THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN BURMAH. THIS paper concerns itself solely with the native State of Burmah, and takes no cognisance of that rich, fertile, and interesting group of provinces which we know under the collective name of 'British Burmah.' When, therefore, I speak in the following pages, hastily written during a very shaky voyage from Mandalay to Prome, of 'Burmah,' it is to be understood that the independent kingdom of Burmah is invariably meant. The once great empire of the 'Lord of the Universe' has dwindled sadly both in dimensions and splendour. In its palmy days it embraced the whole of the fair wide-spreading region between the great mountain-range that stretches southward from the snow-clad Langtang to the sea near Martaban between the embouchures of the Salwen and the Sitang, and that other range which, under the generic name of the Arracan Mountains, trends southward from the Assam mass, till it sinks in the sea hard by Negrais, 'its last bluff crowned by the golden pagoda of Modain, gleaming far to seaward, a Burmese Sunium.' Of this favoured region, Yule, whose book, published in 1858, is still the standard treatise on Burmah, thus speaks: 'With such a frontier, with neighbours who only wished to be let alone, with such a trunk line from end to end of his dominions as the Irawadi, with his teak forests, and his mineral riches, and his fisheries, his wheat, cotton, and rice lands, a world of eager traders to the eastward, and the sea open in front, the King of Ava's dominion was a choice one, had not incurable folly and arrogance deprived him of his best advantages, cast down the barriers of his kingdom, and brought British cantonments and custom-houses within his borders.' Shorn of its seaboard, mismanaged and misgoverned, it is still a choice dominion. Along a valley from twenty to sixty miles wide, every acre of which teems with fertility, the Irawadi pours down its mighty volume of water, at once a highway and a fertiliser. Its course is a great street, the wayfarers on which are innumerable craft, its borders lined by smiling villages bowered among luxuriant foliage. It is easy come, easy go,' as to money and substance, with the gay-hearted, happy-go-lucky people of Burmah. They can laugh 6 : at want in a country where a plot of ground needs but to be tickled with a hoe and it laughs up into your face with sustenance for a season; they dance and sing, and can afford hours and days for holiday-making and 'pooey frequenting, under misgovernment that would go far to break the spirit of a less buoyant race, and under a burden of taxation that would grind into the dust the peasantry of a less favoured soil. In Burmah every industry-from governing to cabbage-growing—is pursued fitfully, perfunctorily, and as if tempus inexorabile were a bauble to be played with; and yet prosperity is universal, plenty smiles from every village, and merry contentment beams from every face. With trade a mere plaything to all appearance regarded as a casual joke by those who engage in it—the great fleet of the Irawadi flotilla finds cargo waiting at every ghaut; and the customs revenue on exports and imports—a revenue farmed, of course, to a foreigner, to save bother, and so sweated freelyyields annually more than a million and a half sterling, and this exclusive of monopolies that are duty-free. The wife of the half-naked coolie who carries your portmanteau ashore wears a dolizan of the 'red, red goud' prized as much in the Burmah of to-day as in the Scotland of the olden time. A real ruby flashes its crimson radiance on the finger of a chance deck-passenger on your steamer, who may be the wife of an artisan or a petty official. And you are told bycredible witnesses that the valley of the Irawadi, fertile and peopled as it seems, can bear no comparison in fertility and population with the great inland valley parallel with it to the eastward, stretching along the base of the Shan mountains all the way from Mandalay, the capital, to the British frontier station of Tonghoo-its length two hundred and thirty miles, its breadth varying from forty to eighty. In the eastern slopes trending down to this valley, coal and ironstone-both, it is needless to say, unwrought-lie in juxtaposition as close as in the Cleveland hills, and lead is actually worked after a fashion. As you traverse the streets of Burmah, no beggars harass your path with piteous whines and loathsome credentials such as swarm in every city of British India, and are indeed not wholly unknown in our own favoured isle. To the superficial observer, the land is an Oriental Arcadia somewhat flavoured with naughtiness, and slightly chequered by crucifixions. To look up, from the perusal of a newspaper story of Sheffield distress, at the river foreground of a Burmese village, with the plump children larking in the sand, and the laughing women tripping down to bathe, is a contrast that has a momentary tendency to shake one's faith in the blessedness of civilisation. The late King of Burmah died in October last, and, soon after the telegram announcing the accession to the throne of one of his sons, there appeared in the English newspapers the wondrous tale that in a land, concerning which the most salient piece of knowledge that any of us, save experts, had of it, was the absolute despotism under which it was ruled, despotism had been abandoned per saltum, and was replaced by mild, enlightened, and well-balanced constitutionalism. The new monarch, so ran the strange news, had voluntarily surrendered the prerogatives devolving on him through a long line of irresponsible despots. He had even abandoned his governing individuality as the sovereign, and was content to rule through, or rather to be ruled by, a council of ministers. Ingenious leaderwriters speculated on the probability of a Burmese Parliament, now that despotism had given place to a constitutional administration, of which reform was professed to be the watchword. We live in nimble days, when the record of a 'sensation' is fast effaced from the mental slate by the advent of a new item of the same convulsive pattern; but the tidings of and the comments on the Great Burmese Transformation Scene' are so recent that I venture to hope some, at least, of the readers of the Nineteenth Century have still some memory of the circumstances as told in telegrams and articles in October and November last. They interested me much at the time, and the short visit to the Burmese capital, from which I am on the return journey, afforded the opportunity, which I most gladly embraced, for inquiring into the details of the strange political phenomenon of which telegrams had given us but the broad and sketchy outlines. Although my time was short, I took great pains to gather and collate the information which the reader will find embodied in the succeeding paragraphs. I cannot but think that the narrative possesses interest, not alone for the general reader, but for the student of the history of nations and of politics. The late King of Burmah-the 'Mendoon 'king, as he was called in Burmese fashion, from the province of which he had been princeowed his throne to the internal convulsions caused by the successful British invasion of 1852. He dethroned his brother, 'the cockfighting king,' in 1853, and was crowned the same year. The 'Mendoon' king was a man of great force of character, and, had he been as loyal as he was strong, he might have gone far to make Burmah a model State among Oriental nations. But, in his later years at all events, he bore the deserved reputation of being obstructive, exclusive, oppressive, and an enemy to the progress of his country. He began his reign well. Yule, writing of his visit in 1855, says of him: His conscientious efforts to do justice have been rewarded by complete tranquillity.' He found the country in wretched case. Where there was government at all, it was misgovernment, so that the strongest aspiration of the people was to be ignored by the Government. Bribery and corruption held sway throughout the ranks of officialism, from the king on the throne to the meanest hanger-on of the pettiest official. Immunity from punishment for offences was a mere question of money, no matter 6 how atrocious or flagrant the crime. Burmah then was as if Turkey under the Pashas had taken unto itself seven devils worse than the first. Each district of the kingdom was given to an official or a minion who ate' it. The term is not mine, and used by me metaphorically; it is the Burmese official expression of the period. Princes, ministers, concubines, white elephants, dancing girls, each and all had a province, a district, or a village 'to eat.' The official so holding a province was the supreme authority in it. He had power of life and death. The local functionaries whom he appointed were simply the men who undertook to furnish him the greatest amount of 'eating.' Of course, these ground out of the people eating' for themselves as well; and the screw was continually on, with an extra turn whenever there was a change of masters, or rather owners. The misery was so horrible that the population emigrated by whole villages into British territory, of the new and beneficent rule obtaining in which the good tidings came drifting over the frontier. Such was the wretchedness, and so sweeping was the depopulation, that the new king, when he came to realise the state of the country over which he found himself ruler, exclaimed with a certain horror, 'Great God, I might as well be king over a desert!' He began his course of reform firmly, but quietly and gradually. It was no easy task; for family claims, the consideration held meet for good service in time of need, and vested interests, confronted and obstructed his every step. When he came to the throne, no official received a stipend-he was paid by the grant of a district 'to eat.' The king determined to abolish the eating' system, and to substitute stipends. Working warily, he began in the lower ranks of the official phalanx. The institution of a capitation tax furnished him with the means to pay salaries. He got into his own hands and exercised the appointment of the local functionaries acting for the 'eaters,' and from this leverage worked steadily for the abolition of the 'eating' altogether. He did not, indeed, abolish altogether local exactions, nor could he, with the imperfect machinery at his disposal, guard the revenues against peculation; but he accomplished this, that 'eating' was no longer recognised, and that all ministers and princes were in the receipt of regular stipends. The district title, indeed, remained and remains to each, but the district revenues were, theoretically at all events, paid intact into the Imperial treasury, and a certain annual sum paid thereout to the incumbent-the quondam eater.' His interest in keeping up the revenue was enlisted by the application of the principle that the stipend should bear a proportion to the amount of revenue paid into the treasury-a system of which the weak side clearly was that the taxpayer had as little protection from the temptation unduly to swell the revenue, as he previously had from being eaten' directly and nakedly. As it fell out, he mostly suffered a good deal in both ways; for while the incumbent took care 6 that his quota of revenue looked well, he and his subordinates could not quite forget that the principal of an exaction is apt to be larger than the interest of it in the shape of commission paid as salary. Complaints were rife, and the king heard them. He adopted a curious expedient. He instituted a set of semi-monastic laymen, who bore the name of 'Sabbath-keepers.' These traversed the country in quest of corrupt practices, acting as king's spies after a fashion, and reporting to him direct. A European wonders that instead of this complex and inefficient device-for quis custodiet custodes ipsos ?— the king did not resort to the expedient of a national valuation and a national assessment. He enlisted also the reserves of the Buddhist priesthood spread over the face of the country, and gradually in every commune there became constituted a local committee of revenuecollecting of which the woon or official was the executive member, and the Phoonghi and Sabbath-keeper' inspecting and controlling members. The condition of the people was thus materially improved. It is true that in criminal matters the hands of the local officials were weakened; but the effect of this was to centre more and yet more all power in the hands of the king, and to make him in reality, as well as in phrase and in theory, absolute and omnipotent. He laboured to make the Crown the actual as well as the conventional centre of justice, of patronage, of honours and favours. He would be the wielder of a benevolent despotism. To use a comparison, his aim was 'personal government;' only he was his own Lord Beaconsfield. And in achieving his end the monarch was the unconscious prototype of the minister. He eliminated from his service all men of strong individual character, cursed with the nuisance, to him, of wills of their own and the evil habit of daring to think for themselves. He laid himself out to gather around him functionaries of mediocrity and subserviency, and hated equally an able man and one to whom he was under an obligation. A rebellion in 1866 interrupted his schemes, only, in the result, to strengthen his hand. The most dangerous of the insurgents was the son of the crown prince, his brother; but the leader of the first outbreak was the king's own son by an inferior wife. He burst into the palace at the head of a gang of followers, and cut off the crown prince's head in the palace court. The king was pursued, and had to escape by a back door. The palace for a short time, the capital for longer, was in the hands of the insurgents. But they withdrew to raise the country to the southward. The son of the murdered crown prince went off to the northward, and raised another rebellion on his own account, so that the king had two insurrections to cope with simultaneously. He was hard pressed indeed. At one crisis, of all the realm he only held the capital, and numbers of his troops deserted him. But he was equal to the occasion; he devised his own strategy, he built batteries, he held his own, and he gradually crushed both |