STUDIES 
 
 IN 
 
 THE HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 THARRAWADDY 
 
 n 
 
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BURMA STUDIES AND PAMPHLETS. 
 
 STUDIES IN THE HISTORY 
 OF THARRAWADDY 
 
 REPRINTED FROM THE RANGOON TIMES 
 
PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION ONLY 
 
STUDIES 
 
 IN 
 
 THE HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 THARRAWADDY 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1920 
 
THARRAWADDY 
 
 Next month His Honour the Lieutenant-Governor will, it is 
 expected, pay a visit to Tharrawaddy on his way to Rangoon.^,,.^- 
 That District has been troubled with an unenviable notoriety jfr^o^"*'^^^^ 
 for several years, and its condition has been the cause of many 
 communications, culminating in a reference in the Legislative 
 Council. In a sense, Tharrawaddy may be considered "an acid 
 test" subject; those who know anything about it are either 
 vehemently in favour of continuous repressive measures or are 
 equally vehement in the belief that repressive measures are 
 found to fail. As usual the truth lies between the two extremes. 
 To-day we pubHsh in another column the first of a series of 
 " Studies in the History of Tharrawaddy," written with know- 
 ledge of the District and with a constructive purpose. Some 
 of these articles will of necessity set forth the past history of 
 Tharrawaddy, as the present is ever the child of the past, 
 especially in Burma ; but they will be found to have very close 
 bearing on present conditions and will provide material for a 
 judgment as to the future. They are intended to be not con- 
 troversial, but informative; and we anticipate that they will be 
 read with interest by all who have any concern for the future 
 of a District which has been too much in the limelight for 
 decades past. Tharrawaddy would certainly have been happier 
 if it had had less "history." 
 
 12 June, 1919. 
 
 r^ 
 
 
Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive 
 
 in 2010 witii funding from 
 
 University of Nortii Carolina at Chapel Hill 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/studiesinhistoryOOgran 
 
STUDIES IN THE HISTORY 
 OF THARRAWADDY 
 
 I. A BURMESE REGIMENT 
 
 THE PEGU LIGHT INFANTRY 
 
 The enrolment of the Pegu Light Infantry Regiment was sanc- 
 tioned by the Governor-General in Council on the 4th April, 
 1853, because the work to be done in the Tharrawaddy District 
 in suppressing the "rebel" Gaung Gyi required troops who 
 were acquainted with, and accustomed to, the local physical 
 conditions as well as more accustomed to the climatic conditions 
 than the Madras and Bengal regiments then employed by the 
 British authorities. The Corps was not placed under the General 
 Commanding in the Province but under the Civil Commissioner. 
 Enlistment in it was to be for general service ; and it was proposed 
 that the regiment should consist of Burmese, Arakanese, 
 Takings and Karens, with a few Malays, say twenty to each 
 company. The Malays were added because Malays had been 
 found so useful in the Ceylon Rifles, and because it was believed 
 that Malays were more feared by Burmans than any other race, 
 and would therefore be useful against Burmese marauders from 
 over the border. Major Nuthall, who was in command of the 
 Arakan Battalion at the time, was appointed to raise the new 
 regiment and take command of it. 
 
 In May, 1853, Nuthall formulated for the organisation of the 
 corps definite proposals which obtained the approval of Govern- 
 ment. According to these the corps was to consist of 800 
 sepoys (with officers, doctors, clerks in proportion) and was to 
 be formed for civil purposes but to be subject to all the Articles 
 of War applicable to native troops in the service of the East 
 India Company, and liable for military service whenever it 
 might be ordered, by land or by sea; the standing orders of the 
 Bengal Army were to apply generally; the men were to be 
 
[ 2 ] 
 
 enlisted as sappers and rowers, and to be armed with percussion 
 fusils. The uniform was to be green with black facings and 
 accoutrements and silver mountings, the waist belt being 
 fastened in the front with a bronze snake-clasp; in place of 
 breast-plates each man was to have a bronze lion's head and 
 pricker in a case connected with a double chain. The pay of a 
 sepoy up to twenty years' service was fixed at seven rupees a 
 month. 
 
 At the end of May, 1853, Nuthall, having obtained no recruits 
 in Rangoon — some critics said he did not try very hard — went 
 to Prome and there called for recruits under 22 years of age of 
 any race living in the Province of Pegu; but the lack of any 
 nucleus caused difficulty. After some time 20 boys were per- 
 suaded to offer themselves ; of these seven were not physically 
 fit and seven declined to take the oath of allegiance, so then 
 there were six. Nuthall decided to take this somewhat minute 
 nucleus of a regiment to Rangoon hoping for more success there ; 
 but one deserted when embarking at Prome, so then there were 
 five. This was hardly encouraging, but Nuthall persevered. 
 Finding that part of the difficulty lay in the system of monthly 
 payments he paid the men every four days; further, recruits 
 were paid four annas a day for the broken period of their first 
 month instead of the regulation two annas. Eighty men now 
 offered themselves for service in a few days. Many of them were 
 unfit for service, but as they made a show of a nucleus it was 
 pretended that all were taken, although none were actually en- 
 rolled; they were useful for constructing barracks and it was 
 proposed to weed them out afterwards. They went on strike for 
 Rs. 10 a month almost at once. Nuthall made a great speech to 
 the strikers and drew their attention to the Indian troops all 
 round them, arguing that they would not have agreed to serve 
 so far from their homes unless they had found it satisfactory to 
 serve under the British for Rs. 7-8 a month and the glory. The 
 recruits were not convinced ; they refused to work for the pay 
 fixed for them and were accordingly dismissed; but in a few 
 days all returned and asked to be re-enlisted. Nuthall, seizing 
 his opportunity, weeded them out and took back only those 
 who suited him; thus achieving a second object by making a 
 favour of the re-enlistment. In July, 1853, however, Nuthall 
 
[ 3 ] 
 
 himself pointed out to Sir Arthur Phayre, the Commissioner, 
 that the recruits had a real grievance. Coolies in India were 
 paid Rs. 5-8 per mensem and the sepoys who had to keep up 
 various articles of half-mountings were accordingly paid Rs. 7-8 
 there ; in Burma where the usually cooly rate was Rs. 8 the men 
 of the Pegu Light Infantry, who after a rupee had been deducted 
 for equipment received only Rs. 7, were distinctly worse off. 
 Government however declined to grant any concession. 
 
 When he first began Nuthall asked to be allowed to take ten 
 men from his former command, the Arakan Battalion, to form 
 a nucleus for the new regiment. Later he found the Peguers, 
 as he called them, more difficult to discipline than he had ex- 
 pected; and he increased his demand to 40 or 50. It is not clear 
 whether he ever got these men, but that he eventually did seems 
 probable from the fact that he ceased to ask for them ; he was 
 not the man to subside without getting what he wanted. In 
 July 1853 he reported that he had 172 men who had taken the 
 oath of allegiance, promising to serve for three years, and to 
 work as sappers, pioneers, builders, rowers, etc., whenever 
 required to do so. By September over 1000 had offered them- 
 selves and 192 had been taken, while many more were said to 
 be ready to enlist if some advances were sent to them. All the 
 local recruits up to this time were Karens and Shans, no Bur- 
 mans or Takings being taken as yet. They behaved well and 
 submitted to discipline, and they appear to have been employed 
 in building barracks in Rangoon. At first spades and pickaxes 
 were provided for sapper work, but these were soon changed 
 to the more familiar dahs and mamutis. 
 
 On the 20th November, 1853, the corps found its first em- 
 ployment on active service when a detachment landed some 
 way up the Pegu River and hunted a party of dacoits for several 
 days under peculiarly trying conditions. Success was only 
 partial but the force earned the warm commendation of Major 
 Nuthall. Soon after this the corps was warned to be ready to 
 proceed to Yegin to quieten the Tharrawaddy District, and in 
 January 1854 the move was made. 
 
 In April 1854 a proposal to increase the pay of privates in 
 quarters to Rs. 9 was sanctioned, although it had been rejected 
 only in the preceding January ; and in August of the same year 
 
[ 4 ] 
 
 the pay of privates in quarters was raised to Rs. lo (including 
 hatta) and the pay of non-commissioned officers was increased 
 at the same time. While engaged this year in the active pursuit 
 of Gaung Gyi, for which the force had been organised, the men 
 were frequently commended for good work ; they showed them- 
 selves ready to suffer without complaint continued hardship 
 and privation, and exhibited great courage and daring in actual 
 conflicts. 
 
 In 1855 owing to the difficulty of obtaining Karen and Shan 
 recruits the Commissioner sanctioned the enlistment of Bur- 
 mans and Talaings. No avowed Talaing ever enlisted in the 
 regiment; but Burmans were recruited, and by 1858 the force 
 came to be composed entirely of Burmans and Malays, no Shans 
 or Karens being included at any time after that. 
 
 Malay recruiting had been started towards the end of 1854,' 
 when a subaltern was sent to Penang as a recruiting officer with 
 a promise of assistance from the authorities there. Early in 1855 
 some seventy Malays were brought up in this way, and later 
 thirty-one more, followed again in February 1856 by another 
 twenty-one. These recruits soon received the enthusiastic ap- 
 proval of Major Nuthall who found that Malays did " not require 
 the same ceaseless supervision as the Burm'ans to keep them in 
 order ; they were more trustworthy, took more care of their arms 
 and accoutrements " and were, in his opinion, "the best men for 
 an irregular corps in this Province." Nuthall proposed to get more 
 Malays so as to have one half Malays and one half local men ; 
 but Government limited their number to 200, or two companies, 
 and directed that if the numbers of the two companies could 
 not be made up with Malays they were to be filled with Burmans. 
 To aid in recruiting them it was promised that every respectable 
 Malay bringing 50 recruits to the regiment should be admitted 
 as a commissioned or non-commissioned officer. At the end of 
 1857 the number of Malays was 154 and this was the maximum 
 reached ; for, as it had been found increasingly difficult to obtain 
 Malay recruits and the expense incurred had been large — 
 Rs. 64 per recruit apart from pay between recruiting and arrival 
 in Tharrawaddy — the recruiting party in the Straits Settlements 
 was withdrawn in July, 1857. It is to be noted that quarrels 
 were frequent between the Malays and the local recruits, and 
 
[ 5 ] 
 
 peace between them was maintained only by Nuthall's firm 
 unwavering justice. 
 
 The Burmans did not please Nuthall so much as the Malays. 
 He found them very good on active service but slack in Canton- 
 ments; and in August 1855 he said he had been extremely 
 disappointed in them since they were withdrawn from active 
 service in the field. As might be expected the Burman failed 
 to appreciate sentry duty or any of the meticulous routine of 
 barrack life, and the records include frequent complaints by 
 the officers in these directions. But one sentry at least was 
 faithful. Set to watch a consignment of barrels of gun-powder 
 which had arrived at Yegin to replenish the store of the corps 
 he stayed at his post with a fidelity worthy of Casabianca, sitting 
 quietly there till a spark falling from his cheroot caused him to 
 be removed from the exploding barrel by jorce majeure. The 
 story certainly agrees with the character of the present genera- 
 tion in Tharrawaddy District, from the area of which most of 
 the Burmans of the force were drawn. Nuthall thought the 
 reason for this area supplying so many recruits was to be found 
 in "the confidence and courage acquired by the people of that 
 district in predatory habits during the Burmese time and their 
 consequent predilection for a military life." In April 1855 the 
 corps had 450 privates, including Shans, Karens, Burmans and 
 Malays. In April 1858 it included about 780 Burmans who, 
 together with the Malays, then brought the Battalion up to its 
 full complement of sixteen native commissioned and ninety-six 
 native non-commissioned officers with sixteen buglers and 
 800 privates. It has already been mentioned that from and after 
 1858 no Karens or Shans were included. 
 
 On first arrival in the Tharrawaddy district in 1854 the corps 
 went to Yegin, but Myanaung was chosen almost at once for 
 their headquarters, and they crossed over and built their 
 barracks there, and retained that post as headquarters till the 
 end. 
 
 The suppression of Gaung Gyi, which was a great part of 
 the purpose of the force, was effected by about February 1855, 
 when the regiment had reached only half its full complement ; 
 but that half in conjunction with the Arakan Battalion played 
 no inconsiderable part in the operations and even in March 
 
[ 6 ] 
 
 i854> when it had been only two months in the field, the 
 corps was complimented by the Commissioner for gallantry in 
 the operations round Tapun. Detachments from it replaced 
 the Arakan Battalion in garrisoning the disturbed area until the 
 Sarawah Police Corps, formed in 1854, took over some of the 
 posts, leaving the Pegu Light Infantry the duty of assisting in 
 guarding the Upper Burma frontier and of supplying garrisons 
 for Henzada, Mingyi and Myanaung. Detachments were also 
 employed in Hanthawaddy. In 1857-8, owing to the great 
 amount of sickness amongst the detachments of the Madras 
 Native Infantry employed on the frontier, all the outposts were 
 garrisoned by the Pegu Light Infantry who were more suited 
 to this work than were Indian regiments of the line. Their 
 experience in this work was not altogether unchequered. In 
 the year 1858-9 there were two cases of treasure in charge of 
 detachments being lost, and one instance of a small party on 
 the march losing their arms by sheer carelessness; and in i860 
 the pay of a whole detachment and several muskets were 
 carried off by bandits from the outpost of Yaymiet. On another 
 occasion a well-organised attack by the well-known plunderer, 
 Maung Hnaung, a dismissed Myook, resulted in the loss of 
 treasure and the elephant on which it was carried; a second 
 detachment under Lieut. Macdonald gave pursuit but Maung 
 Hnaung got away with all his booty except the elephant which 
 was abandoned in the jungle. But generally the men behaved 
 well in their frequent tasks of repelling incursions from Burmese 
 territory, and by their cheerful quickness and readiness to 
 move without tents or baggage showed that they were thoroughly 
 adapted to their work. Early in i860 they anticipated an attack 
 by a body of 300 dacoits upon the wealthy town of Shwedaung, 
 capturing thirteen of them and compelling the rest to abandon 
 all the loot they had already got. In 1859 there were no less 
 than eighty-two and in the next year fifty-eight desertions ; but 
 this was due to keeping young soldiers of little experience un- 
 relieved for too long periods in small outposts in unhealthy and 
 comparatively expensive localities along the frontier, and when 
 about a half of these had been recaptured and punished the 
 fault was rapidly cured. 
 
 An incident which is of particular interest just now took place 
 
[ 7 ] 
 
 in 1857, when the whole regiment volunteered for service in 
 Bengal against the Mutineers, The Commissioner replied that 
 the regiment had no services to offer; the acceptance of pay 
 from Government made their services the property of Govern- 
 ment ; if Government desired to use those services orders would 
 be issued accordingly; till then it would be more becoming to 
 the regiment to perform properly the duties assigned to it. The 
 Governor-General, however, when he learned of the offer, 
 thinking perhaps that snubs were not a monopoly of Com- 
 missioners, said that, although its services were not required, 
 he desired the Commissioner to thank the regiment for its offer. 
 The regiment did, in a sense, render Mutiny service, as it 
 withstood the numerous frontier attacks which were made when 
 the first news of the Indian Mutiny began to reach the Burmese 
 Court, and were systematically continued in 1858 by large bands 
 of men who were suffering from the scarcity of rice then pre- 
 vailing in Upper Burma. 
 
 In 1 86 1 it was suddenly decided to disband the regiment on 
 account of the establishment under Act V of 186 1 of an organised 
 constabulary for the Province. To this new force all the officers 
 of the regiment were appointed; and many of the men took 
 service in it too, the remainder being gradually disbanded. 
 By the 30th April 1861, 328 privates were left; two companies 
 were kept for a time till the new constabulary could take over 
 the guard of the jails at Henzada and Mingyi, but on the i8th 
 August 1 861 the regiment came to an end. But it had lasted 
 long enough to show those who had eyes that the Burman 
 would make a good soldier if sympathetically handled and 
 granted sufficient pay and reasonable conditions of service. The 
 old-fashioned soldier, who, destitute of imagination, supposed 
 that only one standard and type of discipline were permissible, 
 and that close formation and highly polished buttons were the 
 ultimate essentials of military art and science, failed to see this; 
 but there is no doubt that a very different opinion would have 
 been expressed by an Anzac or South African officer accustomed 
 to the different ideals of to-day's colonial army. In the Pegu 
 Light Infantry the Burmans had no opportunity to show their 
 capacity for military leadership ; but that too was shown by their 
 opponent in marked degree, and was again exhibited nearly 
 
[ 8 ] 
 
 thirty years later by the rebel U Thuriya. The recent discovery 
 that Burmans can be trained to be soldiers might have been 
 made at any time by anybody who had studied the Tharra- 
 waddy record intelligently, even if he were not aware of the 
 numerous wars and conquests of Burmese history, or thought 
 they bore no relation to warfare by armies organised on western 
 lines. 
 
11. THE STORM OF GAUNG GYI 
 
 The principality of Tharrawaddy, which was formed when the 
 kingdom of Prome was annexed to Toungoo by Burin Naung 
 in 1542-3 and continued up to the time of the British occupa- 
 tion in 1852, occupied practically the same area as the present 
 Tharrawaddy District, save that a small strip along the river, 
 twenty-five miles long and eight to ten miles wide, forming the 
 division of Sarawah, was not included. It was divided into two 
 counties. North and South, of which the capitals were Monyo 
 and Laukazeya — the latter being adjacent to the Mingyi 
 which became the headquarters of the Yegin-Mingyi Assistant 
 Commissioner. There was also a further sub-division into 
 twenty circles — some accounts say thirty-two — under thigyis 
 and steersmen and four Royal Forests under Conservators. The 
 Myowun of the whole principality lived at Monyo. Between the 
 Myozvun and the Sitkes of the two counties there was a division 
 of authority, the evil results of which were exacerbated by 
 appeals to the Prince of Tharrawaddy ; as a result discontent, 
 disunion and anarchy had often prevailed. Accordingly it is 
 not a matter of surprise that Captain Josiah Smith, the first 
 Deputy Commissioner of the district, found on his arrival four 
 armed parties struggHng for control and the right of collecting 
 the revenues. The strongest of these parties was that of Gaung 
 Gyi who had formerly been the thugyi at Tapun. He had failed 
 to pay in his proper quota of taxes, and refused to furnish a 
 contingent to the Burmese army at Prome, which had been 
 collected to withstand the British ; but the advance of the latter 
 allowed the Burman generals no opportunity of reducing him 
 to obedience. The Myowun at Monyo in 1852 was U Talok, a 
 brother-in-law of Gaung Gyi, who was described in 1853 as 
 "upwards of eighty years of age but still full of energy rapacity 
 and perfidy." 
 
 As early as September 1852 the southern part of Tharra- 
 waddy was openly in favour of the British ; and when Maung Po, 
 the Governor of Tharrawaddy and Myanaung, retired to 
 
[ lo ] 
 
 Myanaung in October 1852, nearly the whole river line became 
 safe ; but the northern portion of Tharrawaddy, where Gaung 
 Gyi's influence was felt, gave rise to the most difficult of all the 
 tasks experienced by the British in their annexation of Lower 
 Burma. U Talok was retained by the British as Myook at 
 Monyo, and he promised Gaung Gyi to obtain for him the post 
 of Myook of Myanaung. Failing to receive this, or impatient of 
 delay, Gaung Gyi marched on Monyo at the beginning of March 
 at the head of a number of Burmese police and soldiers, who had 
 been left behind in the Burmese retreat and were ready now 
 for any undertaking which gave a fair promise of plunder. 
 Altogether he had 1500 men, of whom 600 were armed with 
 muskets. U Talok fled across the Irrawaddy to Okpo, and 
 Monyo was destroyed. At the first sign of disturbance Captain 
 Smith summoned Gaung Gyi to Henzada, intending to give 
 him an appointment. But Gaung Gyi went to Tapun instead ; 
 and, receiving secret support from the Burmese Court, set up 
 his own Government there. He confirmed in their appoint- 
 ments such of the old thugyis as supported him, and drove the 
 others away. He also appointed steersmen who robbed boats on 
 the river and in the villages near its bank. His brother Gaung 
 Gale, who had formerly assisted him in his duties as thugyi, 
 assisted in his new enterprise, chiefly on the river, and was often 
 credited with being the more able of the two. Some degree 
 of organisation was established and it would be more correct to 
 regard Gaung Gyi as the head of an army competing with the 
 British for the possession of a Province abandoned by the Bur- 
 mese Government than as a rebel or outlaw as he is usually 
 described. In April Gaung Gyi's main force consisted of 600 
 men at Yuntalin, about twenty miles from Monyo, with an 
 advance guard of 300 stationed at a distance of eight miles from 
 that town ; two other bodies of 600 each were between Monyo 
 and Mingyi, and still another body of 100 was reported to be 
 somewhere in the same neighbourhood. All remained quiet till 
 the 24th May when Gaung Gyi suddenly crossed the Irrawaddy 
 and committed depredations in Kanaung and Okpo on the 
 Henzada side and then returned to plunder on the eastern bank. 
 Destitute people crowded into Henzada, driven from Sarawah 
 and Tharrawaddy by the loss of all their property ; rice was sold 
 
[ II ] 
 
 at Rs. 8 a basket — the usual price being six to ten annas — and 
 even at that price only small quantities were available. Captain 
 Smith asking for troops to assist him reported " the spectacle of a 
 large tract of country in successful rebellion against the Govern- 
 ment " and "the rebels in possession of the river." Even when 
 the Deputy Commissioner himself convoyed some canoes down 
 the river Gaung Gyi's men tried, though unsuccessfully, to cut 
 off the last of them. In June the materials collected for the re- 
 building of Monyo were burned by Gaung Gyi ; and Myat Tun 
 who had been defeated by Sir John Cheape and Captain Fytche 
 at Danubyu, joined him and took charge of his river operations. 
 Meanwhile in February or March the Deputy Commissioner 
 had asked for Yegin to be established as a military post, for a 
 gunboat to patrol the river, and for the Henzada side of the 
 river to be made into a separate district so that he could give 
 his whole attention to the eastern side. All these requests were 
 granted and the outcome of the requests for troops and the 
 establishment of Yegin was the sanction given on the 4th April 
 to the enrolment of the Pegu Light Infantry Regiment which 
 was the subject of the first of these studies. 
 
 The Governor- General, after cautioning the Commissioner 
 against undertaking anything with inadequate means or in- 
 volving risk, "because of the tendency in India and in England 
 to distort or magnify trivial incidents in Pegu into serious 
 disasters," gave him a free hand to deal with the situation, and 
 for a time the British had some success. H.M.S. "Nerbudda" 
 cleared the Irrawaddy of Gaung Gyi's friends and on the 31st 
 July Smith reported that the Sanywe neighbourhood was 
 quietened and that other rebels along the river were disposed to 
 surrender themselves. On the 29th August the Myook of 
 Tharrawaddy attacked Gaung Gyi with success and cleared 
 the lower district of rebels. On the other hand on the 4th August 
 U Talok, the Myook of Monyo, had been kidnapped by Gaung 
 Gyi and carried off to his stronghold at Taungnyo ; and Captain 
 Phayre reported to the Governor-General on the ist September 
 that the whole of the east bank of the Irrawaddy from a few 
 miles above Tharrawaw to Tarokmaw was "completely under 
 the power of Gaung Gyi," and that the latter had apparently 
 determined to get the people of the west bank to join him. But 
 
[ 12 ] 
 
 as a result of the success of the British in the south Gaung Gyi's 
 influence seemed to be waning; and on the 19th October it was 
 learned that, fearing attack, he had sent his family to the Pegu 
 Yoma for safety. In January 1854 the British were strengthened 
 by the arrival at Yegin of the first detachments of the Pegu Light 
 Infantry and they occupied Gaung Gyi's quarters at Tapun in 
 the same month. Gaung Gyi waited in the jungle near by, hoping 
 that they would get tired of Tapun — as well they soon might — 
 and go back ; but being disappointed in this he retreated to the 
 hills. A party of the Arakan Battalion under Lieut. D'Oyly 
 followed up and in the same month of January attacked him and 
 captured his gilt umbrella, his gong, twenty-five stand of arms, 
 and the wives of many of his officers. One of his lieutenants was 
 killed and his two elephants were nearly captured. Amongst 
 the people confidence in the British now began to revive so 
 that more information was obtainable. Gaung Gyi was followed 
 up at once, no rest being taken lest news of the pursuers should 
 reach him, and he was completely surprised at Bawbin, where 
 there is now a Forest Department bungalow, a few miles east 
 of NattaUn; many of his friends were killed or captured but 
 Gaung Gyi himself escaped. 
 
 The unhealthiness of the locality forbade further operations 
 in the neighbourhood of the hills. But unfortunately the main 
 forces were withdrawn not merely to the plains but all the way 
 to Prome. Gaung Gyi seized the opportunity and at once 
 neutralised all these successes by his renewed activity. In 
 January he had released his brother-in-law, U Talok, whom he 
 had abducted in the previous March; and U Talok, having 
 returned to Monyo, had been reappointed by the British to his 
 Myookship there. But on the loth February another party sent 
 by Gaung Gyi again abducted him. There is no doubt that these 
 abductions show that U Talok was sitting on the fence, but 
 they also show which seemed at the time to be the winning side. 
 Meanwhile all who had helped the British in any way were 
 attacked, and a reign of terror was established in the north of 
 the district. A party was sent to kill the My 00k appointed by 
 the British in Tapun, and that officer was severely wounded and 
 barely escaped with his life. Every village round Tapun up to 
 within a mile thereof was burned, and its population driven off, 
 
[ 13 ] 
 
 in spite of the presence of 350 men of the British forces in that 
 town. The British forces lost completely the confidence of the 
 people, so that they could no longer get either information or 
 supplies ; while the terror of Gaung Gyi's name was higher than 
 before, and many of the leading men of the district who had 
 already submitted to the British now submitted to him. All 
 the interior of Tharrawaddy indeed lapsed to Gaung Gyi, and 
 on the 3rd March, 1854, it was found that by occupying the 
 Ba-in forest he had cut the communications between Yegin and 
 Tapun. On the 7th March a company of the loth Bengal 
 Infantry was attacked about six miles from Tapun and was saved 
 only by the timely appearance of a force marching down from 
 Paungde. 
 
 But about this time the energy of the British began to revive. 
 The Commissioner, Captain Phayre, had offered in February 
 a reward of Rs. 2000 for bringing in Gaung Gyi alive "and 
 untortured"; in March the Governor-General increased the 
 reward ten times. Captain Phayre on the 22nd February met 
 at Tapun Major Nuthall of the Pegu Light Infantry Regiment 
 and Captain David Brown, the Assistant Commissioner, and 
 these three concocted a plan to drive Gaung Gyi back to the 
 hills. Major Pott was appointed to the command of the Tharra- 
 waddy District; and Major Nuthall's regiment, with boats to 
 use during the rains, was placed at his disposal. In addition 
 he had a gun-boat at the mouth of the Tapun river, a detachment 
 of the Arakan Battalion with two guns, and five companies of 
 Sikh, Bengal, and Madras Native Infantry. With the revival of 
 British energy it was found possible to add to these a force of 
 Burmese armed levies to act as scouts and protect the flanks 
 under the command of their own Bos ; these were armed with 
 muskets and recruited chiefly from the neighbourhood of 
 Paungde and were paid four annas a day; including those 
 stationed at Sanywe, Monyo and Myodwin the cost of the levies 
 came to Rs. 20,000 per mensem. In May also the Sarawah 
 Police Corps of 480 men was sanctioned, while the Deputy 
 Commissioner and the Assistant Commissioner were empowered 
 to carry into immediate execution sentences of death passed 
 upon persons convicted of participation in open rebellion. In 
 July Captain David Brown was appointed Deputy Com- 
 
[ 14 ] 
 
 missioner of Sarawah with headquarters at Yegin, the Henzada 
 side being taken away to allow him to concentrate upon Gaung 
 Gyi. In November it had still to be reported that as the Police 
 and the Pegu Light Infantry were not sufficient to protect the 
 country from Gaung Gyi, the Indian troops could not yet be 
 withdrawn. But by February 1855 the Arakan Battalion was 
 withdrawn after being specially complimented for its work, and 
 replaced by detachments of the Pegu Light Infantry, which 
 had then reached a strength of over 400 men. By this time 
 Gaung Gyi's power had collapsed owing to the close pursuit he 
 suifered ; and the problem of pacification had resolved itself into 
 that of dealing with a number of small dacoit parties of which 
 his was one. Steady progress was made, and in June 1855 
 Gaung Gyi withdrew to Upper Burma. 
 
 In 1858 a scarcity of rice in Upper Burma led many who' 
 thought the British fully occupied with the Indian Mutiny to 
 make attacks upon the British frontier; but on urgent remon- 
 strance the Burmese Court adopted effectual preventive 
 measures. Gaung Gyi, however, came to the frontier to make 
 an inroad at the head of a considerable force. Special orders 
 to desist were sent to him from the capital, and as he refused 
 to obey he was shot by the local Burmese authorities. 
 
 A grandson of Gaung Gyi's brother, Gaung Gale, came into 
 prominence in Tharrawaddy in the disturbances of 1888 ; while 
 Sir Herbert Thirkell- White relates in his A Civil Servant in 
 Burma that comparatively recently he met in Mandalay some 
 descendants of Gaung Gyi. The Province owes it to Gaung Gyi 
 that he showed by his own achievements that Burmans can 
 exhibit capacity for directing military operations, and also by 
 furnishing the ground for the experiment with the Pegu Light 
 Infantry caused it to be made evident that Burmans could fill 
 the ranks as well as direct. 
 
III. "FAIR GENERALLY, SOME SHOWERS; 
 UNSETTLED LATER" 
 
 In 1819 Alompra's son Bodawpaya died at his capital Amara- 
 pura and was succeeded by his grandson Bagyidaw, who con- 
 templated an invasion of England but is known to the British 
 chiefly because he was the King of Burma at the time of the 
 First Burmese War. The humiliation which he suffered at the 
 end of that war affected his reason so much that a commission 
 of regency of four persons was formed, including the Queen's 
 brother Minthagyi, "formerly a fishmonger," and presided 
 over by the King's brother, Prince Tharrawaddy. But the 
 latter found palace intrigues so dangerous that he withdrew from 
 the capital and lived in various places in and near the Delta, 
 brooding over the troubles which had arisen from the supremacy 
 of the fishmonger, to the following of whose counsel instead 
 of Tharrawaddy's it was mainly due that the Provinces of 
 Arakan and Tenasserim had been lost to those "uncivilised 
 foreigners" the English. It is probable that Prince Tharra- 
 waddy's endeavours first to avoid a war with the British and 
 afterwards to come to terms with them were due to the position 
 of his own territory in the direct line of advance from Rangoon 
 to Ava. But this would not make the failure in the war less 
 irritating; and when in addition he found the fishmonger was 
 ready to go to a dangerous length in his enmity, he retired to 
 his palace at Myodwin in the present Tharrawaddy District, and 
 under cover of indulging in his favourite sport of boat-racing 
 collected round himself there a strong body-guard, took measures 
 to raise a large army and secretly collected 8000 muskets. In 
 1837 when the fishmonger sent a party to arrest one of the 
 retinue at Myodwin, Tharrawaddy was so angered that he 
 marched with his followers to Sagaing and thence to Moksobo, 
 the home of Alompra, and raised the standard of a successful 
 revolt. On securing the throne he took the title of Kunbaungmin 
 and moved the capital back from Ava to Amarapura; his 
 
[ i6 ] 
 
 Tharrawaddy principality played no further part in the events 
 of his reign. 
 
 The next disturbance of the Tharrawaddy atmosphere was 
 the storm of the Gaung Gyi episode ; but the recovery from this 
 was exceedingly rapid. Gaung Gyi withdrew across the frontier 
 in May or June 1855 ; and already in the Administration Report 
 of 1857 Sir Arthur Phayre declared that "Tharrawaddy is 
 probably the best ordered District in the Province." In 1857 
 many attacks were made upon the northern boundary of 
 British Burma as the result of a frontier agitation stimulated in 
 the Burmese dominions by the first news of the Indian Mutiny, 
 and in 1858 these were systematically continued by large bands 
 of men who were suffering from the scarcity of rice prevailing 
 in the Burmese territory; but from 1857 to 1859, although 
 so near the frontier that special powers were granted to the 
 Deputy Commissioner to carry into execution at once sentence 
 of death passed on any persons convicted of participation in 
 open and armed insurrection in cases in which there had been 
 loss of life, Tharrawaddy was the paragon with "less crime in 
 proportion than any other District" in British Burma. In i860 
 there were only nineteen cases of cattle-theft, and in 1861 the 
 Tharrawaddy and Henzada Districts were united because it was 
 "unnecessary to retain a separate Deputy Commissioner and 
 his staff for a district producing so little revenue, litigation or 
 crime as Tharrawaddy." There was some disorder in 1865-8 
 due to outlaws from Upper Burma and the Prome District, but 
 Tharrawaddy was generally law-abiding, and in 1873 there was 
 only one case of dacoity in the whole of the District (which then 
 included the present Henzada District). It was recorded in that 
 year that "In Tharrawaddy, once the most turbulent district 
 in Burma, a gang would find no sympathy amongst the people 
 and would soon be disposed of by them." This remark is of 
 interest not only as characterising the people as law-abiding but 
 also as refuting the possible suggestion that the clear crime 
 calendars were due to bad reporting of crime. In 1878 there 
 was an increase of dacoity and other serious crime ; but this was 
 observed in all the other Districts too, and active measures soon 
 disposed of the culprits, so that in 1880-81 Tharrawaddy again 
 showed a comparatively clear crime calendar. 
 
[ 17 ] 
 
 But in 1885 the district began to get out of hand and in the 
 early part of 1886 a storm of disorder which had burst in the 
 Shwegyin District in December 1885 reached Tharrawaddy 
 which then became the scene of quasi-rebellions that were 
 suppressed only with the aid of troops. Nga Aung who lived 
 within five miles of the district headquarters raised a golden 
 umbrella and within a week had a following of several hundred 
 men with many guns collected from the surrounding villages. 
 Other risings of a political character were headed by Landa 
 and the Pongyi Bo. When these were suppressed the rebels 
 broke up into small bands of dacoits. Bad characters of all 
 kinds now banded together and took to the jungle, while less 
 daring spirits stayed in their villages and dacoited under cover 
 of the notorious gangs. Villages with less than five guns were 
 disarmed by the Government to prevent firearms falling into 
 the hands of dacoits, but the dense jungle of the district made 
 capture of the dacoits difficult. Informers were often murdered 
 and villagers therefore feared to give information. The police 
 seemed to be frightened and even the Township Magistrates 
 failed ; most dacoities took place close to township headquarters 
 and police stations. In the third and fourth quarters of 1886 
 there were 159 and 139 dacoities respectively. The police were 
 not altogether useless, for they made many arrests and in the 
 third quarter secured seventy-six convictions ; but for the most 
 part in this and in the two succeeding years dacoities were the 
 work of gangs in formidable numbers under recognised leaders, 
 and the work of the police was of the nature of petty warfare. 
 The rural police failed at this time because, as elsewhere in 
 Lower Burma, they had lost touch with the people. But the 
 regular official police were strengthened and received the 
 assistance of a special Indian Police Force recruited from North- 
 ern India, and of a punitive police force which was imposed at 
 the request of the people, and of "Karen levies"; and by con- 
 tinually hunting the dacoits they had already made large progress 
 in settling the district quite early in 1887. It is important to 
 note that the "Karen levies," who were volunteers enrolled 
 as special constables on the understanding that they would 
 turn out to assist the regular police when called upon, included 
 in Tharrawaddy District quite a few Karens, and were chiefly 
 
[ i8 ] 
 
 composed of Burmans and Yabeins. When on active service 
 these received pay and were armed by Government ; where not 
 less than ten, or in some cases five lived in the same village, 
 they were allowed to retain their guns whether on active service 
 or not. 
 
 But about the middle of the hot weather of 1887, when con- 
 ditions had so much improved, the local officers made the 
 mistake of issuing licenses for firearms freely; and this was 
 immediately followed by a recrudescence of dacoity which 
 required special measures for its suppression. Punitive police 
 were not imposed after August 1887 (when their number was 
 375) but regular troops were stationed at all the treasuries to 
 set free the police for dacoit-hunting. In April 1888 Mr Todd- 
 Naylor became Deputy- Commissioner; the work of re-estab- 
 lishing order was pressed on vigorously and disarmament was 
 completed. Truly, as the dacoit gangs were broken up, crimes 
 of violence were found only to have given place to crimes of 
 stealth ; but those who looked rather at the kind of disorder 
 most readily perceived were just beginning to think the sky 
 was getting clear when, in July 1888, there broke out suddenly 
 the rebellion of the Pongyi^ U Thuriya, which proved to be 
 the greatest storm of all save only that of Gaung Gyi. 
 
 U Thuriya's rebellion was well organised, and the arrange- 
 ments extended all along the railway line from Paungde to 
 Tharrawaddy. His adherents were bound by an oath ; and many 
 of them were tattooed with the letters © © Q O , partly as a 
 distinctive mark, partly to make them invulnerable. Some 
 1700 palm-leaf tickets were prepared for distribution to the 
 rank and file, commissions on larger pieces of palm-leaf were 
 given to the leaders, and a grandson of Gaung Gale (the brother 
 and assistant of the famous Gaung Gyi) was nominated Viceroy 
 of Tharrawaddy under the Myingun Prince. Nearly all the 
 various dacoit bands of the district joined in the undertaking. 
 The 2nd July was chosen by an astrologer as a suitable date, 
 and it was arranged to make a simultaneous attack that night 
 on Gyobingauk, Zigon, Nattalin, Paungde, and all the railway 
 stations between Okpo and Tharrawaddy. 
 
 For some reason U Thuriya changed the date to the ist-2nd 
 
 ^ PoM^>'z= Buddhist monk. 
 
[ 19 ] 
 
 July midnight, when the telegraph wires were cut and the railway 
 workmen forced to pull up a rail on the line between Gyo- 
 bingauk and Zigon. The Kyedangyi of the neighbouring village 
 of Kayingon was dragged out and informed that the rule of the 
 foreigner was at an end ; while a proclamation was read to him 
 which, he was told, was issued by the Myingun Prince. Copies 
 of this proclamation were afterwards obtained and it was found 
 then to be of a purely political nature with no suggestions of 
 oppression or mis-government. Having pulled up the rail the 
 rebels marched south to capture or sack Gyobingauk and the 
 Rangoon-Prome mail-train. There had been a rumour that 
 Sir Charles Crosthwaite, the Chief Commissioner, would travel 
 by that train, and it is possible the date of the rising was changed 
 on that account; it was beheved that the party which tore up 
 the rail at Zigon intended to take up another behind the train 
 so as to ensure its capture. 
 
 Meanwhile Maung Tha Pe, the Kyedangyi of Wunbe In 
 village near Zigon, had warned Mr Hill, the PoHce Officer at 
 Zigon, of the project at lo a.m. on the ist. Mr Hill took mea- 
 sures to save the guns of headmen and others in the neighbour- 
 hood and of the Bawbin police out-post from falling into the 
 hands of the rebels, and informed the Inspector- General of 
 Police and the Deputy Commissioner, Mr Todd-Naylor. The 
 latter proceeded to the scene in a light train which acted as 
 pilot to the night mail and saved it from wreck, and after an 
 exciting night and a diligent search arrested eighty-four of those 
 concerned and effectively quashed the rising. This served to 
 show that the Government both could and would suppress 
 disorder; and the work of the police immediately began to 
 improve rapidly in results, so that by the end of the year the 
 detection of crime in this district was described as excellent. 
 A year after the rebellion the Chief Commissioner declared 
 that the dacoit gangs had been extirpated and that the district 
 had been brought to a state of quiet which it had not enjoyed 
 for a long time. 
 
 Although the sensational development of U Thuriya's ad- 
 venture was peculiar to Tharrawaddy the epidemic of ordinary 
 crime was not ; and by 1890 the district had recovered and could 
 not, for instance, be compared with the districts of Pegu and 
 
[ 20 ] 
 
 Amherst. In 1891 in spite of an increase from thirty-eight to 
 forty-nine violent crimes (due largely to a band of dacoits from 
 Hanthawaddy, of which the two leaders were both shot), 
 Tharrawaddy was by no means the worst district in the province, 
 and with further steady improvement the violent crimes of 
 1893-4 f^^^ to twenty-one cases. Neither did Tharrawaddy at 
 that time merit special mention for cattle theft. But in 1894-5, 
 when there was Only three-quarters of the usual harvest in the 
 northern part of the district, and a combination of millers 
 controlled prices in Rangoon, there was a violent change for 
 the worse. There were twenty-eight murders; violent crimes 
 increased from twenty-one to sixty-four, placing the district 
 third in the province in this matter; cognisable crime of all 
 kinds increased and numerous false cases were reported. In 
 1895-6 Tharrawaddy led the province with eighty-two violent 
 crimes. Hanthawaddy coming second with forty-nine, but 
 there were no dacoities included, most being petty highway 
 robberies. In this year, however, cattle theft became really 
 serious in the district and from this time onwards Tharrawaddy 
 was distinctly a warm place. Though Hanthawaddy tended to 
 surpass it in violent crimes there was little to choose between 
 them. In 1903-4 there was a marked growth of crime in Tharra- 
 waddy, which led to the addition of iii men to the regular 
 police of the district. This was followed in 1907 (just after the 
 general reform of the police force) by another severe storm of 
 crime which had not yet subsided in 191 2, when the regular 
 police force was increased by 117 men and a punitive police 
 force of 263 men was imposed for five years at a cost of Rs. 543 ,000, 
 which was recovered from the local inhabitants by a ten per 
 cent, cess upon the land-revenue. It must be noted that after 
 the general reform of the police force in 1906 the proportion 
 of police officers to population appears to have been diminished 
 relatively in Tharrawaddy. For in 1905 this district had one 
 police officer to every 876 of the population and in 19 10 one 
 to every 760 ; but the corresponding figures for Pegu were 902 
 and 482, and for Prome 909 and 666^. 
 
 There can be no gainsaying the bad record of crime in 
 
 ^ All these figures allow for the increase of population since the census 
 of looi and therefore differ from the figures in the official Police Reports. 
 
[ 21 J 
 
 Tharrawaddy since 1894. The district has an unenviable reputa- 
 tion for criminality in all branches, with murder and violent 
 crime, ordinary theft and cattle theft as its specialities. The 
 general opinion is that this has always been the case, and records 
 can be cited which support this view. In the Pegu Commis- 
 sioner's letter-book of 1853 "^^Y ^^ found a report that "the 
 Sarawah district was always in bad order in Burmese times." 
 Of the Tharrawaddy part of the district it is recorded in the 
 same book that "since long before the memory of man the 
 people have been disorderly and rebellious ; discontent disunion 
 and anarchy have often prevailed there." An old proverb ran: 
 "A Tharrawaddy man comes to you with a law-book in one hand 
 and a dah^ in the other." The Commandant of the Pegu Light 
 Infantry declared about 1857 that the Tharrawaddy men were 
 suited to a military life as a result of the " confidence and courage 
 acquired in predatory habits during Burmese times." In his 
 order of 1854 for the formation of separate Henzada and Tharra- 
 waddy Districts Sir Arthur Phayre gave as his reason for the 
 change "the unsettled state of the township of Tharrawaddy 
 arising from the disposition of its inhabitants who from time 
 immemorial have been noted as a turbulent and lawless race." 
 He had already written, too, in 1853: "The people used to 
 boast that they made away with their governors when they 
 ceased to be pleased with them, and they were a by-word of 
 the Burmese." It may be noted, however, that an exact parallel 
 of this last has been said of the English before now, and the 
 Parliamentary system depends essentially upon the power to 
 displace undesirable rulers; the proverb, too, does not suggest 
 that the Tharrawaddy man had no respect for Law. Moreover 
 in 1857, when he had been longer in the province and knew more 
 about it. Sir Arthur Phayre declared that "Tharrawaddy was 
 probably the best ordered District in the Province." General 
 Fytche and the Hon. Ashley Eden gave it good testimonials, 
 too, as we have seen, in the 'sixties and 'seventies, and indeed a 
 good report was normal for many years. This must be reconciled 
 with the earlier statements; and it is observed at once, when 
 this is attempted, that those statements were necessarily based 
 upon reports from Burmans friendly to the new rulers. But 
 ^ Z)a/j= knife or sword. 
 
[ 22 ] 
 
 while it has never yet been proved that those Burmans did not 
 colour their reports for any purpose, it is not difficult to suppose 
 they would desire to enhance the contrast between themselves 
 and the recalcitrants, or to excuse failures in their administra- 
 tion by a magnification of the difficulties, or to satisfy their 
 vanity by additions to their escort. Then there is the psycho- 
 logical consideration that the Burman constantly describes a 
 condition which has held for a few years as having held " always " 
 or "for ever so long"; it is merely a matter of an undeveloped 
 memory and of a lack of historical training. Moreover those 
 early reporters necessarily obtained their information through 
 interpreters of poor attainments ; it is not likely that a Deputy 
 Commissioner, educated in early Victorian times and harassed 
 by Gaung Gyi, would make a critical enquiry into the exact 
 shades of meaning of the apparently simple word always. The 
 difficulties which could arise through ignorance of the Burmese 
 language are suggested by a report which Captain Smith made 
 in 1853 ^^ ^he effect that "the principal crops" were rice, 
 miscellaneous vegetables, sessamum indigo and ngapi^. With 
 a people so disorderly as the first reports declared, it would be 
 impossible that on Gaung Gyi's withdrawal order should not 
 only be restored instantaneously but also maintained. The 
 restoration could perhaps be explained by the depopulation of 
 the area during the disorders ; but the same explanation cannot 
 extend to the succeeding years when the old population rapidly 
 flowed back again. It is known that Gaung Gyi was rebelling 
 against the Burmese Government and that no less than four 
 armed parties were struggling for mastery in Tharrawaddy 
 before the British appeared on the scene. Captain Smith 
 declared in 1853, before Gaung Gyi's depredations began, that 
 "nearly all the gang robberies of this District originate in the 
 scarcity of food ; the people are forced by absolute want to band 
 together for the purpose of plundering villages and boats known 
 to contain rice ngapi and other necessaries of life." It is most 
 probable that the disorder which the friendly Burmans reported 
 was really confined to a comparatively short episode, though 
 there had been previous occasions of friction between the 
 
 ^ Ngapi means fish paste. 
 
[ 23 ] 
 
 Myozvun and the Sitkes owing to the bad political organisation 
 which divided authority between them. 
 
 The uncritical repetition of the earliest reports of the criminal 
 character of the Tharrawaddy District has unfortunately given 
 rise to a widespread belief that all its energies and genius have 
 since the time of the pithecanthropus been combined in and 
 concentrated upon the production of crime and that good order 
 has never been known there. But examination of the records 
 of the first forty years of British administration clearly exposes 
 the falsity of this belief; and if any real success in reducing the 
 crime of Tharrawaddy is to be made this false view and its 
 implications for the future must be given up. The true history 
 is that apart from the minor episode of 1878 to 1880 and the 
 more serious episode of 1885 to 1889, the district was in good 
 order throughout the British administration until 1894; only 
 then did it begin to deserve its present reputation for crime. 
 
IV. METEOROLOGY 
 
 In studying the social and political atmosphere of Tharrawaddy, 
 it is important to bear in mind the dates of its disturbances. 
 A cause which has been in constant action since before 1853 
 could readily explain a generally heavy crime record with 
 variations due to the super-imposition of other forces; but it 
 will require particularly careful argument to establish such a 
 cause for the actual record, clear up to 1894 with the exception 
 of the storms of 1878 to 1880 and 1885 to 1889. The contrast 
 between the periods before and after 1894 is even more marked 
 than at first appears because allowance must be made for the. 
 increasing energy of repression. A marked feature of the modern 
 history of the district is the frequency with which punitive 
 police forces have been imposed ; in the late nineties they were 
 a regular institution in most of the townships. The increase of 
 crime in 1906 and the repeated effect of an increased police 
 force in diminishing crime suggest nothing so much as a spring 
 compressed by the police and expanding at the slightest relaxa- 
 tion of their pressure. But just as physical meteorology dis- 
 counts the effect of roofs and umbrellas, so criminal meteorology 
 must distinguish between retarded genesis and increased re- 
 pression ; and it appears that the virtual genesis of crime has 
 been accelerated since 1894 even more rapidly than the figures 
 for recorded crime indicate. The special conditions of 1885 to 
 1889 will be dealt with presently; previous to that the genesis 
 of crime was limited in spite of the slightness of repression. 
 Tharrawaddy was described in 1873 as a model of good order; 
 in 1 86 1 there was so little crime that it was thought unnecessary 
 to incur the expense of a Deputy Commissioner. It has never 
 yet been suggested that this reduction of the cadre of Deputy 
 Commissioners as a result of success in restoring good order 
 is the reason for a failure to continue or repeat that success; 
 but most other considerations except sunspots have been put 
 forward at one time or another. Many of these, however, relate 
 chiefly to the suppression of crime ; or, so far as they relate to 
 
[ 25 ] 
 
 its genesis, apply equally to other districts or other times and, 
 therefore, while they may explain the heavy crime calendar of 
 Lower Burma in general, fail to explain the special facts of 
 Tharrawaddy history. The first step towards understanding 
 that history is to review the facts ; that has already been done in 
 broad outline, and now a closer view will be taken of the pre- 
 vailing conditions at each season of disorder. 
 
 Amongst the explanations of the disturbed atmosphere of 
 the Tharrawaddy District in particular appears a reference to 
 Kunbaungmin's revolt. It is suggested that he provided the 
 origin of a criminal population by attracting lawless characters 
 to his home at Myodwin. Probably he did include many such 
 in his following, but they would be the least likely to be left 
 behind when he marched for the throne; with such prospects 
 of loot they would naturally go with him to claim their reward 
 from their successful leader. Again it is suggested that Gaung 
 Gyi left a legacy of criminals ; but it is difficult then to explain 
 the immediate and lasting return of good order on his with- 
 drawal. It is reported in 1855 that the more orderly population 
 had almost evacuated the district and that it was their immigration 
 to Henzada which forced up the price of rice in that town in 
 1854 to sixteen times the normal. It was natural for the officials 
 of the time, who regarded Gaung Gyi as a rebel, to consider 
 his followers lawless. But it must not be forgotten that Gaung 
 Gyi's long appeared to be the winning side, that his enterprise 
 was really an attempt to establish a government, that those who 
 foresaw his final success foresaw also the British retiring as 
 discredited rival claimants for an ownerless province. It would 
 be more correct to regard Gaung Gyi's followers as the more 
 adventurous rather than the less orderly elements of the popula- 
 tion. Moreover, as soon as it was clear that life and property 
 were safe in Tharrawaddy, the people returned to their former 
 homes, and new settlers came from elsewhere, so that already 
 by 1868 the Government of India had admitted that, in spite 
 of the good order maintained, the increase of population re- 
 quired Tharrawaddy to be separated again from Henzada 
 District. In 1878 when the separation was carried out there was 
 initially some administrative confusion, owing to the difficulty 
 found in establishing a new headquarters and organising the 
 
[ 26 ] 
 
 newly- formed district; the construction and opening of the 
 new railway had the effect of increasing crime; there was a 
 general increase of crime throughout Lower Burma ; and there 
 was also a disturbing factor in the revenue demand. The system 
 of settlement of land-revenue by leases had proved very popular 
 in Tharrawaddy in 1863-64 when most of the landowners, 
 unlike those of Hanthawaddy, accepted the ten year leases 
 which were offered them ; in 1873-74 it was decided not to issue 
 fresh leases and "certificated surveyors" were sent out to 
 measure the land for re-assessment. In 1880-82 the careful 
 survey by a better agency found the areas were generally under- 
 estimated, but it did not follow that there was so much under- 
 estimation in 1878 ; it is certain that it was a rash proceeding to 
 trust to the kind of surveyor employed, and it is probable that 
 some individual cultivators felt through the exaggeration of 
 their area, or from the expenses involved in avoiding that, a 
 hardship which was not softened by the average under-assess- 
 ment. In any case there was a general increase of revenue due 
 to the assessment of extensions made free under the leases, and 
 there was anxiety about the future which was amply justified 
 by a summary enhancement of the rates per acre by twenty-five 
 per cent, in 1879 and an addition in 1880 of an extra five per 
 cent, to the five per cent, cess already paid. 
 
 The next disturbed period was the serious one of 1885 to 
 1889 when there was very patent — and unfortunately rather 
 obsessing the minds of many who were thus prevented from 
 looking deeper— the unsettlement due to the war in Upper 
 Burma. Tharrawaddy was the nearest district to Upper Burma 
 which offered any considerable area of new land to cultivators, 
 and it had 5400 Upper Burman immigrants, considerably more 
 than any other district. Even in London in 1 9 1 6 children stopped 
 and looted vans of merchandise as a result of the unsettlement 
 of their minds by war conditions ; how easily then might there 
 be unsettlement in Tharrawaddy when rumours of British 
 reverses began to spread? It was alleged by some (but with 
 what reason is not clear) that some of these immigrants were 
 emissaries sent from Upper Burma for the definite purpose of 
 causing disorder. The general population however did not love 
 disorder; they asked for and obtained in 1886 the imposition of 
 
[ 27 ] 
 
 a force of 189 "punitive police" — that is, additional police paid 
 for by a local tax; next year the number reached 375 until they 
 were dispensed with in August. By the end of 1886 the un- 
 settlement due to the war had apparently quietened down but 
 it had left serious effects. The disorder had led many villagers 
 to purchase guns, often at extremely high prices; fearing that 
 these would fall into the hands of dacoits. Government disarmed 
 the district and 975 guns were confiscated without compensation. 
 Cultivators were forbidden to live in isolated houses. "Karen 
 levies" and punitive police were said to force labour and take 
 food without payment. The settlement of 1882-84 ^^^ ^^^ ^^ ^ 
 further increase of land revenue in 1884 and 1885 amounting 
 to fifteen to twenty per cent, in the south and thirty-seven per 
 cent, in the north ; these were average rates of increase and the 
 increases in the first-class kioins were considerably higher still. 
 Many villages had been impoverished by fines imposed upon 
 them under the Rural Police Act, while the towns were alarmed 
 at the prospect of the imposition of an income-tax. The 
 fisheries failed because of a deficient rise in the river. Except 
 in the small area of the Thonze circle the paddy crop of 1887-88 
 was far below the average, and a price Rs. 13 above the average 
 of the three previous years (when the average Rangoon price 
 was Rs. 75, 85, 81 respectively) had betrayed many into selling 
 too large a proportion of their reduced crop. The early rains of 
 1888 failed entirely, so that the cultivators were unable to 
 plough and were threatened with a complete failure of their 
 crops and certainly saw little prospect of obtaining any early 
 rice to make up for the deficiency in the provision they had 
 saved from the previous short harvest. The degree of poverty 
 prevailing is indicated by the record of numerous children being 
 transferred to persons ready to adopt them and pay Rs. 5 to 
 Rs. 30 for them. Thus political irritation was accompanied by 
 high economic tension. Moreover the suppression of disorder 
 by measures which caused the irritation was apparent rather 
 than real ; crimes of violence had been suppressed but crimes of 
 stealth had replaced them, and in particular the rapid increase 
 of cattle thefts (which doubled in frequency between 1886 and 
 1889) must have added to the troubles of the cultivators. To 
 crown all, came a severe epidemic of cholera. 
 
[ 28 ] 
 
 Meanwhile in 1887, when superficially it seemed that order 
 had been approximately restored, the local officers had begun 
 to issue freely licenses for fire-arms. This premature relaxation 
 resulted in a fresh outbreak of dacoities which was met by a 
 policy of extreme severity. Under the new Village Act were 
 imposed upon many villages fines, of which the effect can only 
 be judged fairly in the light thrown upon the general dis- 
 organisation of village administration at the time by Sir Charles 
 Crosthwaite's famous Minute : to villages which had no corporate 
 spirit but a headman without power such a fine must have 
 seemed not merely a heavy burden but a gross injustice. Special 
 powers were given to the Deputy Commissioner to carry sen- 
 tences of death in certain serious cases into immediate execution. 
 Everybody seems to have thought at the time that the obviously 
 right course was being pursued; but, whether it was the least 
 objectionable course or not there was only one possible result 
 of applying coercion to human beings who were already suffering 
 the economic and political tension of the time. Violence reacted 
 to violence. There was a general Burman belief at that time in 
 an eventual restoration of Burmese sovereignty, and there is 
 no suggestion of a specially disorderly people in the fact that 
 U Thuriya was able to get a following in an enterprise which 
 aimed at overthrowing the comparatively new government 
 under whose regime such troubles were suffered. U Thuriya's 
 proclamation indeed gave a political reason for the rising; and 
 that was commonly accepted at the time as the explanation of 
 all the trouble. But even if it was the main reason in the minds 
 of his followers (and this is not certain) there can be no doubt 
 that the rising was due more to the troubles the population was 
 enduring than to any conception of Burmese sovereignty. It is 
 a commonplace now that the true cause of a rebellion, as of an 
 industrial strike, is often not the reason for their action given 
 by the discontents. Just as it is not really the threatened extra 
 straw but the previously loaded portion of the burden which 
 crushes the camel, so it is generally a more firmly established 
 grievance than that which is alleged that breaks down the patience 
 of a people. The alleged grievance may be any trifle and the 
 people may be entirely unjustified in regarding it as grievance 
 at all ; yet even the aristocratically-minded Goethe declared that 
 
[ 29 ] 
 
 when the people rebel the people are always right. No doubt 
 every one of Wat Tyler's neighbours was ready to avenge the 
 insult offered to his daughter by the tax-collector, but that was 
 no reason why every man from Kent to Norfolk should rebel 
 against the king; the Peasants' Revolt was due to the general 
 disorganisation of the conditions of labour and food production 
 and the substitution of a level capitation tax, when the storm- 
 shattered fleet had to be repaired, for the graduated that- 
 hameda which had previously been collected to pay for the 
 fleet's construction. It is indeed curious how close is the parallel 
 between the essential conditions in Tharrawaddy in 1888 and 
 in England in 1381. The physicists again have shown us a 
 heavy cloud floating peacefully in dust-free air precipitated 
 immediately to rain by the introduction of an ultra-microscopic 
 particle of dust or even by a "particle" of electricity. The 
 tiniest nucleus is sufficient to start condensation ; and once that 
 is started the whole cloud is forthwith condensed. Soo too 
 U Thuriya appears to have been the condensing point ; but the 
 cloud had arisen independently. 
 
 Still, some will say, there is no smoke without a fire; there 
 must be some soul of truth in the reputation of Tharrawaddy ; 
 there must be something in the people which caused them to 
 react to these economic difficulties so much more readily than 
 the remainder of the province ; certainly there were more Upper 
 Burmans there than in other districts, and no doubt the crop 
 of 1887 was better south of Thonze than towards the north, 
 but were the other conditions noted sufficient to account for 
 the difference between Tharrawaddy and its neighbour Hantha- 
 waddy in which the industrialisation of agriculture had already 
 developed and the presence of numerous alien Indians holding 
 aloof from Burman social organisation had for many years given 
 rise to much of the recorded crime ? It may be replied that the 
 irritation of Tharrawaddy by economic troubles, cholera, and 
 martial law ruthlessly applied was such as would cause the 
 rebellion of any people against any government, native or 
 foreign; that for local reasons Hanthawaddy was exceptionally 
 quiet in 1886 and most of Lower Burma was as disturbed then 
 as Tharrawaddy; that other districts may have had not less 
 disease but less obvious symptoms ; that although the physicists' 
 
[ 30 ] 
 
 cloud will condense on the most minute nucleus it will hold for 
 ever if no nucleus arises. There were certainly heavy clouds over 
 Tharrawaddy, and it so happened that a nucleus was provided 
 in U Thuriya ; the clouds condensed and the storm broke. Why 
 did the nucleus appear in Tharrawaddy? Was that an "acci- 
 dent" due to the fortuitous co-operation of numerous inde- 
 pendent forces which elsewhere operated but did not happen 
 to co-operate; or does the very appearance prove special local 
 conditions? Unfortunately the local officers were so fully 
 occupied with action that they had little time for thought; 
 they reported how the rebels died, but omitted to enquire how 
 they had lived. It did not occur to them that the biographies 
 of the rebels might have proved eventually more useful than 
 their execution. 
 
V. THE ECONOMIC THEORY 
 
 Ruskin's declaration that the science of political economy, as 
 then taught, was founded upon half-true dogmas derived from 
 an insufficient examination in a narrow corner of Europe of a 
 limited portion of the field of economic phenomena (which 
 was already a restricted portion of the wider field of social 
 phenomena) was violently reprobated by the readers of the 
 Cornhill Magazine in 1861, and probably no other magazine 
 could have dared then to publish such matter at all ; it was the 
 age of the philosophy of unrestricted competition. The Suez 
 Canal was opened in 1869 andthe virus of competitive individual- 
 ism soon took advantage of it to travel to Burma. As in Western 
 Europe its growth was stimulated by steam and its most obvious 
 economic form was shown in the development of capitalist 
 industry. But whereas in England its activities were seen in the 
 field of manufactures, in Lower Burma it went to the rice-fields 
 where it eventually gave rise to the prevailing system of agri- 
 culture of the present day, which in the Delta, where it has 
 been most completely developed, aims not at the production 
 of the maximum crop or the maximum benefit for all concerned 
 in its production, and still less at the maximum benefit for the 
 general community, but, regarding the cultivator as a mere 
 instrument of production, aims at the production of the maxi- 
 mum rent. The process has not yet been carried so far in Tharra- 
 waddy as in the Delta, but even there the figures given in the 
 last settlement report (1915) indicate that in the plains, after 
 meeting the expenses of cultivation, the balance in the cultiva- 
 tor's hands (for meeting the cost of living, and of interest on 
 the inevitable loans to finance the cultivator, and for paying the 
 rent if he is a tenant) averages about thirteen baskets of paddy 
 per acre, while the average rent is sixteen. It was observed that 
 the most inferior holdings were not often let. But a certain 
 number of holdings, rented or owned, are quite possibly culti- 
 vated at a loss, the cultivators obtaining their livelihood by so- 
 called subsidiary industries upon which their paddy cultivation 
 is parasitic ; and the inclusion of returns from such holdings in 
 
[ 32 ] 
 
 the statistics reduces the estimated net produce. There is also 
 a margin of error due to miscellaneous causes ; but the figures 
 are sufficiently reliable to justify the statement that the tenant 
 makes only the barest livelihood even when he does not steadily 
 increase his debts. As no less than two-fifths of the area is 
 cultivated by tenants it is clear that there is economic stress. 
 But the matter does not end with tenants ; it makes little differ- 
 ence in the available balance whether one pays rent to a land- 
 lord or interest to a mortgagee, when one's holding is fully 
 mortgaged. The truth is that at least one-half of the land in 
 these, the principal tracts of the district, is cultivated by owners 
 or tenants who live on the very margin of subsistence. Of the 
 tenants the Settlement Officer found that one-half worked their 
 holdings for one year only, and one-third for either two or 
 three years only, before leaving to hire a different holding, in 
 working which they would of course suffer all the disadvantages 
 of ignorance of its peculiar properties. "Short tenancies," he 
 writes, "are the commonest and are due to competition among 
 tenants " ; and he somewhat naively adds, " It is a tendency that 
 makes for the rapid increase of rents." Really the three pheno- 
 mena of short tenancies, competition and increase of rents all 
 conspire to accentuate each other. The economic pressure is 
 clearly indicated by the rapid expansion of cultivation in the 
 flooded tracts of the Myitmaka basin, considerably forestalling 
 the advance of natural reclamation by taking up land so liable 
 to serious flood that this cultivation is a pure gamble. Yet the 
 Burman of Tharrawaddy, writes the Settlement Officer, " makes 
 a good and lenient landlord," reducing the rents in bad seasons, 
 not carrying on any unpaid portions as a debt to be settled at 
 the next good harvest as in parts of the Delta. The conditions 
 in fact are not due to extraordinary greed on the part of the 
 landlords, who are not generally large capitalists, but who often 
 are widows and orphans of cultivators or aged or infirm 
 cultivators themselves; they are due to the whole social and 
 economic system which is based upon ruthless unrestricted 
 competition, and while it organises production entirely dis- 
 regards all considerations of distribution and consumption, and 
 does not even consider whether it is producing the most desir- 
 able products. 
 
[ 33 ] 
 
 With this system goes the practice of employing agricultural 
 labourers separately and on a casual basis for each separate 
 stage in the process of production, that being the cheapest 
 method of production in the eyes of a community which dis- 
 regards all nauseous social bye-products. The labourers compete 
 for work, and the older men are ousted by their more vigorous 
 juniors and go to swell the competition for tenancies. Thus the 
 transition from labourer or tenant to owner, which was formerly 
 "a comparatively simple matter, is now almost impossible." 
 The price of paddy has risen; but the tenant is no better off 
 because the keen competition for tenancies allows no better 
 margin for his subsistence than before. Meanwhile the labourer 
 suffers by the rise of price, because, although he is normally 
 paid in paddy for the most important part of his agricultural 
 labour, he takes his wages in practice as cash advances on the 
 sabape system. He receives his own food at his employer's 
 house, but his wife and children must buy their rice at an in- 
 creasing price. As the price rises a larger cash equivalent for 
 his paddy wages is received by the labourer but the rise in the 
 sabape rate naturally lags behind the rise in price. The diffi- 
 culties of the labourer are increased by the importation for 
 parts of the work of Indian labour, which having a lower standard 
 of living, undersells him. A certain number of Burman labourers 
 thus fail to find employment for part of the season ; the com- 
 petition even in those branches in which Indians are not 
 employed is thus intensified and the standard of living is 
 dragged down until Burmans have begun to compete with 
 Indians by combining in gangs working for an Indian wage. 
 Meanwhile the growing wealth of the land-owning and capital- 
 owning classes heightens, by the contrasts it engenders, the 
 resulting discontent of the poor. 
 
 The economic conditions here shortly described are those 
 universally recognised as conducive to the development of 
 crime in an agricultural community. These conditions are 
 developed moreover in greater or less degree precisely in those 
 districts of Lower Burma in which crime is heaviest ; and they 
 began to develop in the last quarter of the nineteenth century 
 or about the time the present chronic state of crime in those 
 districts began to develop. In some other parts of India there 
 
[ 34 ] 
 
 - was a somewhat similar change in agricultural economics which 
 
 (was not accompanied by an outbreak of crime; but there the 
 new economic forces were introduced more gradually, and their 
 action was modified by the caste system. In the Ma-ubin 
 District, which has developed less crime in proportion to its 
 population than the other delta districts, paddy cultivation is 
 .less important in comparison with the fisheries than in those. 
 f Turning to the Insein and Syriam Districts it is found that in 
 1 1872, as a result of the opening of the Suez Canal three years 
 { before, rice began to be sent to Europe in steamboats and 
 Vseventeen steam rice-mills were working in Rangoon, where 
 there had been only two before; there was a rapid and large 
 extension of rice-cultivation, and a large and increasing crop 
 of dacoity and theft began to be produced immediately there- 
 after. Hence the theory that the crime of Lower Burma is 
 due to the development of industrial agriculture, of "factories 
 without chimneys." Those who believe that Tharrawaddy has 
 never been orderly must, however, find some difficulty in 
 accepting this explanation ; while those who are acquainted with 
 the true record also find difficulties. 
 
 The influence of the economic conditions is undoubted. The 
 disorder of 1853 was political in origin, but the robberies were 
 ascribed by the Deputy Commissioner at the time to scarcity 
 of food. The subsequent minor outbreaks of disorder were 
 generally due to poHtical unrest or contagion. In 1878 to 1880 
 the causes which were enumerated in the fourth of these studies 
 included anxiety about the enhancements of land-revenue. 
 In 1888 the political tension was accompanied by acute economic 
 stress. The beginning of the present chronic condition in 1894 
 coincided very significantly with the combination of a deficit 
 of one-fourth in the harvest and a bad market for the crop. 
 (The average prices in Tharrawaddy for the harvest seasons of 
 1889 to 1899 were 89, 85, 89, 124, 77, 73, 98, 96, 121, 96, 90.) 
 In 1 90 1 to 1903 there were large increases in land -revenue due 
 to revision of the settlement ; and some of these took place un- 
 fortunately in 1902 which was the second of two years of a 
 bad paddy market, while in a small area the increases of 1905 
 had afterwards to be reduced in spite of the general subsequent 
 rise in paddy prices. The meaning of these increases can only 
 
[ 35 ] 
 
 be understood in the light of knowledge of the vagaries of the 
 soil-classifiers in the earlier settlements; the average increases 
 were not uniform increases applying everywhere, but were the 
 resultant of small increases or even decreases in some holdings 
 and much larger increases in others, in which, even if the yield 
 of the land justified and demanded the increase, the consequent 
 change in the standard of living would be a serious matter, and 
 if the increase resulted from an error of the soil-classifiers the 
 seriousness would be immensely enhanced. The importance 
 of this was the greater, as in those days only a small part of the 
 land was cultivated by tenants to whom the revenue demand 
 was of no consequence; and the misfortune of a low paddy 
 price in 1902 made the matter particularly acute. It is possible 
 that the great increase of crime which took place about this 
 time, and led to an increase of the police force by 1 1 1 men in 
 1904 was in part due to that. There was, however, a system of 
 intermediate rates to mitigate the enhancements; and this 
 though unsatisfactory under the recent settlements was effective 
 under the conditions of those times, and though it could not 
 remove the hardship in the cases of erroneous soil-classifica- 
 tion, postponed it. And the revenue even when erroneous was 
 not so high as the rents subsequently came to be, and in any 
 case its enhancement came into action only ten years after the 
 outbreak of crime. Moreover the settlements of other districts 
 were on similar fines and accompanied by similar conditions. 
 
 The great increase in crime in 1894 was not confined to 
 Tharrawaddy but was general throughout Lower Burma and 
 marks the beginning in all that part of the province of the present 
 serious crime production, the development of which has coin- 
 cided roughly with the development of industrial agriculture. 
 But there is the difficulty that the latter has not developed so 
 far in Tharrawaddy and Prome as in the Insein, Syriam and 
 Pegu Districts whose crime record, though bad, is not nearly 
 so bad as theirs in spite of the stimulus given to crime by the 
 proximity of the large towns of Rangoon, Pegu, Insein and 
 Syriam. An explanation can be furnished in Prome in the 
 economic difficulties arising long ago from the smallness of the 
 holdings, the poor soil and rainfall and uncertain harvests, the 
 large number of toddy palms, and the densest and most laborious 
 
 3—2 
 
[ 36 ] 
 
 rural population in Lower Burma; and these conditions apply 
 in part to the northern portions of Tharrawaddy. But it is not 
 possible to assign all the crime to that portion, representing 
 perhaps one-fourth of the district. In the remaining three- 
 fourths, where the economic conditions of Prome do not apply, 
 it is undoubtedly true that economic conditions are of great 
 importance ; but for the success of the theory of the domination 
 of economic causes it is necessary to explain how the chronic 
 development of crime has been so much greater than in other 
 districts in which the characteristic economic conditions began 
 earlier and have been so much further developed, and also how 
 it began in 1894 when the development of those conditions in 
 the Tharrawaddy District was still rudimentary. 
 
VI. SOCIAL DISORGANISATION 
 
 In 1852-3, when the British administration began, the popula- 
 tion of Tharrawaddy proper was said to be 10,000 persons Uving 
 in 2500 houses, while Sarawah had 3500 persons more. In 
 1872 the population ot the present area of the Tharrawaddy 
 District, which differs only a little from the sum of those two 
 areas , was 171 ,000 ; in 1 88 1 it was 272 ,000 ; in 1 89 1 it was 339 ,000 
 or approximately double that of 1872. In all the old districts 
 a similar increase occurred. But there was no corresponding 
 development of social organisation; on the contrary the 
 kyedangyi became (in the words of Sir Charles Crosthwaite) a 
 mere village drudge without power and influence, and all 
 traces of village responsibility were lost. The old thugyi had 
 become a revenue official, no longer possessing either minute 
 local knowledge of, or personal influence in, every part of his 
 circle. There was nothing remarkable in all this; it was a direct 
 result of the increased population which could no longer be 
 successfully organised on the old lines, and of the nature of the 
 kyedangyVs office, which brought many unpleasant duties but 
 neither emolument nor honour. The Village Act was designed 
 to substitute for the kyedangyi^ a village headman who would 
 be the leader and representative of the community. But in 
 fact the Community has failed in most villages to develop. As 
 Disraeli told us: " Gregariousness is not association." The 
 tradition of a corporate village life had been broken and could 
 not be re-established by the methods of the Village Act. 
 
 Sir Charles Crosthwaite repeatedly emphasised the importance 
 of the non-official character of the headman who should be the 
 repBCsentative and leader of the village, and the Village Act 
 carefully subordinated the villagers to the headman and not 
 to the officials, who were given only the power to demand the 
 co-operation of the headman in certain directions ; but headman, 
 rural policeman and villager, all alike received nothing but duties 
 and penalties under the Act. It is true that, in prescribing some 
 duties, such as assistance to travellers, it limited the demands 
 
[ 38 ] 
 
 that could be made ; but no positive privilege of any kind was 
 conferred by the Act save an exemption from some kinds of 
 personal service for persons "not of the labouring class and 
 accustomed to do such work as may be required." The in- 
 evitable development of this has been that the wealthier villagers 
 have become immune from the headman's requisition for 
 practically all the duties of villagers — a remarkable instance of 
 one law for the rich and another for the poor— and consequently 
 have tended to stand apart from the rest of the villagers instead 
 "of sharing in the common life with responsibilities proportionate 
 to their privileges. But even apart from this mistake it was not 
 possible to develop a corporate spirit by imposing on the head- 
 man duties towards an external Government, and on the villagers 
 the duty of assisting him in executing them. Corporate life 
 has never yet grown out of anything contained in the Village ' 
 Let, and never will. Wherever a corporate village spirit exists 
 it will be found to have developed in carrying out some common 
 project, such as the erection of a monastery or the construction 
 of a brick path or jetty, the personal qualities of the headman 
 for the time being (or of some other villager) giving rise tem- 
 porarily to an association of the people under his leadership. 
 But corporate life is more than that; it demands an enduring 
 / ^ consciousness of unity amongst the changing individuals of 
 / the group. If, instead of providing a Village Act to deal with 
 I disturbed periods, some definite endeavour to organise and 
 \ humanise village life at ordinary times had been made while 
 \ the economic conditions were not yet acute, it is possible that 
 \ some sort of corporate life might have been regenerated. But 
 \^he Village Act not only failed in itself; it prevented the con- 
 sideration of alternative methods and no general corporate life 
 / resulted. Without corporate life there cannot be such a public 
 / opinion that disorderly persons "would find no sympathy 
 I among the people and would soon be disposed of by them " as 
 I in Tharrawaddy in 1873. Such a public opinion is much more 
 \ than the sum of the opinions of the individuals. But the effect 
 \ of a failure to repress crime is cumulative on account of the 
 \ example which each crime sets to imitative minds, and of the 
 \general power of suggestion which is heightened by the apparent 
 ii;nmunity of the transgressors. 
 
[ 39 ] 
 
 The increasingly unequal distribution of wealth due to the 
 economic conditions has done more than provide temptation 
 to thieves. It has directly attacked what corporate spirit there 
 was in the villages. No doubt the Burmese village had always 
 
 V treated its wealthier members in some ways as a special class, 
 Vbut with the new economic development grew the custom of 
 
 the wealthier associating rather with the similar members of 
 neighbouring villages than with other economic grades of their 
 own village. Partly as a result of this came the tendency for 
 the well-to-do to become concentrated in particular villages, 
 
 V leaving the other villages to the poor — who were thus deprived 
 at once of their leadership and of their charity and subscriptions 
 to village ceremonies and public improvements. 
 
 The failure of the Village Act to provide any basis of social 
 organisation for Lower Burma has been repeated on all sides. 
 Even the fundamental condition for healthy village life, that 
 there should be land for the village to stand upon, has been 
 neglected. Old-established villages are cramped and cannot 
 expand because cultivation touches them on all sides, no trouble 
 having been taken to provide for the increase of population, 
 the inevitability of which should have been so obvious. Other 
 hamlets have been squeezed into odd corners of unproductive 
 land, which in the Delta is commonly flooded. Many people 
 have been forced to beg permission to build a hut on the edge 
 of somebody's paddy-land from which they are liable to be 
 evicted at any moment. Not only these but old-established 
 hamlets on land to which the evicting cultivator has no valid 
 title whatsoever are actually evicted every year, and the evictions 
 are enforced in the Civil Courts. Naturally the eviction takes 
 place at the beginning of the ploughing season, and the evicted 
 families are shelterless from the rains unless they can find some- 
 body, probably at a distance from their work and with a house 
 already fully occupied, ready to take them in. And with the 
 removal goes often the loss of occupation. Half a sympathetic 
 eye could have seen that the more cultivation extended the more 
 necessary it was to reserve village-land against it. But with a 
 shortage even of house-room where will the villagers meet to 
 enjoy that intercourse from which alone corporate feeling can 
 spring? Will corporate feeling arise from putting around a 
 
[ 40 ] 
 
 village a fence which constantly accentuates the congestion? 
 What kind of site and premises has the ordinary lay school, and 
 even many a monastery school ? 
 
 The breakdown of social organisation in Lower Burma gener- 
 ally can be traced in other directions too, but the general result 
 is the same. Steadily growing with the increase of population, 
 and particularly because that was due so much to immigration 
 from diverse parts, it has been stimulated by the economic con- 
 ditions. In 1888 the old organisation was already, according to 
 Sir Charles Crosthwaite, ineffective for repressing crime. The 
 new organisation, which he set up, was competent only to 
 repress and in some measure to discourage by making the con- 
 ditions more difficult ; it could not regenerate the lost corporate 
 life and organise public opinion. The social and economic dis- 
 organisations were either alone sufficient to give rise to crime; 
 and their interaction was still more potent even apart from their 
 mutual stimulus. It is impossible now to separate their effects; 
 but the earlier failure of social organisation explains in part why 
 the crime epidemic of Lower Burma began before the economic 
 conditions were fully developed, and the stimulus of those 
 conditions explains its large growth and the failure of the 
 means adopted for its repression. 
 
 The weakening of parental control over the young has often 
 been suggested as a prolific cause of crime ; and it, in its turn, is 
 said to be due to the widespread change to teaching in lay schools 
 from teaching in monastery schools, where, it is believed, children 
 were taught to reverence and respect their elders. But it is not 
 alone in Burma that elderly persons are apt to think that they 
 in their youth were much superior in politeness and respect for 
 their elders to the wild youngsters who treat them so badly to-day. 
 Most readers of this paragraph have probably heard pointed 
 expression given to the same idea occasionally in their own youth 
 — and were ready enough then to be sceptical; and it is quite 
 possible the same idea was expressed, and received with the 
 same scepticism in Neanderthal. The statement that Burman 
 children have less respect than formerly for their parents and 
 elders is certainly to be accepted, if at all, only with some dis- 
 count. How far, if it is true, it accounts for an increase of crime 
 is another matter, and it is still another question whether it is 
 
[ 41 ] 
 
 due to the change from religious to lay schools. There are other 
 factors at work. As in all other countries moral teaching is 
 largely referred for a basis to custom. In undeveloped minds 
 law and custom are identical, as indeed they were in the early 
 history of the race. For many reasons (chiefly economic) 
 numerous customs have fallen out of use in recent years. But 
 originally all customs had equal sanctity ; thus the abrogation of 
 any custom, even if it is only a relic of spirit-worship, tends to 
 diminish the sanctity of other customs ; and owing to the asso- 
 ciation of the ideas the authority of law — both in the legal and 
 in the moral sense — is diminished too, and so also is that of the 
 moral injunctions of parents. Further it is not clear that the 
 monastery schools had so very much influence in the direction 
 of inculcating respect for others than priests ; and so far as moral 
 instruction goes it is at least doubtful whether the frequent 
 gabbling of half-understood phrases was any more beneficial in 
 Burma than it has been found elsewhere. It is doubtful how 
 far the lav schools have proved themselves inferior in character- 
 formation to the monastery schools. There is certainly a natural 
 tendency for the young to grow conceited about the superiority 
 conferred by their vast knowledge, and to rate less highly than 
 is proper the moral instruction of their less educated parents 
 and elders ; but this difliculty is to be met by so improving the 
 economic conditions of parents that they may have more time 
 and energy to devote to the training of children, by the exhibi- 
 tion of moral superiority on the part of elders and by direct 
 teaching about this temptation to conceit in the schools — in fact 
 by teaching more and not by preferring schools which teach less. 
 The principal advantage of the monastery schools lies really 
 in the discipline involved in processions to collect gifts and 
 more particularly in keeping the school and its compound clean 
 and attending to its garden. But all the world over it is the 
 custom for parents to blame the teacher for an alleged failure 
 to teach the children manners and morals, and for the teacher 
 to retort that the parents have better opportunities than the 
 teachers for doing this. And the teachers are largely right. 
 Much of the school-time even in the monasteries of Burma is 
 occupied with instruction in nothing of greater ethical value 
 than the alphabet and arithmetic, and whether the child is 
 
[ 42 ] 
 
 taught in a monastery or in a lay school the influence of the 
 parents is greater than that of the teacher. Every animal 
 responds most readily to the influence of its feeders. The 
 Burman child has always received most of his training from his 
 parents, and the teaching of the priests would be of no use at 
 all without the parents' moral support. In any case it is difficult 
 to believe that the change in the channel of education had 
 proceeded so far by 1885-90 as to influence seriously the out- 
 burst of crime which took place in 1894 throughout the province. 
 If it is thought that though this change did not stimulate the 
 original outbreak it has had important influence in maintaining 
 the production of crime, there is still the difliculty that it has 
 taken place in every district in the province and cannot therefore 
 be a main cause of the particularly serious crime record of 
 Tharrawaddy. 
 
 So too with the whole failure of social organisation, which, 
 like the economic development, is much more marked in the 
 delta districts than in Tharrawaddy. The house-site problem 
 alone, which is a small matter in Tharrawaddy compared with 
 the delta districts, makes an immense difference. Many newly- 
 colonised parts of the delta too have never been organised ; and 
 in parts the diverse origin of the colonists is emphasised by 
 the addition of a foreign element. Neither economic nor social 
 disorganisation therefore can be a complete explanation of the 
 even more prolific development of crime in Tharrawaddy than 
 in the rest of Lower Burma. 
 
VII. GHOSTS 
 
 " Ghosts... all sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs.... They cling 
 to us and we can't get rid of them." (Ibsen.) 
 
 When Razadarit the Talaing King of Pegu defeated the in- 
 vading Burman army of Mingyiswa, King of Ava, at Hlaing in 
 1386 he carried the pursuit as far as Prome, but effected no 
 permanent occupation of what is now the Tharrawaddy District. 
 This remained as it had previously been a no-man's land 
 between the two kingdoms, invaded by both parties but de- 
 finitely occupied by neither, until 1 405 , when a definite boundary 
 was drawn between the kingdoms of Pegu and Ava which gave 
 Tharrawaddy to the latter. About the middle of the fifteenth 
 century the governor of Prome, taking advantage of Ava's pre- 
 occupation with the Chinese invasion, founded the independent 
 petty kingdom of Prome, which included Tharrawaddy and 
 was a constant source of trouble to the kings of Ava till it was 
 annexed by Burin Naung in 1542-3. From that date until its 
 conquest by Alompra in 1753 Tharrawaddy was a principality 
 of the second Talaing Empire of Pegu ; and after that conquest 
 it continued as a principality of the Burmese Empire. It differed 
 from the area of the present district by the exclusion of the 
 narrow strip, only about eight miles wide, along the river bank, 
 reaching from Tharrawaw to Monyo and Yegin-Mingyi 
 (Laukzeya), and forming the division of Sarawah. 
 
 Nowadays Sarawah is a strip of flooded land, sparsely in- 
 habited and producing a poor crop of paddy and a certain 
 amount of miscellaneous crops grown in the dry season after 
 the floods subside, but formerly parts of it were very fertile. 
 The change occurred when the bunding of the right bank of 
 the Irrawaddy in 1867 raised the level of that river and caused 
 a large volume of its water to escape over its left bank. But in 
 view of the benefits derived from that bunding elsewhere this 
 fertile strip of Sarawah was readily sacrificed ; it did not occupy 
 the whole of Sarawah but was only two to three miles wide at 
 the most, and sloped rapidly down towards the valley of the 
 
[ 44 ] 
 
 Myitmaka or Hlaing river on the east. This valley forms now 
 a second strip of land about eight miles wide, having that river 
 running through the middle of it and lying still lower than the 
 flooded cultivated area round Tharrawaw. It extends the whole 
 length of the district and, being flooded every year to a depth 
 of four to fifteen feet, is at present completely unculturable 
 and furnishes nothing besides insects and fish and those annoying 
 breaches in the Tharrawaw branch of the railway. It forms a 
 dismal swamp which is one of the most obvious physical 
 characteristics of the district. 
 
 But a second characteristic physical feature of the district is 
 the failure of so many of the streams which descend the western 
 face of the Pegu Yoma to reach the channel of the Myitmaka. 
 On approaching the low strip in which that river lies they nearly 
 all spread out and form a thegaw^ which is a wide accumulation- 
 of detritus and forest refuse brought down by the water and 
 deposited so as to fill up the river bed. Across these deposits 
 the water flows in a thin sheet with here and there small channels 
 which in their turn are silted up to cause an ever widening 
 extension of the accretion. Such accretion has had of course 
 a marked efl^ect upon the level of the country ; and the infer- 
 ence that the level between the present railway line and the 
 Myitmaka was formerly much lower is of prime importance in 
 the study of the history of the district. Not only was the level 
 lower, but the swamp was wider. Mr Leete, when Conservator 
 of Forests in the Pegu Circle, made a close study of these rivers, 
 and stated in 19 14 with reference to practically all those north 
 of the Thonze chaung that forty years before all these streams 
 had thegaws close to the railway line. But the railway line is 
 now the central line of the cultivated central plain of the district. 
 It is probable therefore that sixty years earlier still the thegaws 
 were on the east of the railway line, and one begins to under- 
 stand how Kunbaungmin could make boat-racing an excuse 
 for the congregation of so many followers at Myodwin, eight 
 miles east of Gyobingauk. One can also appreciate better the 
 situation of Myodwin, which appears now to be so out-of-the 
 way but was really in earlier times comparatively central. The 
 reason why the only objects of archaeological interest in the 
 district are at Laukzeya near Yegin-Mingyi and at Myodwin, 
 
[ 45 ] 
 
 and even so date only from about 1830 and 1843, is the existence 
 in earlier times of this marsh, much wider than at present, ex- 
 tending the whole length of the district and dividing the popu- 
 lated area into the narrow riverine strip which formed the Sara- 
 wah division of Burmese times and a malarious fringe along the 
 foot of the Yoma which formed the Tharrawaddy principality. 
 The present central paddy plain has been built up quite recently 
 by the steady advance of the thegaws which although it has been 
 partially checked by the changes caused in the Irrawaddy- 
 Myitmaka nexus by the Henzada embankments (seriously begun 
 about 1863) has been as rapid as was noted by Mr Leete. The 
 low marsh which formerly occupied the situation of this plain 
 furnishes, in conjunction with the malarious nature of the terai, 
 the explanation of the fact that while a Burman civilisation 
 developed to the north in Prome, and a Taking civilisation to 
 the south in Hanthawaddy, and although these two civilisations 
 often came into conflict, ordinary intercourse between them 
 took place almost entirely by the river route. Even in 1825 the 
 British column advancing by land turned to meet the river force 
 at Tharrawaw because of the enhanced difficulties in their 
 progress through the Tharrawaddy area. Tharrawaddy re- 
 mained a comparatively undeveloped no-man's land between 
 Prome and Hanthawaddy with a population which in 1852 
 numbered only ten thousand. 
 
 Such conditions could not be without an effect upon the 
 development of the Tharrawaddy inhabitants. Clearly their 
 occupations would not develop on quite the same lines as in 
 level Hanthawaddy near the populous centres of Pegu, Syriam 
 and Rangoon, or as in the populous and highly cultivated plains 
 of Prome and Hmawza whence rice was exported to Upper 
 Burma. Up in the hills were isolated Karen groups as there are 
 to-day all along the Pegu Yoma ; but in Tharrawaddy even in 
 the less elevated parts the ordinary man only cultivated for 
 subsistence and derived the satisfaction of a large part of his 
 wants from wild vegetation and from hunting and fishing. The 
 civilised strip was so narrow that every one in it was in direct 
 contact with wild and sometimes fierce Nature, and these 
 conditions held up till after the British occupation began. 
 Further there was the difference of the degree of control exer- 
 
[ 46 ] 
 
 cised by the Government in such an area and in the comparatively 
 open areas nearer the seats of Government in Upper Burma or 
 the ports of Lower Burma. Reaction to environment is the essen- 
 tial character of life of which, therefore, evolution in some form 
 is a necessary quality. It is now being more and more recognised 
 that animal evolution, however it may be with plant evolution, is 
 only secondarily an affair of bodily structure ; primarily it is an 
 affair of mental structure to which bodily structure has adapted 
 itself. The human mind seems to be endowed with a number of 
 general emotions and instincts supplemented by a large capacity 
 for adaptation to its environment which leads to the development 
 of a mental structure corresponding to their environment and 
 occupations in the inhabitants of every locality. Succeeding 
 experiences overlay with modifications the developments and 
 modifications due to earlier experiences, giving rise at last to 
 a mentality in which the earliest qualities are greatly modified. 
 But although modified they continue to play a part; the new 
 structure is definitely a modified development of the old and 
 not a substitute for it. In each stage of evolution there is a 
 survival of the forms which have the most successful innate 
 tendencies to form the corresponding mental structure; while 
 each individual recapitulates, though perhaps roughly and 
 imperfectly, the stages passed by his ancestors. There thus 
 develops in each locality a mental type with characteristic 
 qualities, traditions and ideals due to the history of the con- 
 tinued mutual reaction between existing mental structures and 
 environment and the occupations practised. Thus from the 
 social and family co-operation of the densely-populated paddy 
 plains of China sprang the Confucian ethics of co-operation 
 and social service. The pastoral life of Judaea furnished in the 
 good shepherd that giveth his life for the sheep a model of 
 self-sacrifice. The proximity of every part of England to the 
 sea and the mistiness of her atmosphere have led to the pro- 
 duction of a race which knows no limits in its pursuit of 
 adventure in the sphere either of travel or of the imagination. 
 What kind of mental structure is to be expected under the 
 conditions of the Tharrawaddy District? What character 
 traditions and ideals should be formed there ? 
 
 No doubt in quite primitive times hunting for food was one 
 
[ 47 ] 
 
 of the principal occupations of every human pack ; but as semi- 
 agricultural habits were contracted in settlements in a milder 
 environment growing steadily more mild the old clan system 
 died out, and, as the wild produce of the immediate neighbour- 
 hood of a particular spot, though supplemented by the products 
 of cultivation, could only support a limited number, the settle- 
 ments would be of limited size. Within each small group there 
 would be practised co-operation, but in relations with every 
 other group there would be a strong leaning to competition. 
 Where pastoral or agricultural habits were largely developed 
 the mental structure of the people would be modified ; but in 
 the degree in which the hunting habits and association with 
 wild nature continued that structure would develop in the 
 direction of Le Play's Hunter Type, which, while no less 
 endowed with courage than the pastoral type, is distinguished 
 from that type by a character not of the self-sacrifice of the 
 ideal shepherd but of self-assertion and "other-sacrifice." The 
 characteristics of the "hunter type" are those of men who 
 support themselves with the animal and vegetable products of 
 nature, obtained, not like crops or herds by a long peaceful 
 process of cultivation or tending, but by an aleatory search 
 under conditions which involve the constant risk of various 
 serious dangers. The hunter, whether he seek animal or vege- 
 table products, must often come into situations in which he 
 must either take the life of a fierce assailant or yield his own ; 
 as he may sometimes search long without reward he will hold 
 fast to whatever he gets ; he resents the intrusion of others into 
 the circle of his hunting because increasing demand means a 
 diminishing supply, and he therefore lives in small com- 
 munities and develops a spirit of independence. As he seeks 
 vegetable as well as animal products the term Hunter is not 
 quite appropriate ; but it is difficult to find another single word 
 to convey the sense of the tracking of animals as well as of the 
 search for other products of the jungle. The name is not of 
 much importance however provided its connotations are kept 
 in mind. 
 
 The clearest line of development of the hunter spirit is that 
 which leads to the warrior asserting himself against other men, 
 with which is closely associated the development of the pre- 
 
[ 48 ] 
 
 datory instincts. Another line of development is that which 
 transforms the courage and self-assertion of the hunter into 
 a spirit of adventure first in the material and then in the 
 mental universe. Again one side of the hunter's mind is dis- 
 tinguished by its interest in and study of nature; originally 
 aiming only at increased power of catching and destroying, this 
 becomes transformed to the spirit of the naturalist. But what- 
 ever subsequent transformations take place the original hunting 
 instinct in its earliest transformations still persists (or "per- 
 severes") though overlaid by subsequent experiences. It 
 appears only slightly veiled in the taste for games in which a 
 player or thing is hunted. It is shown in the interest in a terrier 
 killing rats. It is to be traced in the subjective sweetness of 
 stolen fruit. It appears blatantly in the passion for sports in 
 which killing plays an essential part as the indubitable regis- 
 tration of success. It was offered as an explanation of the 
 "disastrous outbreak of burglaries" experienced in England 
 after the conclusion of the armistice last November, having 
 been awakened as a predatory character by the stimulus of the 
 war even in men who had remained in civil life. Under certain 
 stimuli it still appears in its primitive simplicity, even in the 
 most highly cultured natures, as when Julian Grenfell wrote of 
 the Joy of Battle. In no civilised society however can the pure 
 ideal of the hunter be pursued ; it is the negation of organised 
 life in a large community. The changing conditions of environ- 
 ment and the consequent development in some degree of 
 agricultural occupations demand from any race which wills to 
 survive a modification of its mental structure to an extent which 
 varies with the character intensity and duration of its racial 
 experience. But as has already been emphasised the primitive 
 qualities are modified, not eradicated; they still continue to 
 play a part. 
 
 Every people has passed through the hunting stage at some 
 period of its development, and the qualities developed therein 
 are still present in a form more or less overlaid and modified 
 according to its history. In all Burma, with the jungle until 
 recently so close to every village and with such recent memories 
 of war and conquest, the overlaying and modification are less 
 than in many races; but in Tharrawaddy where contact with 
 
[ 49 ] 
 
 wild Nature (both in the hills on the east and in the floods to 
 the west) and undeveloped conditions and weak government 
 and comparative isolation from the culture of both the Burmans 
 on the north and the Talaings on the south existed so recently, 
 we may expect to find particularly strong evidence of the per- 
 sistence of the hunter's spirit as a Ghost of the ancestors of the 
 race in the ideals traditions and character of the people. Tharra- 
 waddy in fact in 1850 differed from the central areas of Burman 
 and Talaing civilisation just as these differed from western 
 Europe, in that the primitive hunting instinct was, owing to 
 the physical environment and occupations of the people, nearer 
 the surface and therefore so much more readily stimulated. 
 Here indeed was the true source of the "confidence and courage 
 and predilection for a military life" which Major Nuthall 
 observed in the Tharrawaddy men of the Pegu Light Infantry 
 and ascribed to predatory habits in Burmese times ; he was more 
 nearly right in his words than in his intention, the assignment 
 of the basic meaning of "predatory" is all that his words re- 
 quire. The spirit of independence which gave rise to the reports 
 that the Tharrawaddy men disposed of rulers who did not 
 suit them derived originally from the same source. Gaung Gyi 
 with his strong spirit of independence and bold adventure and 
 his clever strategy, which took advantage everywhere of the 
 difficulties which the physical conditions offered to his oppo- 
 nents, was the very type of the Tharrawaddy man. The people 
 of Sagaing and Shwebo, long accustomed to living by the culti- 
 vation of the lands adjacent to their compact closely-organised 
 villages and frequently engaged in distant wars or in repelling 
 invasions, organised themselves and developed first into the 
 disciplined soldiers of Alompra and Bandula and later into 
 the favourite flock of the Registrar of Co-operative Societies. 
 The Burmans of Tharrawaddy lived in a sparsely inhabited 
 jungle tract and took no part in the collective action of either 
 the Burmans to the north or the Talaings to the south. Pre- 
 serving more nearly in its primitive form the independent 
 hunting spirit they proved themselves in the Pegu Light In- 
 fantry, as well as in the persons of Gaung Gyi and his followers, 
 well adapted to irregular guerilla warfare; and, except in the 
 significant case of a football-team which gives an opening for 
 
 D. 4 
 
[ 50 ] 
 
 the indulgence of the hunting spirit, co-operation in all forms 
 is much more difficult to establish among them unless the 
 individual advantage can be clearly seen. 
 
 The present population of Tharrawaddy has not descended 
 entirely from the stock of 1850; it has been largely recruited 
 from immigrants from Upper Burma. But it was naturally the 
 more adventurous and more independently-minded Upper 
 Burmans who emigrated to the Lower Province where they 
 had to experience all the differences of the unfamiliar conditions 
 associated with level contours and a heavy rainfall. Upper Burma 
 thereby was relieved of those adventurous and independent 
 spirits which would have weakened its tendency to solidarity. 
 But in Tharrawaddy like was added to like ; while in the same 
 way the other districts of Lower Burma have received a popur 
 lation of the adventurous type somewhat similar to that of 
 Tharrawaddy in addition to whatever they had before, and so 
 have acquired in greater or less degree the Tharrawaddy char- 
 acter. 
 
 The spirit of adventure being a lineal descendant of the old 
 hunting and killing spirit, it is not surprising that other traits 
 closely associated with the same spirit or transformations of it ap- 
 pear. A love of gambling is certainly more closely associated with 
 the uncertainty of the hunter's life, with its alternations of hunger 
 and surfeit, than with the life of the shepherd or cultivator. The 
 instant appeal to the knife in petty quarrels is the direct outcome 
 of the spirit of the hunt. The individualism of the hunter is one 
 of the direct causes of the lack of cohesion in the villages of 
 Lower Burma, which would have been cured before now if the 
 varied origins of the immigrants and present physical conditions 
 were its sole causes. The competitive individualism which 
 characterises agriculture in Lower Burma would perhaps have 
 arisen amongst any people placed in the same circumstances, 
 but the immediate and complete reaction of the Burmans to the 
 conditions was a result of the hunter spirit expressed in in- 
 dividualism. 
 
VIIL THE RAISING OF GHOSTS 
 
 The persistence of the primitive traits of the hunting age is a 
 factor which has frequently been overlooked or denied because 
 the traits have been hidden by a screen formed of the complex 
 of inhibitions developed in the later history of the race and dense 
 in proportion to the sum of subsequent racial experiences. But 
 it so happens that there is ready to hand a direct test of the 
 theory in an observation of the effect of temporarily suppressing 
 those inhibitions. The Advisory Committee under Lord D Aber- 
 non, which reported to the Central Liquor Traffic Control 
 Board in England in 1917 on the effects of alcohol on the human 
 organisation, is probably the highest authority on that subject. 
 It is reported that (setting aside the case of the chronic drunkard) 
 alcohol successively suspends the functions of the brain and 
 mind in the order from above downwards — that is to say, in 
 the inverse order of their development in the individual and in 
 the race. Small doses affect the higher intellectual faculties, 
 which are the latest acquirements of the brain ; and the result 
 is a failure of inhibitions and a consequent setting free of the 
 emotions and their instinctive impulses from intellectual control. 
 A further dose leads to a disturbance of the functions of sense- 
 perception and skilled movement, and this disturbance is 
 accompanied by emotional instability; the emotions and in- 
 stinctive impulses being still relatively intact, the drinker is 
 apt to give way to violent displays of emotions characterised 
 by the exclusive dominance of each primary emotion in turn. 
 The report is a scientific corroboration of In vino Veritas. 
 Viewed in this light the well-known effects of alcohol upon 
 Burmans are a corroboration of the theory of the persistence 
 in them of the hunting and killing traits behind a screen of more 
 modern acquisitions, the greater readiness with which the 
 screen is removed in Burmans than in Europeans being a result 
 partly perhaps of less racial experience of alcohol but largely 
 of the more recent acquirement of the screen. 
 
 It was of course common knowledge long ago that the con- 
 sumer of a sufficient dose of alcohol is liable to become quarrel- 
 some and behave generally in an uncivilised manner. But the 
 
 4—2 
 
[ 52 ] 
 
 analysis of the mode of action of alcohol, which though it was 
 denied by many when taught by Sir Victor Horsley and others 
 has now received the incontrovertible authority of Lord 
 D'Abernon's committee, brings that knowledge to us in a form 
 of which use can be made in two different ways. In the first 
 place it will be noticed that the analysis does not prove that 
 alcohol is a prolific cause of crime. It shows that it is possible 
 for it to be such, and demands therefore an investigation into 
 the correlation of alcohol with crime in any criminal locality. 
 But it goes further — and this is a matter not commonly appre- 
 ciated; it shows that care is needed in rejecting an indicated 
 correlation in one locality because it cannot be discovered in 
 another. It will often be accepted that differing environment or 
 occupations will account for different results being obtained 
 in two localities, but it is not yet sufficiently realised that, even 
 when environment and occupations are identical now, the human 
 material may be different because of differences in long-for- 
 gotten history. (In the study of this matter, too, one should 
 count not only the stabber who acted under the influence of 
 alcohol consumed by himself but also him who stabbed on a 
 provocation given by a consumer; but the figures should be 
 kept distinct.) The second direction in which the analysis is 
 of use is in its suggestion of a possible cause of crime in any 
 drug or other influence which by inhibiting the control of the 
 higher nerve-centres raises the ghosts of past ages. The effect 
 of opium is known to be a depression of the faculties of reason 
 and judgment accompanied initially by a slight excitement of 
 the imagination that soon gives way to a general depression 
 which, as in the case of alcohol, affects the faculties in the 
 reverse order of their development. Thus the relation of opium 
 to crime should be studied in the same way as that of alcohol. 
 That, indeed, has long been generally understood, but a more 
 subtle influence which has commonly been overlooked is malaria. 
 The effect of wide malaria infection is a subject demanding 
 the close study of a mind trained in statistics and psychology 
 as well as versed in the study of malaria. Opium is commonly 
 consumed all along the Pegu Yoma as a preventive of malaria ; 
 it has even been alleged that in some eastern parts of the Prome 
 District a cultivator must guarantee a supply of opium for this 
 
[ 53 ] 
 
 reason before he can get a ploughman to agree to work for him. 
 Many Burmans who would refuse to use opium even as a 
 preventive of fever resort freely to alcohol when travelling in 
 malarious areas. A large proportion of town Burmans, if they 
 have to go out even to rural villages, to say nothing of the jungle, 
 in October or November, regard a daily dose of some form of 
 alcoholic drink as indispensable to protect them against fever; 
 and the dose is very apt to grow. Many have thus contracted 
 either the opium or the alcohol habit directly through the fear 
 of malaria. But the close study, in the light of the Freud theory 
 of repressed tendencies, of the neuroses arising from malaria 
 and malarial cachexia in Burmans would probably establish 
 a relationship between malaria and crime arising in much the 
 same way as the relationship between crime and alcohol, by 
 the weakening of the mental forces which maintain the repression . 
 Malaria will then appear to be a far more potent force than 
 alcohol or opium because it affects a so much larger portion of 
 the population. 
 
 The analysis now suggests still another line of thought. 
 Alcohol and opium and probably malaria are related to crime 
 through the failure of repressing forces which arises from their 
 effect upon the nervous system. But such a failure may be 
 caused in other ways. One such way is by emotional shock, 
 but the resulting condition is then regarded as pathological and 
 outside the present studies. A more subtle way is by long-con- 
 tinued conscious or sub-conscious mental friction or stress 
 arising from the repression of tendencies and habits which have 
 previously had full play. Such stress must occur whenever 
 adjustment is made to a changed environment. With the en- 
 vironment changing slowly the stress may not be great ; but with 
 an economic environment changing as rapidly as that of the 
 Lower Burman has done the stress must be serious. Take what 
 is perhaps the most obvious change as an example, and consider 
 all the effects of the changes in the habits of domestic economy 
 arising from the loss of free jungle-products which can no 
 longer be collected in most places because the expansion of 
 cultivation has pressed back the limits of the jungle from which 
 also a larger population desires to take toll. In Tharrawaddy in 
 particular there is combined with this the repression of the 
 
[ 54 ] 
 
 instinct for the hunt, formerly satisfied by the search for all 
 free natural products, both animal and vegetable, and repressed 
 quite suddenly and recently. But it is the very alphabet of 
 psychology that suppression leads to violent manifestation ; and 
 the Thonze householder dares not leave a waterpot outside his 
 house at night lest it appeal to somebody as a free gift of Nature 
 to be appropriated for the trouble of collecting it. So too, all 
 the changes in environment, economic or physical, cause, 
 through the repression of tendencies belonging to the old 
 environment, mental strain which results in many individuals 
 in strong reaction. The strain is sub-conscious and the individual 
 is unable to explain the "motive" which apparently caused the 
 crime. But there is probably much to learn from a study of the 
 modern theory of hysteria, with which many cases of crime are 
 undoubtedly related, particularly those in which the "motive" 
 is obscure and the only apparent explanation is "pure cussed- 
 ness." Some aspects of the social disorganisation, such as the 
 failure to provide reasonable house-sites, take effect in a similar 
 way by establishing neurasthenic conditions under which the 
 ghosts are raised and walk again. 
 
 The clearest cause of mental strain associated with the loss 
 of free jungle products is, however, the difficulty of making 
 ends meet in the domestic budget without them ; and this leads 
 to the consideration of all forces which by tending to impose a 
 lower standard of living excite reacting mental stresses in the 
 endeavour to maintain the habitual standard. From this it is 
 only one step more to the consideration of the effect of the fear 
 and worry due to all poverty however caused, and thus to find 
 a cause of crime in any cause of poverty. The most obvious 
 cause of poverty in Lower Burma generally is the competitive 
 basis of its economic life. Other causes are the alcohol and 
 opium habits which take effect both by direct exhaustion of 
 resources and by reducing industrial efficiency. Malaria, what- 
 ever may be its direct psychological effect, is another powerful 
 cause of poverty acting either by depriving wife and children 
 of their natural supporter, or by the loss of efficiency when 
 working, or by the loss of time when too ill to work — perhaps 
 occurring at a critical point in the agricultural season and causing 
 a failure of the harvest for a tenant or owner, and dismissal for 
 
[ 55 ] 
 
 the labourer. Whether due to economic competition, to malaria 
 or to drugs, poverty tends to work in a vicious circle, to re-inforce 
 its own causes and so accentuate itself and its effects. And the 
 psychological consideration of its action in a people of the Bur- 
 man temperament shows that crime may be caused indirectly 
 by poverty of much less than that extreme degree in which 
 destitution acts as a direct stimulus to theft to supply an 
 elementary need. 
 
 Thus poverty, drugs, malaria and the change of physical and 
 economic environment may be regarded as causing crime in- 
 directly and through their mental and nervous effects. In 
 addition there are forces stimulating directly the production 
 of crime. The influence of example is particularly important 
 amongst these because it becomes constantly more powerful 
 as crime increases. It must not be thought that the power of 
 example is restricted to unpunished crime; the influences of 
 suggestion and mimicry in circumstances in which other forces 
 have already excited irritation are effective even in the case of a 
 crime which is detected and punished, particularly if the crime 
 takes place locally and the punishment far away in a secluded 
 institution. Another stimulus to crime arises directly out of 
 the mere increase of the density of the population. If the 
 population of a given area is doubled the number of contacts 
 between individuals must be quadrupled, and the number of 
 occasions of mutual irritation or of temptation must also be at 
 least quadrupled unless some influence concurrently diminishes 
 them. The competitive atmosphere of the economic life of 
 to-day is certainly not such an influence. Normally the growth 
 of population should be accompanied by growth of social 
 organisation under which men, becoming associated instead of 
 merely being gregarious, learn to allow less effect to occasions 
 of irritation; this is indeed the essence of civilisation. The lack 
 of social organisation appears again therefore as a stimulus of 
 crime through the consequent failure of civilisation to advance 
 as rapidly as the population increases. 
 
 We have already noted that the disconnected outbreaks of 
 crime in Tharrawaddy before 1904 were accompanied by acute 
 economic conditions and political tension, and that since that 
 year there has been a growing economic and social disorganisa- 
 
[ 56 ] 
 
 tion, which would, as we now see, tend to produce psychological 
 conditions in which ghosts of instincts or tendencies developed 
 in earlier stages of the evolution of the people would be raised 
 and crime generated. The temporary stress of 1878 to 1880 
 and 1885 to 1889 produced temporary outbreaks. The crime of 
 1894 also started under economic stress and would probably have 
 subsided, too, in the same way as those previous outbreaks if 
 the general economic and social conditions had been the same. 
 But, although the economic and social disorganisation in Tharra- 
 waddy had not yet advanced far enough in 1894 ^^ t)e accepted 
 as the cause of the chronic state of crime obtaining there since 
 that date, it had proceeded far enough to neutralise the measures 
 taken for repression. As each year passed the disorganisation 
 was steadily growing and its effect was enhanced by the growing , 
 stimulus of example. By 1904 the conditions of industrial 
 agriculture were establishing themselves, and with a history 
 of ten continuous criminal years the high output of crime be- 
 came normal and only liable to oscillation as exacerbating 
 influences and the measures for its suppression alternately 
 obtained the upper hand. 
 
 Thus by pressing back to the psychological basis of the effects 
 of economic and other conditions it is possible to meet the two 
 difficulties in assigning to economic causes the chronic crime of 
 Tharrawaddy, which began before those causes had become 
 chronic and developed in greater intensity in Tharrawaddy than 
 where those causes were more developed. The primitive in- 
 stincts, which are found in men of every race because of the 
 conditions of life of primitive man, but are transformed and 
 repressed by the inhibitions and mental modifications acquired 
 in the course of racial development, can be liberated by certain 
 stimuli in their primitive or only partially transformed character. 
 Owing to the physical, political and social history of Tharra- 
 waddy those inhibitions are even less firmly established in its 
 people than in other Burmans, while the transformation of the 
 primitive hunting and predatory instincts by environment and 
 occupation has not proceeded so far; and accordingly those 
 instincts are more easily stimulated in Tharrawaddy than in 
 other districts, although owing to colonisation by people of a 
 similar innate character the delta districts have populations 
 
[ 57 ] 
 
 which do in some degree partake of the Tharrawaddy character. 
 Amongst the stimuli which tend to revive the primitive instincts 
 poverty and the other effects of the current economic and social 
 conditions are perhaps the most powerful, and continued crime 
 began sooner in the neighbouring districts than in Tharrawaddy 
 because in them these economic conditions developed sooner. 
 But the crime of Tharrawaddy developed most intensely 
 because of the innate character of its population, which re- 
 sponded more readily to those stimuli and to the stimulus of 
 example of which the influence has grown at an increasing rate. 
 Other stimuli have been alcohol, opium and malaria. As 
 causes of poverty these reinforce the effects of the economic 
 conditions, and they have also direct influence. Malaria is rife 
 now along the foot of the Yoma and was of prime importance 
 among the forces retarding the development of the old prin- 
 cipality. It is probably even now more serious in Tharrawaddy 
 than in most districts of Lower Burma; and besides having 
 thus a greater direct influence would be more effective in 
 inducing the alcohol and opium habits. Further, remembering 
 the transformation of the primitive hunting spirit into the spirit 
 of adventure, it need cause no surprise if the people of Tharra- 
 waddy are found to be more ready than others, quite apart from 
 fever prevention, to experiment with drugs. In this connection 
 there is on record a report which may also interest those who 
 regard the British Government as responsible for the opium 
 evil in Burma. It was made by Captain Smith in 1853, ^^^ ^^^^ 
 year of the British occupation of the province, when Gaung Gyi's 
 rebellion was in full swing and the Sarawah and Tharrawaddy 
 people were driven to Henzada and suffered there from great 
 poverty, and it stated that "intoxicating drugs are used to 
 excess by the idlers — chiefly opium sold secretly by Chinamen." 
 This report not only forestalled a recent view of the opium 
 question, but suggests that the people were indeed susceptible 
 to the temptation of drugs. Such susceptibility is not a suffi- 
 cient reason for condemnation, Emerson, an apostle of the 
 Higher Life, recognising the greater readiness with which 
 drugs are used by the adventurous than by the timid, even 
 went so far as to declare that a people which has never indulged 
 in some drug is not worth its salt. 
 
IX. THE LAYING OF GHOSTS 
 
 The history of greatest interest to intelligent men is the history 
 of what has not yet occurred. All history of the past is of interest 
 chiefly as an aid to writing the history of the future. The method 
 of this science of pro-history is that of all the successful sciences ; 
 namely, deduction from a theory which resumes all the known 
 facts in a kind of mental shorthand and is constantly tested by 
 agreement between the deductions and newly discovered facts. 
 The theory is a pure concept, to the students of which questions 
 of historical truth are of interest only as guides in so constructing 
 the theory that it may be in agreement with the known facts, 
 and questions of metaphysical truth are of no interest at all. The 
 functions of the theory are to guide to the discovery of new facts 
 and to increase the material and spiritual power of man; and 
 the theory is true in so far as it fulfils these functions. The earth 
 is safely circumnavigated through the theory that it is a sphere 
 around which the rest of the universe revolves. The simple 
 atomic theory of matter provides a satisfactory basis for chem- 
 istry so long as a certain wide range of phenomena is not ex- 
 ceeded. The ghost theory of the Tharrawaddy crime is advanced 
 with a similar pragmatic claim ; it is suggested that it resumes with 
 sufficient accuracy the known facts and furnishes a guide to the 
 discovery of new facts, and, inasmuch as knowledge is an 
 indispensable preliminary thereto, assists in the discovery of 
 the proper methods of dealing with its subject. It is in fact a 
 tool to work with. It conceives of the production of crime by 
 the action of certain stimuli upon a people of a particular 
 psychological character which is the natural result of their 
 past history. It exhibits the "antecedent and primary causes 
 which bring about the disposition to commit crime" {Police 
 Report, 191 1 ) and by throwing light upon the mode of action of 
 known stimuli offers aid in the detection of others. It suggests 
 three methods of combating crime: to discover and remove 
 or weaken the stimuli ; to provide legitimate means of expression 
 for the repressed instincts concerned ; and to convert the char- 
 
[ 59 J 
 
 acter of the people by transforming those instincts and over- 
 laying them with inhibitions which will successfully resist the 
 stimuli. The satisfactory application of these methods will 
 involve an economic social and spiritual revolution; their 
 neglect will be accompanied by a development of crime which 
 will make future administrators of Tharrawaddy look back with 
 a sigh to what they will regard as the innocent years of the 
 Great War. "The forces of the world do not threaten — they 
 operate," says President Wilson; and that is true of the crime 
 stimulating forces at work in Tharrawaddy. Fortunately it is 
 equally true of the forces which resist them, and if these forces 
 can be discovered and applied in time with sufficient intensity 
 their success is equally inevitable. Already a beginning is being 
 made in their appHcation, and it is no part of the intention of 
 the present studies, which are directed to the "pure" rather 
 than the "applied" branch of their science, to work out a 
 complete system of application. A few disjointed suggestions 
 arising out of the preceding studies are all that will be offered. 
 Amongst the stimuli of crime example was noted as of 
 particular importance because of the cumulative influence it 
 exercises. Correlative to this is the importance of the measures 
 for reforming criminals and repressing crime. The agency of 
 repression is the police force, and the improvement of the police 
 is consequently the method of attacking crime which meets 
 with fewest sceptics. The story of the Pegu Light Infantry 
 Regiment was prefaced to these studies partly because, while 
 one of the difficulties in organising that regiment was, as with 
 the police to-day, the inadequacy of the pay, the general con- 
 ditions of service were of even more importance. The ex- 
 perience of the Pegu Light Infantry Regiment when employed 
 on frontier duty showed that these conditions must be human 
 if the force is to be a success. At his last Durbar (April 1919) 
 the Deputy Commissioner of Tharrawaddy called for a body of 
 poUce which would fill other districts with envy ; there is every 
 reason to believe that the district can supply that if Govern- 
 ment will let him experiment with improved conditions of 
 service. The need for better pay is admitted; but, just as with 
 Labour in Europe and America, pay alone will not settle the 
 matter. The Tharrawaddy policeman, for the very reasons which 
 
[ 6o ] 
 
 will make him a good policeman, requires opportunity for self- 
 expression and a broader life. It must not be expected that the 
 housing problem has been settled for the Tharrawaddy police 
 by the supply of continuous rows of cottages even more closely 
 resembUng each other than do the bricks and concrete posts 
 of which they are built ; individuality must be allowed room for 
 expression and a piece of land must be given to each man for a 
 garden — and opportunity to develop it. A suitable sheltered 
 playground for the children of the station is also required. The 
 supply of a newspaper is as important in the police station as in 
 some offices in the Secretariat to which newspapers are supplied 
 at Government's expense. Clubs are required for reading as 
 well as for indoor and outdoor games; powers have recently 
 been granted to sanction grants-in-aid to such cases and the 
 police stations should not be overlooked, though the institutions 
 should admit others than police and other officials because thus 
 all will get broader views and develop wider sympathies, and a 
 beginning will be made in a few centres at least of the process 
 of humanising Ufe in Burma. The police football teams have 
 their value; but even against these a warning is required, 
 because they are liable to monopolise attention and leave 
 non-players without the provision of any opportunity for self- 
 expression and with only the soreness that comes when a player 
 is promoted. 
 
 But even with an improved police force repression cannot 
 be successful without (in the words of the Police Report 191 6) 
 "the creation of a healthy public opinion leading to a cordial 
 co-operation of the community and the police." And that is 
 hardly possible until a community has been developed. But 
 communities cannot be developed by merely granting to head- 
 men power to inffict punishment upon those villagers who, not 
 having the excuse of wealth, fail to assist them in carrying out 
 their duties. Nor are they necessarily produced by building 
 village fences; " gregariousness is not association." The im- 
 provement of the status of headmen has its uses, but it can 
 never engender the desired public opinion amongst the non- 
 headmen ; benches of headmen will provide a useful and cheap 
 branch of the judicial service, but unless the headmen are elected 
 they cannot do more than use their more intimate local know- 
 
[ 6i ] 
 
 ledge to punish more wisely and promptly, and to recognise 
 more readily the cases which demand guidance rather than 
 punishment. Public opinion will arise when and where there 
 is a community ; communities will begin to develop when some 
 enduring medium for the expression of their sense of unity is 
 provided. Economic societies cannot as a rule include the 
 whole of the village; political organisation is required, and the 
 formation of village committees with constructive powers, 
 which even if limited are real and susceptible of extension, is 
 the first step. But advance in political organisation requires 
 improved social and economic organisation. It must be realised 
 that the Village Act and the Village System are by no means 
 identical ; the rigorous enforcement of the former is not really 
 the same thing as the maintenance and development of the 
 latter. The Act has its place in the foundations of the system, 
 but it must not be mistaken for the commodious apartments 
 which the superstructure ought to provide. The village-site 
 problem too must be dealt with before it becomes as difficult 
 as in the Delta. There must be room for the village if corporate 
 life is to develop. The destruction of old-established hamlets 
 in the Delta by the aid of Township Courts gives a real stimulus 
 to the belief that law and order are not upon the side of the 
 people — a belief which will effectually prevent the people from 
 being upon the side of law and order. Though this is confined 
 to the Delta it is symptomatic of the lack of touch between the 
 judiciary and the people which is not confined to the Delta; 
 it is due not only to ignorance of the Land Records system but 
 to an ignorance of rural conditions which must afl^ect unfavour- 
 ably all the work of the Courts. 
 
 The correlation of malaria and crime in Burma should be 
 closely studied. Unfortunately the vital statistics in Burma are 
 of no value for the purpose, nor even are the figures for patients 
 in the hospitals. A malaria survey like that recently carried out 
 in Mandalay is urgently required in all the criminal districts; 
 its results should be carefully collated with local crime records, 
 and its scope and tabulation should be modified if necessary 
 for that purpose. Further, a continued study in relation to 
 malaria of the present inmates of jails and of new entrants for 
 a considerable period, and a tabulation of the results on a care- 
 
[ 62 ] 
 
 fully considered basis of kind and motive of crime (and also 
 the economic status of the criminal), should be of value if the 
 statistical examination of the data were made by a mind trained 
 in that work. On account of the now well-known phenomenon 
 that malarial cachexia may be developed to a high degree 
 although, owing to his system having become habituated to the 
 toxin, the subject has never shown prominent symptoms of 
 fever or ague of any kind, the study of the prisoners should not 
 be confined to obtaining a record of clinical symptoms but 
 should be pursued with the unrestricted aid of the microscope ; 
 while on the other hand a free use should be made of all the 
 methods of modern psychology to study the co-existing mental 
 qualities. There is reason for believing that the co-ordination 
 of all these studies in Tharrawaddy would be well repaid. 
 
 Incidentally it would probably become clear to some that it 
 is entirely unnecessary to have a skilled medical officer to check 
 the ordinary routine papers of jail administration. It is surely 
 something of a paradox that the comparatively few prisoners in 
 a District Jail, mostly men in the prime of life, living under a 
 carefully framed regime, well housed and sufficiently fed, 
 protected from most diseases, and suffering only by the mental 
 effects of incarceration, should be supplied with a special 
 medical attendant; while the immensely larger number of 
 persons (largely children or old people) outside the jail, often 
 insufficiently clothed and fed, living lives which are the anti- 
 thesis of regularity in an environment often extremely insanitary, 
 exposed to all kinds of weather, overwork, infection and worry, 
 are neglected. It will perhaps be realised some day that the 
 inmates of the jails being largely drawn from the mentally 
 unstable and living under conditions which affect only the 
 mind unfavourably, should be placed in the charge of a psy- 
 chologist. The Civil Surgeon, apart from executions and super- 
 vision of the medical service of the jail, would be set free for 
 his legitimate duty of Health Officer in the rural as well as the 
 urban areas and for the benefit of the law-abiding as well as 
 the transgressors. The psychologist would be fully occupied 
 because he could not understand his subjects unless he also 
 studied persons outside the jail ; he would be required to study 
 also the school-children and advise the educational authorities 
 
[ 63 ] 
 
 and give occasional expert assistance at the hospital. The Civil 
 Surgeon would then be able to attend to the pioneer cultivators 
 who are clearing new holdings on the edge of the jungle. All 
 through the colonisation of Lower Burma the fundamental 
 difficulty of the pioneer has been not finance but fever. It has 
 constantly been the inefficiency caused by fever which has 
 made the financial difficulties so important. But although the 
 people who took the risks of pioneering were drawn from the 
 more virile and adventurous portions of the population, no 
 effort was ever made to help them fight the fever which killed 
 so many and brought so many others into the debts which 
 eventually swallowed up the land they had developed. If the 
 medical department of the Province had taken its proper part 
 of fighting malaria in the colonisation of Lower Burma, the 
 economic condition of the cultivators in many parts would have 
 been very different from what it is. Not only would the pioneers 
 have survived in better economic condition; the greater ease 
 of success as a pioneer would have caused many more to leave 
 the old-established tracts and so have relieved the competition 
 there. 
 
X. THE LAYING OF GHOSTS {concluded) 
 
 The stimuli of alcohol and opium have already been sufficiently 
 discussed in the development of the theory. Poverty must also 
 be dealt with, not only because it is a direct stimulant to crime 
 but because the solution of the economic problem is a necessary 
 preliminary to any considerable advance in social organisation 
 on lines which take account of personality. Moreover economic 
 organisation is the easiest to start because the advantages to 
 each individual can be most clearly seen ; and it can be used to 
 facilitate social organisation. An endeavour is being made 
 with co-operative credit, sale and supply. In a society of small 
 owners these could probably furnish an almost complete solution 
 of the problem. But amongst tenants, with such severe com- 
 petition for land as exists amongst the tenants of the Delta 
 and is growing in Tharrawaddy, they cannot succeed. Nearly 
 the whole of what they save in interest must be transferred to 
 rent, leaving the tenants almost where they were unless they 
 can form a sufficiently powerful trade-union or can form societies 
 to take over the land. Meanwhile the greater the solidarity of 
 the small owners and tenants, the worse the lot of the labourer 
 who must also look then to collective action in a trade-union 
 or in societies which take over the land. Except in areas worked 
 by small owners (as in Prome) subsidiary industries for culti- 
 vators will benefit chiefly the money-lenders and rent-receivers 
 if introduced before the tenants and labourers have a stronger 
 economic position. Improved seed and methods of cultivation, 
 new and varied or multiple crops, all tend in the same way until 
 that condition is established. Whether the competition amongst 
 tenants in Tharrawaddy is yet so severe that these views apply 
 there is a matter of enquiry ; the figures of the last settlement 
 report suggest that it was not so in 191 5, but the conditions may 
 have changed during the war. The objection to the introduction 
 of improvements and subsidiary industries while the tenants 
 and labourers are unorganised is not merely the negative con- 
 sideration that these classes would get little benefit, but the 
 
[ 65 ] 
 
 serious positive consideration that they would thereby be so 
 much worse off even when they did improve their relative 
 economic position, and that the inevitably consequent struggle 
 would be so much the more bitter. In the case of subsidiary 
 industries there is also the difficulty that the profit derived from 
 them might not be enough to provide for a fair standard of 
 living and yet be enough to make the establishment of a trade- 
 union more difficult. It may be necessary to accept the dis- 
 advantages of co-operative societies amongst tenants to effect 
 the initial step towards the wider organisation ; but in that case 
 the step should be taken before control over the land passes 
 still further into the hands of rent-receivers. There are dangers 
 in going too slow in co-operation as well as in going too fast. 
 The balanced development of whole-time non-agricultural 
 industries to relieve the competition for land and agricultural 
 employment offers a different prospect and furnishes perhaps 
 the most fruitful field of endeavour if the new industries are 
 not so treated as to produce worse problems of their own. The 
 development of such industries would not only reduce the 
 competition amongst tenants and labourers but would provide 
 the needed field for investment or spiritually profitable con- 
 sumption of much of the wealth which at present is a bait 
 stimulating the predatory instincts. 
 
 The Land Records system must be revised so that it can less 
 readily be used by the wealthy and unscrupulous to the detri- 
 ment of the poorer or less sophisticated. The methods of land- 
 revenue settlement must also be revised to secure a more equitable 
 distribution of the revenue amongst the assessees, and a more 
 defensible gradation of the changes made at each revision than 
 is accorded under present conditions by the system of inter- 
 mediate rates in vogue. It will never be possible, however, to 
 make a satisfactory settlement until the land-revenue is 
 supplemented by a tax upon the profit derived from renting 
 land, including in such profits the profit derived from storing 
 paddy paid as rent, which at present escapes assessment to 
 income-tax. The rent received for agricultural land should not 
 be regarded as a profit of agriculture but as a profit of investment 
 in land. Profits below a prescribed minimum being exempted, 
 there would be no danger of affecting the genuine cultivator or 
 
[ 66 ] 
 
 his widow or orphan ; the change could only hit the large rent- 
 receivers. Traditions relating to land-revenue derived from 
 Akbar and other early authorities must give way to the needs 
 of the present; the object of the land-revenue is not the main- 
 tenance of a tradition but equitable taxation. Without such a 
 tax as that suggested, there must always be at every new settle- 
 ment the difficulty that revenue rates which would transfer to 
 Government its proper share of the unearned increment of 
 rent, even on the most modest basis of calculating that share, 
 would crush the cultivating owners or at least seriously depress 
 their standard of living and induce those nervous effects to 
 which attention was drawn in the eighth study. Apart from such 
 a tax the most effective aid in the improvement of settlements 
 will be derived from the formation of agricultural trade-unions, 
 which will be able to undertake most of the work of the settle- 
 ment, and particularly will carry out soil-classification and 
 arrange the relative incidence of the revenue on various lands 
 throughout the district and province with the best knowledge 
 and therefore in the best way. 
 
 The parrot-cry that the lay schools do not develop character 
 as did the monastery schools may be hushed for a time while the 
 energy it absorbs is given to devising a scheme to get better 
 teachers with sufficient remuneration to make their minds easy 
 and contented and schools in which teachers can have a fair 
 opportunity. It cannot be expected that every teacher will be an 
 exceptional man; and, without being such, an underpaid and 
 discontented teacher, suffering from severe economic pressure 
 and teaching in a badly designed dwelling-house in any odd 
 corner of the village, cannot be expected to exert the best possible 
 influence and train his pupils satisfactorily. Spacious and con- 
 venient school buildings with adequate play-grounds and 
 equipment (extravagance being distinguished from adequacy 
 for other reasons besides expense) should be provided at the 
 public cost, or at least more liberal aid should be given from 
 public funds than is now the case. The site can safely be outside 
 the village-fence just as that of the monastery often is now, and 
 the cost can be recouped in the near future by reappropriation 
 from "Prisons." The lay schools if given an opportunity can 
 do as much as religious schools to inculcate respect for such 
 
[ 67 ] 
 
 "superiors" as deserve it; it would be a poor system of educa- 
 tion which did not encourage the discrimination of such. It is 
 moreover frequently found to be not so much the diminution 
 of respect which is deplored as the loss of servility. Given a 
 reasonable site and building, the lay schools can use the same 
 means to discipHne of keeping the school clean and tending the 
 garden as the monastery schools. 
 
 The subjects of instruction are also of importance. The growing 
 demand amongst Burmans for a better system of education is 
 a good sign, but there is a marked tendency to ask for technical 
 education. This, though useful enough in its way, will not aid 
 in reducing crime (or improving political capacity) unless the 
 main emphasis is laid upon the stimulation of constructive 
 imagination. But if the instinct for adventure is afforded scope 
 in the mental and spiritual sphere it will be so far transformed 
 that much stronger stimuli will be required to excite it to demand 
 expression in illegitimate ways. The psychologist when he came 
 to study the schools would quickly conclude that their days are 
 too long; shorter sessions being given to literary education, the 
 time so freed should be devoted to genuine nature-study 
 always in close contact with nature, affording thus an outlet for 
 the hunter-instinct in its earliest transformation. Occasions 
 which the weather made unsuitable for nature-study could be 
 utilised for some kind of constructive manual work. Nature- 
 study could be so directed as to enable the next generation to 
 appreciate and respond to the teachings of the Agricultural 
 Department and even to assist that Department. 
 
 Related to the development of nature-study is the Boy Scout 
 organisation which was the outcome of a specific endeavour to 
 discover a means of encouraging the qualities and virtues 
 developed by the hunter type in its conflict with nature while 
 discouraging the hunter's defects and vices. There are only two 
 centres of Boy Scouts in the province now, and neither of those 
 is in the Tharrawaddy District which appears to be a very 
 suitable field for their establishment. An organiser of the right 
 type to develop Boy Scout centres at all the towns of the Tharra- 
 waddy district could be found amongst the many partially 
 disabled officers of the Expeditionary Force who would have 
 the advantage of all the glamour of his war experiences. He 
 
I 68 ] 
 
 would train local Scoutmasters, who should be of the same race 
 as the scouts, and afterwards transfer the whole organisation 
 to them. Scoutmasters would probably be best obtained at 
 first from amongst those who have had elementary (but not 
 too much) military training. 
 
 But it is useless and even dangerous to improve the education 
 of the children unless the environment in which they will live 
 is adapted to the kind of adults so produced. If the one evicted 
 devil is not to be replaced by seven worse, the new capacities 
 developed in the transformation of the old instincts must be 
 accorded room for expression, and this requires the general 
 humanisation of village and town life. Every encouragement 
 should be given to the societies now springing up for this 
 purpose in the towns, and extension of their activities to the^ 
 villages should be encouraged. Land ready levelled or reclaimed 
 and drained should be provided, by acquisition if necessary, 
 for the erection of meeting-rooms in the larger villages. Village 
 committees with powers to construct village requirements are 
 needed to stimulate the development of a corporate spirit ; they 
 will find scope again in this direction as instruments for the 
 transformation of the hunter instincts. 
 
 Meanwhile for some a more direct outlet can be provided 
 by recruiting for the Burman army, but their training should 
 follow the Colonial not the Prussian model. The conditions of 
 life in the army must be human. For instance, the mistake of 
 sending a Burmese detachment to a distant station where there 
 was no minister of their own religion must not be repeated ; a 
 pongyi chaplain must be sent with them. It will always be 
 impossible to turn the Tharrawaddy recruit into a satisfactory 
 machine; but the experiment of the Pegu Light Infantry and 
 the skill endurance and courage of Gaung Gyi and his army 
 showed that there is good material if the right treatment is 
 accorded. A Burmese Army, by stimulating the spirit of 
 nationalism in large numbers not included in its ranks, will 
 provide still another influence to overlay and transform the 
 hunter's spirit of self-assertion by a sense of service to society. 
 
 All these suggestions are founded upon the idea that Tharra- 
 waddy is in a sense the youngest district of Burma, young in 
 the psychology of its people because of its geological history. 
 
[ 69 ] 
 
 Its turbulence is largely the turbulence of unguided youth 
 exposed to a difficult environment. It is inarticulate and the 
 forces at work are largely sub-conscious; yet its psychology is 
 not peculiar, but is that of all new colonies and can be compre- 
 hended by studying the more articulate colonists of the Empire 
 or of the newer parts of the United States. Electricity, which 
 when uncontrolled excels all forces in destructiveness, is, if 
 suitably guided or transformed to other forms of energy, such 
 that it is now put forward as a main element in both the 
 material and the spiritual reconstruction of Western Europe. 
 So too the genius of Tharrawaddy, now wasting itself in crime, 
 can be turned by sympathetic treatment based on real compre- 
 hension of its nature into the great treasure of the province. It 
 is the stuff of which are made poetry and inventions and scien- 
 tific discoveries and theories, and is worth far more than 
 petroleum and paddy. But like petroleum it does not generally 
 lie upon the surface ; it must be sought won and refined ; like 
 paddy it must be cultivated. The practical problem is not to 
 suppress but to raise to still higher potential and to guide in 
 the right channels the instincts of adventure in the children, 
 and to provide a suitable environment for the adults into which 
 children trained on these fines must develop. To stifle these 
 instincts completely is impossible ; any attempt at stifling must 
 be defeated by violent reaction. But since the whole is greater 
 than its part, to allow them to waste away would be a crime 
 blacker than all the crime that Tharrawaddy ever has produced 
 or ever can. 
 
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