in building river-craft for the riparian trade of the middle-Gangetic valley, and sea-going barks and frigates for maritime trade and colonisation along or across the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. You all know how sadly neglected river-traffic is today, and how primitive, decadent and inefficient; river-craft using the sail, rudder and line, or using steam, oil or electric power, will effectually relieve the cramping pressure on railways and roads; and why could we not have a Vaisali Maritime Navigation Company, if Malwa, Gujarat and Bengal could have such companies today? Even as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries A. D., seaward vessels carried goods down from Singhia nearby to the sea-ports of the Gangetic Delta for distant Europe. Let us bid good-bye to that bullock-cart amongst modern conveyances, the O. T. R., and have our own motor boats and tugs, our own oil-fuelled or turbine sea-dogs,and thereby gratify the "pitrs" of this ancient land, who scoured the rivers and the seas, and were the first from North India to hold Ceylon as a commercial colony, and who even as late as the early medieval period established colonial settlements and dynastic relations in Arakan and Pagan in Burma. Once again, cannot the over-populated regions of North Bihar repeat history by sending forth colonial settlers across the seas to the islands and coasts of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific,-sailing on their own ships, and carrying their trade and culture along with them to new lands? (3) In the political sphere, as you must all have learnt, the characteristic of the Vaigali region was realisation of democracy and individual freedom, and of solidarity through federatiou or unions on equal terms. The ancient Vaisalian princes showed the way, along with the Videban princes, by dis-establishing the monarchies by self-denial; the great Vaisalian prince Nabbaga of Vedic and Epic fame, after his abdication over a question of human rights, told his dyansty, "I am now a free tiller of the Soil, King over my acre." The Senators of the later Vaisalian Assembly of the Jaina-Buddhist age were all called "Kings', that is sovereignty resided in them; as Ravindranatha has said in his significant allegorical drama, "the King",-'we are all kings in this State, while the King remains unseen. Vaisali,- the extensive city,' -justi.
