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Julius Smith

Ten Years
in Burma

By
REV. JULIUS SMITH

CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & PYE
NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS

COPYRIGHT
1902 BY
JENNINGS
& PYE

ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED

PREFACE

The following account of life in Burma has been written to make the country and its people better known in America. At this time, when the United States has come into possession of large and important tropical lands, there is much quickening of interest in all such countries. Burma is much like the Philippine Islands in climate, and there is great racial similarity between the Burmese race and the Tagals.

But I have written chiefly to record the experiences and observations of a missionary in a great and important mission-field, which is not so well known in the home land as it deserves to be. My purpose has been to make the condition of missionary life, and much of other life, real to the reader, who has had no experience in a tropical country. It is hoped that this presentation of facts will add to missionary knowledge, and secure a better acquaintance with the races of Asia and the forces of civilization that are making for the uplift of Asiatic peoples.

In writing of mission work in Burma, I have given special prominence to that under the control of the Methodist Episcopal Church. There has been no printed account of this mission for the twenty-two years of its history, and it seems well to give some permanent form to the record of that which has been undertaken by our little band of missionaries in that field.

In writing of races, social life, and government, I have, of course, written of that which is seen through a missionary’s eyes. It so happens that I have had a great deal to do with people of various nationalities, in relations not directly of a missionary character. This has given me many opportunities to observe as a man, regardless of my calling. In all respects I have tried to be fair and accurate. I have always cherished a fellow-feeling with men whose labors brought them to Asia, and my sympathies have been with all such in honorable callings. It has been my purpose to reflect the conditions of life with which they are surrounded. There has been much excluded that I would gladly have recorded, if the limit of this book had allowed the additional facts. Some incompleteness of statement has been unavoidable, as I could not verify the details at the time and place of writing. Ten years is a short time to study great questions in the East, and to form conclusions on the greatest of them; but I trust that enough of well-digested facts has been told in this book to give the student of missions and mission lands an inside view of the questions discussed. For such defects as are due to the limitations of the author’s ability to gather or to present facts in a satisfactory manner, I must trust to the generous sentiments of the reader.

Julius Smith.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Ten Years
in Burma

CHAPTER I
From America to Burma

The Church of Jesus Christ has just closed its first century of missionary effort within modern times. The nineteenth century began with only a few heroic spirits urging the Church to awake to its responsibility of giving the gospel to the Christless nations. The century has just closed with a steadily increasing army of missionaries, who are determined to give the gospel to every man in his own tongue at the earliest possible day, while the whole Church is beginning to feel the missionary impulse, so far at least, that an increasing multitude are eager to hear of mission lands, the condition of the peoples without Christ, the victories of the gospel, and to have some share in its triumph.

Adoniram Judson, the great missionary hero, enrolled the land of Burma in the list of great mission-fields. He began his labors in Burma during the second decade of the century. The following pages are written as a report of missionary labors and observations in that land in the closing ten years of the century.

How the writer came to be a missionary, and to be honored with an appointment to Burma, may warrant a brief statement. In almost all life’s important steps, individual influence proves the determining factor. This is true in my call to the mission-field. In 1867, when only ten years of age, living on my father’s farm in Andrew County, Mo., I heard a Methodist preacher make a plea for the heathen world. I have never been able to recall his name, that being the only time he ever preached in that place, which was a schoolhouse on my father’s farm. The sermon made a profound impression on me, and I decided to give half of my little fortune of one dollar, saved from pennies, to the cause of missions, with pleadings for which he so warmed our hearts and moved our eyes to tears. Later experiences have shown that missionary sermon to have been the most potential influence of my childhood or youth in determining what I should be in after years. The experience itself seemed to die away for a term of years, due, I think, to the fact that I had little religious training and no missionary information during youth. The reawakening of missionary interest came in 1880, when in college in the Iowa Wesleyan University I heard William Taylor tell of his missionary labors in many lands. Had I then been near the close of my college course, instead of at its beginning, I would have volunteered to go to his mission in South America. Seven or eight years went by, and I was in Garrett Biblical Institute. At that time Bishop Thoburn delivered a series of thrilling missionary addresses to the school. I now think, though without being clearly conscious of it, that from that time I was called to go to India. In 1889, I was pastor of the Arlington Methodist Church in Kansas City, Mo., and so became one of the entertainers of the Missionary Committee that met in the city that year. In listening to the missionary addresses for ten days, and more especially in conversation with Dr. Oldham, who was present, being commissioned by Bishop Thoburn to secure re-enforcements for India, the whole question whether my wife and I should offer ourselves to the Missionary Society for work in the foreign field came up for final settlement. I sought the counsel of Bishop Ninde, who had once been to India, and whose kindly manner always invited confidences of this sort. He agreed to come and spend a day with us, two months later, which he did, and as a result of his counsel and advice, we decided to offer to go to India as missionaries. The offer was promptly accepted, and from that time we laid our plans to leave for our new field of work the following fall. It has always been an inspiring memory to recall the steps by which we were led to let go of America and set our faces toward Asia, and the personal agencies that led us to this decision.

There was another consideration which had great weight in our choice of the foreign mission-field. At home there are men ready for all places. In the foreign mission-fields, especially in Southern Asia, to which we were drawn, there are several places for every man. Here any one of a dozen valuable men can be had for any important charge. On the mission-fields there are most important posts that call in vain for re-enforcements. At home supplies can be had to meet any emergency within a very short time; but on the mission-field we often must wait years for the right man. I left Kansas City in the morning, and my successor, a very worthy and successful man, arrived in the evening of the same day. But out in Burma I have pleaded for years for one man to re-enforce the mission. The Arlington Church, which I was serving, was then and is now a very enjoyable pastorate—one in which the people, always cherish their pastor, and better, where they have from the founding of the Church cordially supported every effort for the salvation of men. The decision to leave that Church to go half way round the world to a people I had never seen, was largely due to the fact that we were needed most on this picket-line of missions, and good men, who for any reason could not go to the foreign fields, could be found to take up promptly the work I laid down at home.

The farewells in Kansas City were of the cheerful and happy kind that send missionaries on their way to their peculiar missions strong in heart. Arlington Church spoke its own farewell in a reception to their pastor and his family, while Grand Avenue Church, the Methodists of Kansas City, followed with a general reception to the outgoing missionaries. This general gathering was under the direction of the pastor, Dr. Jesse Bowman Young, and Dr. O. M. Stewart, the presiding elder. The latter sounded the note of cheerfulness for the farewell. He said, “Let us have nothing of a funeral sort about this reception.” We have always thanked him for the cheerful and hopeful tone which ran all through the meeting. Dr. Young was of the same spirit, and in his address, which at one moment bordered on the emotional at the thought of a long parting from those to whom he had been one of the best of friends, recovered himself by saying, “If you discover anything suspicious in my eyes, charge it up to the hayfever.” These good brethren did more than they knew to set a standard of joyful anticipation on the part of the Church and the outgoing missionaries in the honorable service to which they were called, that toned up their courage when facing the actual separation from home ties. This was of very great value to us who were leaving a very enjoyable pastorate, a native land in which we had taken deep root, and most of all, an aged father and mother.

We left Kansas City on September 3, 1890, and after a little over two months spent in resting and arranging our affairs, we sailed from New York for Liverpool on November 12th. The closing hours in New York were very different from those in Kansas City, and made it appear very real to us that we were being plucked up from the home land and transplanted to a foreign country. We had no acquaintances at all in New York, except one of the Missionary Secretaries, who had visited us in Kansas City. He and his associates were as kind as they could be; but then as now, they were men worked beyond their strength with the burdens of business there is upon them, and at that particular time were hurried to get off to Boston, to the annual Missionary Committee meeting, and they had to tell us a hasty farewell at the Mission Rooms, and leave us to go alone to the ship. While our sailing was more lonely than that of most missionaries, yet it is now the custom to make very little out of the departure of men and women to mission-fields, however distant. The older missionaries contrast this formal dispatch of recruits with the custom of forty years ago, when men still in active service, were first sent out. Then it was the plan to have the new missionaries gathered in one or more churches, and after speeches and exchange of good-will all around, to send them forth with the feeling that their outgoing on this great mission was a matter of moment to the whole Church. It is presumable that custom may change in this matter from time to time, and especially as the number and frequency of the departure of missionaries increase; but it is certain that the departure of missionaries to our distant fields on this, the highest mission of the Church, can not be made less of than it has been in recent years.

We sailed on the steamship City of New York, the largest and swiftest ship then afloat. She loosed her moorings at five o’clock in the morning of November 12th. It was a gloomy morning with a cold rain, and though I was on deck to note any objects of interest amidst the gloom, nothing at all of importance was in view, save the Statue of Liberty holding its light aloft in the harbor. No departure from the shores of the home-land could have been less cheering and romantic. But as the great ship made her way out to sea, there was a peculiar satisfaction in the feeling that came over us, that we were actually on our way to Burma. Some time before sailing, it had been decided that we would go there, making headquarters at Rangoon, the capital of that province of the Indian Empire.

Our voyage across the Atlantic was uneventful for the most part, but not uninteresting. On a great ship one has a good opportunity to study his fellow-passengers. One among our company has since become an international character, and even then had become widely known. This personage was none other than Paul Kruger, President, then and since, of the Transvaal Republic. We then thought of Majuba Hill and its consequences, but could not foresee that this son of the African velt would, before ten years had passed, throw so large a part of the world into turmoil and lead in a great war. I was impressed with his strong leonine features, and the less heroic fact that he was one of the first among the passengers to yield to the power of a rough sea.

Four days out we ran into a great storm that lasted nearly two days. Up to that time we were making a quick passage, but the wind and waves soon destroyed all hopes of making a high record. The storm was worst at midnight, and as we were being rolled until it was hardly possible to remain in our berths, the ammonia pipes broke and flooded the lower cabins with gas. Our cabin was located near that part of the ship where the trouble occurred, but no one was seriously injured. A similar thing recently happened on the same ship in a storm on the Atlantic, and again the suffocating gas spread through the ship with one fatality and a number of prostrations.

Landing at Liverpool, we went to London for ten days, returning to the former place to take the first ship direct for Rangoon. There are two general routes from English ports to points in India. By one you travel across the continent, and usually take ship at some Mediterranean port, and sail to Bombay. By the other you sail via Gibraltar, and so go by sea all the way. Our route was the latter course, and at the time we went out there was only one line of steamers, the Patrick Henderson, direct from English ports to Rangoon. We took passage on a new vessel, the steamship Pegu, making its third voyage. “What a strange name for a ship!” we said. We soon learned that the name was taken from an old, ruined city of Burma, and that all the company’s steamers bear the name of some city, ancient or modern, in the land of Burma. So, at the very docks, as we started Eastward, we met a name suggestive of the ancient history of the land of our future labors. In the appointments of the steamer we were much impressed with the fact that we had no arrangement for heating the vessel, but every plan for thorough ventilation. We found it very cold on board until we passed the Suez Canal. Otherwise the appointments were every way satisfactory, and the fare reasonable.

This good ship made but one voyage more under its Scotch ownership. It was then sold to the Spaniards and renamed the Alicante. This circumstance became of much interest to us at a later date, when this ship was the first to be loaded with defeated Spanish troops at Santiago.

The outward voyage had its many objects of interest to the passengers going out for the first time. We sailed in plain view of the Portuguese and Spanish coasts, but were disappointed in passing Gibraltar at night. The next day, however, we were charmed with a magnificent view of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Southern Spain, as they lifted their snowy heights into cloudless skies, and their vineclad slopes dropped away to the level of the sea. For nearly a whole day we sailed close by the picturesque shores of Sardinia. Here we noted a singular confusion of the compass by reason of being magnetized by the land. As the good ship swung off from the southern cape of the island, it made two great curves to correct the erratic state of the compass. We entered the harbor of Naples in the full floodlight of a Mediterranean noon. The afternoon was spent in the city. Our party was not favorably impressed with the gay people in their holiday attire. It seems they have many holidays of the like kind. In the evening we sailed southward; and as darkness closed around us, distant Vesuvius sent its fiery glow upward on the black mass of overhanging cloud, making a lurid night scene. In the morning we woke in plain view of the great volcanic cone of Stromboli, rising out of the sea. We were near the island, which seems to have no land except the volcano itself; yet houses nestle here and there around its base. What a choice for a home—at the base of an actual volcano! The weather was perfect as we sailed through the Straits of Messina, but great Mount Ætna, which we hoped to see, was hid in clouds.

The second stop in our journey was at Port Said. The Suez Canal is the gateway of the nations. Port Said is its northern entrance. It is under international control, and hence its government is less responsible than that of almost any other city. It is one of the most wicked cities of the world. Representatives of all races are congregated there. It is not our purpose to describe this city, but to point out that here for the first time we had a glimpse of the Orient. The fellaheen of Egypt loaded our ship with coal, carrying great baskets on their heads. We arrived in the night, and the coaling began almost immediately. My wife and I got out of our cabin before day to go on deck and see these people at work by the light of torches. A strange, weird sight it was to Western eyes; and their shouting in strange tongues emphasized the fact that we had indeed come to a strange land.

The Suez Canal is the natural dividing-line between the Western and the Eastern civilizations, between the cold Northlands and the perpetually tropical countries of Southern Asia. Looking westward and northward, you find energy put to practical account; looking eastward, you find lethargy and life no more aggressive that it must be to keep peoples as they have been for a thousand years. Westward you greet progress, but Eastward life has been stagnated for ages, and only stirs as it is acted upon from the West. Westward you have an increasing degree of prosperity and material comforts and advantages of modern civilization, but Eastward you have such poverty among the millions as can not be conceived by people more favored. Westward you have civilizations never content with present attainment; but Eastward you have peoples whose highest ideals are only to be and to do what their fathers were and did before them. The West seeks to produce new things, but the East condemns all improvement for no other reason than that it is new. All this, and much more, is suggested by the Suez Canal, from which you plunge downward into Asiatic civilization. Climatically you are henceforth to know only the tropics, a climate, so far as Southern Asia is concerned, that you will come to know henceforth as dividing the year into two seasons, “Three months very hot, and nine months very much hotter.” At Port Said you will be informed of the change that is just ahead of you. Whatever you may have bought in New York or London, you will need one more article of dress at Port Said—a helmet, to protect your head from the tropical sun. You will never see a day in Southern Asia in which you can go forth in the noonday sun with an ordinary hat, or without a helmet, except at your peril; and most of the time you will wear that protection for your head from early morning until five in the evening, or later. You will have another indication that you are going down into the tropics. If you have made your journey, as we did, in the colder months, the sunniest place on the deck has been the most comfortable until you arrive at Port Said; but there they raise double canvas over the whole ship, and from that on, as long as you go to and fro in the tropical seas, you will never travel a league by sea that you do not have that same double canvas above you when the sun is in the heavens. No wonder the Suez Canal means so much besides commerce or travel to all who have passed through it to Southern Asia!

Through the fifteen hundred miles of the Red Sea we took our way. Then the Gulf of Aden was traversed, and next through the Arabian Sea our good ship bore us on our journey. The heat, like very hot summer at home, was upon us, though we were out at sea in December. Coming on deck one morning before other passengers were astir, I was delighted to see the green hills of Ceylon a few miles to our left. We had rounded the island in the night. The decks had been scrubbed in the early morning, as usual; the ocean was smooth, and the tropical sun flooded sea and land, while the sweetest odor of spices filled the air. At once I thought of “Ceylon’s spicy breezes,” but I suddenly noted that the wind was toward the shore, which lay some miles away, and then I was prepared for the sentiment of the chief steward who had sprinkled spices out of the ship stores over the wet deck to please the passengers’ sense of smell as they came forth to give their morning greetings to this emerald isle of the Indian Ocean. In rounding Ceylon we reached our lowest latitude, six degrees north. We were still six days’ sail from Burma, and our course took us nearly northeast from this point. The entire voyage from the Suez Canal to Burma was made under cloudless skies and through calm waters. A day from Rangoon we passed near the beautiful little Cocoa Islands, while the Andamans showed above the horizon far to the southward. It is remarkable how much interest there is among passengers when a ship is sighted, or land appears on a long voyage. These Cocoa Islands are important as being guides to vessels homeward or outward bound, and they mark the line between the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Martahan. An important lighthouse has been maintained there for the past fifty years. The Andamans are shrouded in gloomy mystery, due to the fact that they are used as a penal colony of criminals transported from India. On the 31st of December, 1890, after passing several light-ships, we came, about noon, in sight of the low-lying shores of Burma. We had been thirty-five days from Liverpool, and were getting weary of the sea, to say nothing of our curiosity to land in a country new to us. But no land could be less interesting than this shore-line of Burma, first sighted on coming in from the sea. It lies just above the sea-level, and besides a fringe of very small shrubbery, and here and there a cocoanut palm-tree, it is absolutely expressionless. After lying at anchor for three hours at the mouth of the Rangoon River, waiting for the incoming tide, we began the last twenty miles of our journey up the broad river to the city of Rangoon.

The passengers were made up mostly of people who were returning to Burma after a furlough in England. The anticipation of friendly greetings and the appearance of every familiar object along the river created a quiver of pleasant excitement among them. Our missionary party were almost the only ones who had not special friends in Rangoon to meet them.

Sway Dagon Pagoda

Presently all eyes were turned up the river as the second officer called out, “There is the Great Pagoda.” Yes, this, the greatest shrine of the Buddhist world, rising from a little hilltop just behind the main part of the city of Rangoon, lifted its gilded and glistening form hundreds of feet skyward. This is the first object of special importance that is looked for by every traveler going up the Rangoon River. It is seen before any public building comes into view. But presently the smoke from the great chimneys of the large rice mills of Rangoon appeared, and then the city was outlined along a river frontage of two or three miles. The city has no special attractions, as viewed from the harbor; but the whole river presents an animated scene, always interesting even to any one familiar with it, but full of startling surprises to the newcomer to the East. With the single exception of Port Said, our missionary party had seen nothing of Oriental life. The panoramic view of that river and shore life seen on that last day of 1890 will remain a lifetime in the minds of our party. Steamers of many nations and sailing-vessels under a score of flags, native crafts of every description, steam launches by the dozen, and half a thousand small native boats of a Chinese pattern, called “sampans,” moved swiftly about the river, while two or three thousand people crowded the landing and the river front. It is possible that half a hundred nationalities were represented in that throng, but to us strangers there were only two distinctions to be made out clearly: a few men and women with fair skins, and the remainder of the multitude men of darker hue. “Europeans and natives” is the general distinction used in all India.

Some incidents at such moments in our lives, as our landing in this strange country, make profound impressions far above their actual importance. It was just six o’clock in the evening as we made fast to the wharf. Suddenly, as I faced the new world life of labor just before me, and began to contrast it with that of the past, I remembered that just eleven years before, on that day and at that hour, allowing for difference of latitude, I stepped off the cars in a college town, and parted with my old life as a farmer boy for the new life of a college student. A great change that proved to be, and this was destined to prove even more in contrast with life hitherto. The curious circumstance was that the two transitions corresponded by the year and hour.

I awoke suddenly to the fact of great loneliness. There were multitudes of people, but in the whole company not a familiar face. There were some whose names we had heard, and they were ready to give us a cordial welcome as fellow-workers, but we did not know them from all the others in the throng in whose thoughts we had no place. For myself, I have never had a more lonely moment, even when unattended in the Burma jungles or lost on the mountains at night.

Another incident, of a painful kind, occurred. As I stood beside the ship’s doctor, who had been coming and going to India for thirty years, he volunteered information of the people who were boarding the ship to greet expected friends. One young lady passenger was greeted by her sister, whose husband stood by her side. She was a fair English lady; he was a tall, well-proportioned man of good features, but he was very dark. The doctor said: “That young lady is destined to a great disappointment. Her sister is married to a Eurasian, and she, as an English girl, will have no social recognition among English people here because she has that Eurasian relationship.” To my inquiries of interest, he said many things about these people, in whose veins flow the blood of European and Asiatic, concluding with the following slander on these people, “They inherit the vices of both Europeans and Asiatics and the virtues of neither.” I refer to this expression here to show how such unjust expressions fall from careless tongues; for I have heard it scores of times, breathing out unkind, even cruel injustice. It is a slander that is not often rebuked with the energy its injustice calls for. As I will discuss this people in another chapter, I only say here that for ten years I have been connected with them, and while they have their weaknesses, this charge against them is entirely groundless.

We were presently greeted by the small band of Methodist missionaries and some of their friends, and taken immediately to our Girls’ School in the heart of the town. Here we rested in easy-chairs of an uncouth pattern, but which we have hundreds of times since had occasion to prove capable of affording great comfort. While resting and making the acquaintance of Miss Scott, our hostess, an agent of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, I was impressed with several features of our new surroundings. Though it was New-Year’s Eve, the whole house was wide open, and three sides of the sitting-room had open venetian blinds instead of walls, to let in the air.

Then we were quickly conscious of the noise, mostly of human voices, speaking or shouting strange speech in every direction, which the wooden open-plank house caught up much as a violin does its sound, and multiplied without transferring them into music. We came, by later painful experiences, to know that one of the enemies of nerves and the working force of the missionary in Rangoon is the ceaseless noise from human throats that seems inseparable from this Oriental city. I have been in some other noisy cities, but, as Bishop Thoburn once remarked, our location in Rangoon was “the noisiest place in the world.” Before these thoughts had taken full possession of our minds, we were greeted by another surprise. As we leaned back in the easy-chairs and our eyes sought the high ceiling of the room, there we saw small lizards moving about, sometimes indeed stationary, but more often running or making quick leaps as they caught sluggish beetles or unsuspecting flies from the ceiling. We counted nine of them in plain view, seemingly enjoying themselves, unmindful of the presence of the residents of the building or the nerves or tastes of the new arrivals.

A watch-night service was held that night intended for sailors and soldiers especially, to which I went, while my wife remained and rested at the school with our children. At the service I saw for the first time what is so common in all like gatherings in Eastern cities, the strange mingling of all people who speak the English language. Being a seaport, the sailors from every European land were present, and, so far as they can be secured, attend this wholesome service, while the soldiers from the garrison come in crowds, and others interested in these meetings are there also. Every shade of Eurasians was present. Some of the people whom I saw that night for the first time became my friends and co-laborers in the Church and mission for the entire time of which I write. Late that night, or in the earliest hour of the new year, I fell asleep with my latest conscious thought, “We are in Burma.”

CHAPTER II
First Year in Burma

We were wakened early on January 1, 1891, by the harsh cawing of a myriad of crows, which roost in the shade-trees of the public streets and private yards. We came afterwards to know these annoying pests, that swarm over Rangoon all day long, as a tribe of thieves full of all cunning and audacity. The first exhibition of their pilfering given us, was that first morning when the early tea and toast, always brought to you on rising in India, was passed into our room and placed in reach of the children. The crows had been perched on the window-sill before this, restlessly watching us within the room. But on our turning for a moment from the tray on which the toast was placed, the crows swooped upon it, and carried it off out of the window. This is but a sample of the audacious annoyance suffered from their beaks and claws continually. They are in country places also, but not so plentifully as here in the cities, where they literally swarm. Were it to our purpose we could write pages of these petty and cunning robberies of which they are guilty. A very common sight is, when a coolie is going through the streets with a basket of rice on his head, to see the crows swoop down and fill their mouths with the rice, and be off again before the man knows their intention, or has time even to turn around. It must have been some such sight as this in ancient Egypt, familiar to Pharaoh’s baker, that caused him to dream of the birds eating the bread out of the basket that he carried on his head, and that foreshadowed the dire results to himself. Those “birds” must have been “crows” of the Rangoon species.

I could not wait long that first morning in Rangoon, and the first of a new year, to get out into the streets astir with human life. I took my first impression of many specimens of humanity that passed in view. While the common distinctions in dress, complexion, manners, and occupations, which mean so much when you come to know their significance, were not recognized in this first view of the people, I did get a very definite impression of two classes—one well formed and well fed, and the other class, those poor weaklings, mostly of the depressed peoples of India, who migrate to Burma. Of the latter, I wrote at the time to friends in America, that they were specimens of the human race that had about run their course, and must die away from sheer weakness. Later conclusions do not differ materially from this first decision. But I did learn later that the fine-looking people of strong physique were Burmese, and that the province of Burma, generally, has very few peoples of any race that compare in feebleness with some of the immigrants from India that flock into the cities, such as Rangoon. It is chiefly what the traveler sees in coast towns like Rangoon, which leads so many transient passers-by to wrong conclusions concerning Oriental countries. In Rangoon, many other peoples are more in evidence than the Burmese.

After that early walk and breakfast, which came about ten o’clock, the usual time, I met with Rev. Mr. Warner, and took in charge the affairs of our mission. It is a simple thing for a preacher to go from one pastoral charge to another in America, in every respect very much like the Church and community he has always served; but it is entirely different to go to a distant and unfamiliar country, and take up work essentially different from anything you ever had to do with before. Then, at home it is the custom for each man to be occupied with some one specific work and its obligations; but on the mission-field, such as Burma has been until now, there is such a variety of interests as loads every missionary with the work that ought to be distributed between two or three. That morning I learned that we had an English Church in Rangoon which supported its own pastor; an English school that numbered nearly two hundred pupils, and an Orphanage for the poor Eurasians and Anglo-Indian children. There was also a work among the seamen that visited the port. A woman’s workshop had been founded some time before for helping the poor Eurasian, and other women, to earn a living with the needle. There was also preaching going on among the Tamils and Telegus, some converts and a fair day-school being conducted among them. This work was mostly in Rangoon; but some preaching was done in the villages round about, and one exhorter was holding a little congregation of Tamils at Toungoo, one hundred and sixty miles north from Rangoon. A further account of Methodism will be given later, and it is only necessary here to tell how the work appeared to me that morning when I began my labors in Burma.

Methodist Church, Rangoon

We had a modest wooden church and also a parsonage, a fair-sized building for the school, and another of equal size for the Orphanage. Besides these buildings, we had a couple of residence bungalows, intended for rental for the support of the Orphanage, but for which we were badly in debt. Considering the small size of the mission, our debts were large and troublesome. They were incurred out of the emergencies of our work, and were not the result of bad management in any way. These debts were to be met at once, and added much to my concern for the mission.

Another embarrassing feature of the finances of the mission was found in this, that we had very small missionary appropriations, and the time had been not long before when our workers in Burma had no money from home. The beginning of the mission had been made entirely without funds from America.

This was the more apparent when we look at the distribution of the missionaries. I was to take the pastorate of the English Church, and receive my salary from it; Miss Files, the principal of the Girls’ High School, had never had any salary, except what the school could pay her; Miss Scott, principal of the Orphanage, had half salary; Miss Perkins, the new missionary, alone had a salary from the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society. Mr. Warner had less than full salary, though appointed to native work. We had, also, a number of teachers all paid locally, and supplies in the mission-work, none of whom received a salary from America. Here was an outline of a situation in what was called a “self-supporting” mission-field. How to pay debts, keep all this work going, and make advance in mission operations with our limited money, was my greatest responsibility. There had never been a dollar given to the mission from America for property. The problem was easy of statement, but difficult of solution. To plunge right into this work, my first day in the country, and immediately become the responsible head of the district, was beginning mission-work with vigor and without delay. I have learned since to believe it a serious misfortune that any missionary should be so overwhelmed with work and responsibility on entering a foreign mission-field. All this, too, when we had yet to adjust ourselves to life in the tropics.

We were about to prove what it meant to be suddenly dropped down into the heart of an Oriental city, and there adjust ourselves to the most trying conditions we had ever known. The parsonage belonging to the English Church, which we occupied, shared the lot with the church building. At the time the church and parsonage was to be built, it was the policy of the Government to give a grant of land to any religious society for a church or parsonage. The city is blocked out in rectangular shape, but unwisely made very narrow and long. The blocks are eight hundred feet long by one hundred and fifteen feet wide. Our lot included one end of a block, and was one hundred feet deep. On this lot stood the church and parsonage, facing the main street. When the location was chosen, it was a fairly satisfactory site on which to have a residence, and in a Western country, with Western conditions, it might have contained a fairly comfortable residence; but in Rangoon the natives soon began to crowd into poorly constructed buildings all around the parsonage, and the filth, that so rapidly accumulates in an Oriental city, piled up everywhere. The only sewerage was in open ditches that ran on three sides of our residence. The stench of these sewers was ever present in our nostrils, and especially offensive in the rainless season. But the worst condition was the incessant noise made by the natives. This neighborhood was occupied almost entirely by Madassis, who have harsh, strident voices, and speak with a succession of guttural sounds. They are always shouting, and quietness is almost unknown to them. They quarrel incessantly. At the time we lived in this locality there were six hundred of these noisy people living within a hundred yards of the parsonage. They kept no hours for rest. All day and all night the noise went on. Sometimes, of course, they slept, and the native can sleep in bedlam and not even dream. But there are hundreds astir at all hours of the day and night. Then there were thousands of passers-by who at all hours added their voices to the din. Besides, a heavy traffic was carried on on two sides of us. The streets were metaled, and every wheel and hoof added to the uproar.

The parsonage was of the uncouth architectural plan characteristic of Burma, roomy and arranged well enough for comfort in that country, had the surroundings been endurable. But being placed upon posts, some ten feet from the ground to the first floor, and the floor and walls being made of single thicknesses of teak planks, these multitudinous sounds of the neighborhood were gathered up and multiplied as a violin gathers the sounds of the strings, and this discordant din was poured into our ears. Added to all this noise was the intense heat, which even in the coolest part of the year is very great, and you have conditions of life that tax you to the utmost. My wife and I have pretty steady nerves; but in the thirteen months we tried to live in the parsonage we did not have more than twenty nights of unbroken sleep. Just after we entered this residence, we received our first mail from home, and in the papers to hand we read the speech of the senior missionary secretary at the Missionary Committee meeting in Boston, held at the time we were sailing from New York, in which he dwelt at length, “on the luxury of missionary life in India.” I promptly sent him an invitation to spend the last week preceding the next Missionary Committee meeting in our guest-chamber, overlooking and overhearing all that happens among this noisy throng of Tamils. I felt that I had learned more of the actual conditions of life in an Oriental city in one week, than this good man had learned in all the years of his missionary official life. He did not accept the invitation.

Natives of Burma

When one is overworked with unusual duties that tax nerves to the utmost, and then lives in perpetual noise and heat day and night, he has the ideal conditions for a short missionary career. We were to prove all that this meant within one year from landing in the country.

Surprises and disappointments in the working force of a mission, at least in its earlier and less well organized state, occur with great frequency. Within less than three months, my missionary colleague, Mr. Warner, and his wife left us, and took work in another mission. He had been with our mission less than two years, having been sent out from America. It may be said here that such changes, so early in a missionary’s career, do not generally argue well for the stability of purpose or settled convictions of the missionary, and do not usually help the mission to which a change is made. But in our case it added to our difficulties, as the Burmese work, to begin which Mr. Warner was appointed, did not get started for some years afterward. There was no other man to take up his work, and there could be no one supplied for some time. This situation, coming so soon after I took up the work with the high hopes of a new beginner, added to the complications.

The heat increased from January onward. The work became very laborious, largely owing to failure to get rest at night. In May, I began to be troubled with a strange numbness in my arms. This gradually spread to most of the muscles of the body, and began to affect my head seriously. At the same time, the heat, especially any direct ray of the sun, caused very distressing nervous symptoms. Having all my life worked hard, and having a body that had stood almost all kinds of strain and seemed none the worse for it, I at the beginning expected to throw off these symptoms quickly. But when I did not succeed in this, I consulted physicians and found that they were puzzled as much as myself. Had it been possible to go to some cooler place and take rest at the beginning of this disorder, it is likely that I could have met the difficulty and overcome it quickly; but there was no chance to leave the work, no place to go to, and no one to relieve me. Steadily for five months the trouble increased, until it was impossible even to read in an attentive way, though under the excitement of a Sabbath’s congregation I could talk to the people. In October, only a little over nine months after landing in Burma, Bishop Thoburn peremptorily ordered me to the hills of India for a change. He temporarily supplied my place at Rangoon.

I left Rangoon on the evening of the 10th of October on this painful flight for health. My wife remained and did hard service, all too hard as the case proved, to give the English congregations attention during my absence. This early flight from my work with the uncertainties of my ailment, and the long distance to the Indian Hills, which as we supposed at the time, was the nearest place to get above the heat of the plains, and the condition of the work in my absence, and the added burden to my wife, all combined to give the occasion a serious aspect.

I took passage on a little vessel of the British India Steam Navigation Company, which has a large fleet of steamers in these tropical waters. I traveled after this many times on steamers of this company, and always found the trip of four days to Calcutta very interesting. The sea breeze modifies the heat until you can be in comparative comfort. The officers are usually courteous, but somewhat reserved, for the most part. Perhaps this show of dignity is assumed to support the important office they hold. It may be that it is a National characteristic also. The engineers, who number about the same on each ship as the officers, and have about as much responsibility, and are equally capable men, are usually very free and sociable. The officers are generally Englishmen, and the engineers Scotchmen. I have been greatly surprised to find how approachable most Scotchmen are. Being of a social disposition myself, I usually get in touch with both classes; but I have secured the most friendly response from the Scotch. This has been generally true on land also.

The Bay of Bengal is a stormy water during the monsoon, from May until October. At the latter time the wind turns into the northeast, and one or two cyclones generally form as it turns the rain currents back to the southwest, from whence they came. Our captain was nervous as we rounded the land and made for the open sea, lest we be met by a cyclone. But instead of a storm, the sea was as smooth as a sea of glass all the way to the mouth of the Hoogli River, where we enter the last portion of our voyage. It may not have been noticed that many great seaports are really a great way from the sea, on rivers. More than that, they are usually not on the main stream, but on some subordinate branch of the many mouths of the great rivers. So it is with the Hoogli, which is not the largest of the many mouths of the Ganges. These river mouths, however, are very large streams, partly made by the inflow and outflow of the tides. The tides alone make navigation to Calcutta by ocean-going vessels possible, as there is not enough water on the shoals except with high tide. Calcutta is up the Hoogli River one hundred and twenty miles. One naturally wonders why such a city is so far from the sea. I, at least, have had to content myself without a reason, and like many things Indian, accept that “which is,” and that “which remains as it is,” because it “has been.” The approach to Calcutta by river is very dangerous. The number of ships that have sunk, often with some of the passengers and crew, make a startling history of tragedy. Some places on the river have permanent names for the sunken ships that are buried in its sands. The currents and the tides conflict often, and drive the vessel onto some newly-made bar, and this overturns the great ship, which immediately begins to sink. Three ships have gone down in this river in ten years, one of them with much loss of life. After the vessel sinks well into the sand it rights up again, and lifts its masts out of the water, to remain for years a solemn monument to the tragedy of the river. Usually all life-boats are swung loose and the ports all closed as the ship moves up or down the river at these most dangerous parts. There are specially-qualified pilots, highly paid, who take ships through this river, and they are held to the severest account. An accident, whether the pilot is to blame or not, calls for heavy penalties.

The river has its charming scenery. The country is flat; but the quaint conical Bengali houses that line the shore, with their carefully-laid thatch roofs, the cocoanut and date palms growing in great luxuriance on the alluvial deposit of the river front, and the wide reaches of the rich rice-fields, through which the winding river makes its way, all present a picture of rare tropical interest and beauty.

Villages increase as you approach the city, and great oil refineries and weaving establishments and manufactories increase as you near the city. Some miles below the city the traveler begins to see a great many ships, both sailing vessels and steamers, and as he enters the harbor it is amidst a very forest of towering masts. The shipping that goes in and out of Calcutta, carrying every flag under heaven, is enormous.

I was greatly interested in seeing for the first time this most important city in Southern Asia, if not in all the Orient. My stay was too brief to get a fair view of the city, but enough to see that it is as reported, “a city of palaces.” It is also a “city of hovels,” in which multitudes of people do business and live in as great contrast to the palatial surroundings, as can be found anywhere on the face of the earth.

After a very brief visit with Bishop Thoburn and other Calcutta missionaries, I made my way up country. This took me over the fertile plains of Bengal, through the sacred city of Benares, though without a stop until I reached Lucknow. Here I had a short rest, and then proceeded to Bareilly and was the guest for a day of Dr. and Mrs. Scott, and visited our theological school. In this visit I began an acquaintance with our missionaries and our mission interests in these great centers, which has extended through the years with great profit to myself, and an enlargement of view of our Southern Asiatic missions, that I could not have otherwise had. The heat of North India is much modified by October; but as I was making for the mountains, with a feverish desire to get where it was cool, I pushed on rapidly. The railway journey ended at Katgodam, from whence I was to take a pony and go by marches to Almora, the capital of Garwal, four ordinary days’ travel into the hills. All over the Indian Empire the Government has built on every road public rest-houses, where the traveler can get shelter, and usually food, at a very reasonable price. I had only the afternoon to climb the eight miles to Bhim Tal, my first stage of the journey. I traveled with light equipment; but in all parts of India one must carry his bedding with him, even if he is going to an Annual Conference. “Entertainment” among friends means many good things, but seldom includes bedding, much less so among strangers. I secured a pony to ride; but when it came to the bedding I had to hire a coolie to carry that. I had great difficulty in getting a coolie to go four days’ march back into the mountains. I could not speak a word of the language, and this was a hindrance. I found a friendly native who could talk for me. I secured a strong man for four cents a day. This was an enhanced price exacted because I was a stranger.

I went steadily up the mountains, and with every degree of cooler air I felt cheered. At last at beautiful Bhim Tal, a lake at an elevation of perhaps five thousand feet, I came to the bungalow and had a good supper. Bedtime came, and still the coolie did not come. I had to borrow some blankets of a native and lay down, but not to sleep, as any one accustomed to the country could have foretold. My coolie did not arrive until sunrise.

During that day I had a view of the majestic mountains, that lives with me still. At about ten o’clock in the morning, after an inspiring climb up and still up, I came to the mountain pass, and turning a corner, the great snowy range of the Himalaya Mountains rose into a cloudless sky. The sunlight was reflected from the snow up into the blue heavens. Sublime are these mountains! Three peaks near together range between twenty-two thousand and twenty-five thousand feet, while the snowy range is visible for hundreds of miles. It was a great experience. Having never been among the mountains until that journey, and then to have eyes, mountain hungry, feast of these piles of majestic heights, thrilled me as no view of nature ever has done. I have seen many beauties of natural scenery, and some of nature’s sublimity, but never have I seen the equal of that view that burst on my enraptured vision that glorious October day.

Making a double march the third day, I arrived at the Almora Sanitarium of the Methodist Mission, and was welcomed by Dr. and Mrs. Badley, who were there, the last of those who had gone up for rest that year. The doctor was fast breathing out his life. He was dying of consumption, but working until the last. He was busy revising his Indian Mission Directory. His voice was gone to a whisper, and yet he worked. I helped him as I could, and looked into his face and tried to realize the thoughts of a man who loves work, and in the midst of a most successful career he is cut down, and knows in every moment of waking thought that he can live but a few days. Ten days I staid there, and then came down the mountain road to Katgodam. On this journey I did my last service for the sick and dying man. At Katgodam I carried him in my arms and laid him on his bed in the car. The gentle caress from his wasted hand, and his whispered blessing for the help I had been to him on the hard journey, linger as a precious memory. He died three weeks later.

From Katgodam I returned to the hills, but this time only to Naini Tal, one day’s march up the mountains. In this wonderful hill station I remained ten days, the guest of Rev. and Mrs. Homer Stuntz. November had come, and by this season it was getting cool in these mountains, frosting some at night. I here received a great encouragement in the matter of health, as I found while living in this cool atmosphere that my head began to clear up, and that I could read with pleasure again. Had I been able to remain there, it is possible that I would have made a rapid recovery; but duty seemed to call me again to Rangoon. Dr. George Petecost was then engaged in a series of “missions” in India, and I had secured the agreement of several Rangoon ministers and missionaries to invite him to hold a mission in Rangoon. He was due there in December, and it was nearing the end of November; and as I felt better, and as I was obligated to be in Rangoon, and as the worst heat of the latter place had gone, I hoped to continue to improve, even if I returned. But I was quickly undeceived. No sooner was I in the plains than all the distressing symptoms again appeared. This condition was relieved a little when I crossed the Bay of Bengal, but increased on landing in Rangoon. Meantime, my wife had broken down under the strain of her work, and was seriously ill. So ended our first year in Burma—much hard work, trying conditions, and breaking health. Had this been all the outlook, it would have been disappointing indeed. But the people of Rangoon had been responsive and kind. The work in the English Church had gone forward and some conversions had resulted, which had been of permanent worth to the Church. The lady missionaries had completed a successful year in the school and Orphanage. The other branches of the mission were faithfully cared for, so far as the limited supervision given would warrant.

At this time, and indeed for the whole period of which I write, Burma had been a district of the Bengal Conference, and as the sessions of Conference were held almost uniformly in Calcutta or some Indian station, we Burma missionaries usually made the trip to India to attend the annual session. This took me, including health trips, thirty times over the Bay of Bengal in the ten years of my missionary service. The Indian Conferences have for many years been held as near the beginning of the new year as may be. I left my wife very sick, and started for Conference about the middle of January, being far from well myself, but still at work. The Annual Conference was of great interest, and the Central Conference, which followed immediately, even more so. I was a member of the Central Conference also. The Central Conference of India and Malaysia had been well organized for several years. This body, to all intents and purposes, is a General Conference. It is an increasing power for good. It must exist to keep Methodism in this wide area in some organic unity. It has served this purpose admirably. At this session of the Central Conference, held at Calcutta, in January, 1892, two great questions had a clearly-defined statement that has become of wide-reaching importance.

The question of territorial divisions came up early, and had the right of way for full discussion and settlement. Our people at home can not understand the great areas, as well as the many millions of people in Southern Asiatic mission lands. It is all so much bigger than the notion given by a map. At the time of which I write we had three Conferences and the far-away mission of Malaysia. The most extensive area was included in the Bengal Conference. One end of this Conference included the province of Burma, and the other end reached up to and included almost all the Northwest Indian part of our mission. Thus it curved all around the southern and western sides of the North India Conference, as far as Mussoorie. In length it could not be less than two thousand miles. South India Conference included territory equally incongruous with its name. It became apparent that we must divide up this territory, and make more Conferences. We planned five Annual Conferences, and raised Malaysia to a Mission Conference.

The other great question that had the earnest consideration of the Central Conference was the indorsement of the Missionary Episcopacy. Some of the Annual Conferences had already taken action, and the Central Conference approved the resolutions of the Bengal Conference indorsing and approving the Missionary Episcopacy, and asking its continuance as contrasted with the General Superintendency. Bishop Thoburn’s administration received, after careful debate, the first of that series of indorsements that has lifted the Missionary Episcopacy into a new and conspicuous place in the organism called Methodism.

These two transactions made that, my first, Central Conference of India and Malaysia, memorable.

CHAPTER III
A Year of Changes

While still at Conference at Calcutta, I received a telegram to hasten home, as my wife was seriously ill. Some of the brethren and I spent a season in sympathetic counsel over this distressing situation of my own impaired health, and the serious condition of my wife. I took a steamer the next day, and started for Rangoon. Of course, we wished for a rapid passage; but as often happens when we are eager for the most rapid advance, there proves to be the greatest delay. We were delayed in the Calcutta River forty-eight hours, owing to fogs settling down on the water just as the tide was favorable for sailing. We had to tie up for such time as the fog lasted, as no steamer will move on that dangerous river in a fog. When the fog did lift, the tide had gone down, and we had to remain at anchor till the next tide. In all my journeying up and down the river, I have never had so much delay as on this voyage, when I wanted to get forward the most urgently. The journey across the bay was after the usual sort. I felt much distressed about my wife’s state, but had great comfort in the sympathy and counsel of Dr. and Mrs. Parker, who were fellow-passengers going home on furlough. They were going via Rangoon, and it proved a kindly providence as they did good service in advising us in our time of need.

As our ship approached the Rangoon River, we were again just too late for the incoming tide, causing another long delay. So near home, and yet we had to lie there for twelve hours! When we finally arrived in the Rangoon Harbor, it was after the longest voyage that I have known upon the bay. But I was immensely relieved to find that my wife was slightly better. This was offset somewhat by the fact that I was certainly in a much less satisfactory condition than I had been for some weeks preceding. It was now early in February, and the heat was becoming severe. As the heat was, or appeared to be, my greatest drawback, and would hinder the recovery of my wife, it was decided that the only solution of the difficulty was to make another flight to the Indian Hills immediately for a long rest. This time the whole family was to go. Here also Dr. Parker’s presence and counsel were of great value. He knew India, having had long experience and the best judgment, so we felt safe in following his advice. He had selected two of the Indian hill sanitariums, and knew that that kind of a retreat was my only hope. But he, and every one else at this time, supposed that my work in Burma was ended. It was decided to ask for some one from home to relieve me as soon as possible.

But there was the immediate difficulty of looking after the work, and especially the English congregation. The Conference that had closed so recently had appointed a young man, J. T. Robertson, to be my assistant in the Rangoon English Church, so that I could give more time to the affairs of the district. He was only a probationer in the Conference, having been admitted to Conference at its recent session, and he had had no experience as a pastor. More, he had come to a strange city; but, as the case often is in our mission work, we had to take all the risks to the work and to the man, and appoint him to the untried responsibility of the pastorate of the English Church. That he would have run away if he could have gotten out of the province he has often declared; but this being impossible, he went to work with a will, and for the next five months did very acceptable service as pastor.

Such adjustment of mission work was made as could be in the five days that intervened after my return from Conference and our second departure from Burma. I hoped to aid the workers somewhat by correspondence. The journey across the water began to revive Mrs. Smith, and her condition on arrival at Calcutta was greatly improved. Here we sought the best medical advice. Dr. Coates, a famous Calcutta physician for many years, gave us his counsel. He predicted that Mrs. Smith would continue to improve rapidly, which she did. As for myself, he said that the difficulty was very obscure, and very difficult to deal with. He said that if I went to the hill station of Mussoorie, where we were intending to go, it would be the very best thing I could do. He further predicted that if I did not get better there in four months, I would never get better in India. He stipulated “four months,” as that would take us through the rainless hot season. If this time were spent in Mussoorie, situated as it is at an elevation of seven thousand feet in its cool and bracing air, it would be the best possible place for recuperation. After resting some with friends by the way, we arrived in that hill station on the 13th of March. The snow was still in sight in some lower hills, and the snowy range was seen from afar. The view of “the snows” at Mussoorie is not so commanding as from the regions about Naini Tal, which I had visited four months before. The “station” itself is built on a ridge and its spurs for a distance of six miles or more, and contained at that time some thirty thousand inhabitants. The European residents were made up of retired pensioners of the Indian Government, a large garrison of English troops, and others connected with the several schools for Europeans, and some who engaged in trade. But here, as elsewhere, the great population was made up of the natives. The conditions were as favorable as could be found for rest and recuperation. There was enough sociability to keep off loneliness, and plenty of good reading matter in libraries, and opportunity to roam about the mountains. I lived much in the open air when it did not take me into the direct rays of the sun. Though the atmosphere is almost always cool at this altitude, the sunlight searches one through in the rare atmosphere. It paints the cheeks of every one like a peach, even the dusky faces of the natives are given a flush of red. It is doubtful if even America has much better climatic conditions for regaining health than many of the Indian hills. Could we put the American style of living, and the homelike atmosphere around the sick missionaries in these hills, it is certain that there would be need of less home-going. If missionaries could always retreat to these hills when in a decline before they are too much reduced, they would gain the necessary strength to resume their duties.

I spent the time from March until the middle of June in this station, directing the work off in Burma as best I could by letter. This was difficult from the distance of two thousand miles. During these months I thought of the anomaly of being presiding elder of a district so far away, being also a sick man, and yet so hard pressed were we all, that no other missionary could be spared from any field to take up the work that I would have so gladly laid down. It became apparent that I was not to meet with greatly improved health, even here. Bishop Thoburn was away in America, and while he is one of the most hopeful of men, he gave up all expectations that I would be able to go on in mission work in India. He had actually selected my successor in America. But when the time came to leave home, the brother failed him. As the time wore away, and there was no material improvement in my condition, I only hoped to put the mission interests in Burma in as good order as I might be able, and then to return to America. This was the situation on the 14th day of June. Just then the heat on the plains of India is most terrific, and even the hot air and the dust storms reach such altitudes as Mussoorie. At this time man and beast pant for “rain.” The barren and parched earth seems to cry, “rain!” My letters from Rangoon indicated serious complications in a business way, and there seemed to be a great call to come down and put them to rights. The monsoon had been promised to us; but it had not come, while from the plains the heat rose as from a furnace. Thinking I could only do a little more service for Burma anyway, just to put things to rights for my successor, I concluded to make the plunge into that heat, and to go at once, and return as soon as I could adjust business complications. Here the physician who had my case said: “You dare not go into the plains. In your condition the heat will kill you. You will leave a widowed wife and two orphaned children, and you have no right to commit suicide.” But I still thought it best to risk it for the work’s sake.

I can not forget the awful heat that greeted me all the way to lower Bengal; it was the worst where I first entered the plain. Had I died from the heat at any stage of that journey, I should not have been surprised. But I lived. I crossed the bay again, and did three weeks of the hardest work of my life up to that time in Rangoon. Weary to exhaustion, I hastened to Calcutta on my return to the mountains. As I lay on the hatch on that rough passage, I felt that my days as a missionary were over, and that I had, without a formal good-bye, left Burma forever.

On landing in Calcutta and getting my “land legs” again, I met one of the surprises of my life. I made the glad discovery that I was greatly improved in health! So certain of this did I become, that I told the Calcutta missionaries freely that my days as a missionary were not over. They would gladly have believed me, but were skeptical, and warned me that when I should get back to the hills I would wilt again. They said my apparent improvement was only due to the excitement of the journey, and would soon wear away. But I went further in my conviction, and sent a letter from Calcutta to Bishop Thoburn in America that I was better, and expected to return to Burma, and that the bishop was to strike my name off the invalid list. The improvement continued after my return to the hills, and while I expected a long time to elapse before I would be entirely myself, I never doubted after that thrill of hope in Calcutta that I would become a well man again, and continue my missionary career. It is exceedingly rare that such a radical improvement in health occurs under such an extraordinary, if not indeed perilous, strain as I was under on that trip to Rangoon. My experience in all this has been given in some detail, because it shows how a really desperate case may sometimes turn toward recovery at the unexpected time. Had I returned to America, broken as I was, it would have ended my missionary career. The Church, and ourselves, would have been painfully disappointed, for I had not done what the Church or myself expected, and it would have been taken for granted that I could not possibly stand the tropical climate. As it turned out, I had the honor to continue on the field, bearing heavy burdens for a rather longer period than is usual in the first term of missionary service, and to be permitted to write these records of nearly ten consecutive years in mission work. This breakdown taught us a permanent lesson. No missionary henceforth of our mission should be required to live in the noise, dirt, and heat of the town of Rangoon, as we had to live the first year. We determined to get to the suburbs for quieter and healthier surroundings. At Rangoon this can be easily accomplished. Just out of the town proper, and yet not far distant from our town work, there is a great cantonment, or military quarter, reaching for a mile or more. The location is higher than that of the town. The grounds around residences are usually extensive; but it was difficult to rent a house of any value with the mission money at our command. We secured a tottering old house belonging to a miserly old man, who would not keep it in any sort of repair. It leaned well over to one side, had uneven floors, rickety stairs, and a roof so full of holes that ventilation was perfect. Yet we got on well here during the dry season; but a later experience remains to be given.

From my return to Rangoon both myself and wife plunged into the work of the mission with redoubled efforts, that we were not to slacken for years to come. Mr. Robertson was taken sick with the fever after having stood at his post through the six months of my absence, and his recovery was slow. I had the full pastoral duties, the business of the mission, Government correspondence concerning the schools, and the chaplaincy of the Wesleyan troops, as all our Rangoon pastors have had in their turn. Besides this, I did a great deal of district work, mostly of a pioneering kind. When it is understood that this is the way many of our missionaries are loaded down, it must surprise others, as well as themselves, that they hold out so long under these multiplied labors, not forgetting that it is always under a tropical sun.

Our lives and labors moved on without special incident for all the dry season from October, 1892, to the end of April, 1893, when we entered the monsoon several days earlier than usual. It is here that the reader may have the closing reference to the old house that made up the residence of the official head of the Burma District at this period. As I have already stated, the house did very well as a camping place for the dry season, during which we seldom have any rain at all. But as the time for the annual rains approached, I began to press our miserly landlord to put the roof in order. This he agreed to do, but the agreement he did not keep, and the rains came and caught us unprepared. Bishop Thoburn had just arrived from Singapore on his biennial visit. He had reached our house on the afternoon of the 24th of April. As the afternoon wore away, there began to be signs of rain. The monsoon was not supposed to be due for a week to three weeks yet. However, showers often come lightly before this date. The difference between the light showers and the “bursting of a monsoon” usually is, that the former are light and merely premonitory of the coming rains, while they will be followed by much burning sunshine and increasing heat. The “bursting of the monsoon” usually lasts for days, and has often much of storm with it, which also cools the temperature. Sometimes there is a fall of twenty-five degrees, but not often, and this is not long maintained. But on the evening named rain began to fall very gently, and for an hour or two we were under the impression that it was only a shower; but the rain continued through the night. There was no wind at all, and this led to a most remarkable circumstance, which I do not know of having paralleled, or that it has ever been made a matter of record, though it made a deep impression at the time. All about Rangoon there is a beautiful shade tree called the “padauk.” It has a short, thick trunk and very long, spreading branches. The most remarkable feature of the tree is that it blooms three times within six weeks, a heavy bloom each time, and the third time the bloom bursts simultaneously with the monsoons. Strangely enough, at the end of April, at the time of which I write, there was every indication that the third bloom was about to break forth, though the rains, as stated, were not expected for some time. So accurately does this tree mark the beginning of the actual rains, that a common saying is, “The rains are at hand, the padauk is ready to bloom the third time.” This was the situation as we went to sleep that night, thankful for the refreshing rain, coming so gently also that we did not see the stir of a leaf. After a very refreshing sleep, we were wakened just at daybreak by a great crash, followed almost immediately by another. I hastened to the veranda only to see the great padauk trees in front of the house dripping with water, and at the side of two of them, almost a quarter of each tree, broken and prostrate on the earth, while the sounds of breaking trees came from various directions on other streets. As the light increased, we looked for a reason for the breaking of these great branches. We saw the trees one mass of yellow bloom, and the ground covered with the fallen flowers. The gentle rain was still falling through the motionless air. For a space of three hours after day came the trees continued to break. When the breeze began to blow the breaking ceased. Then we were able to find a cause why these strong trees gave way. During the night the millions of little flowers on the ends of those long branches opened with the rain, and as their cups filled with water, there being no wind to shake the water down, the weight of the water held in these flowers acted on the branches as a great lever and broke them down. A really wonderful natural phenomenon! It has had no repetition since, probably due to the fact that the rain and the blooming have not been absolutely simultaneous, with an absence of wind. As in this case when the breeze started up, the water was shaken down and the breaking ceased. When the flowers had fallen from the trees there could be no more danger; but he who will look for it, can find the scars on the trees still where their great branches were broken by the weight of their own water-laden flowers.

The rain had done havoc in the house also. It had searched out every hole in that perforated roof, and the water was dripping from the ceiling into the middle of the room, and streaming down from the walls. The rain continued for a term of eight days, almost uninterruptedly. Housekeeping was out of the question. We tried to eat at our table, but were driven away by the water and dust swept down from the roof onto the food. There was no help for it. Mrs. Smith’s simple wall decorations of bric-a-brac were all destroyed. We had to live about the other mission premises as best we could during the days that followed. There was a dry spot in the middle of one room where the bishop’s bed stood, and he returned to sleep there each night to keep out of the noise of the town. So it continued for eight days, to the end of the bishop’s visit. I suppose that a bishop of Methodism does not meet with this kind of entertainment often, even in India, much less in America. It takes a good man to endure this sort of experience and keep sweet, especially as he knows the home Church has abundant means to house its missionaries, if it will. And be it remembered that the Church had never given us a dollar for property in Burma at that time in the whole history of the little mission; nor has it yet, except through the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, which has now begun to help with a really strong hand. But the good bishop and I determined to buy residence property, and that on credit, as we had no money. Any conditions of purchase were less risky and less expensive than being so poorly housed, though this plan could not at once be carried out.

Here another painful circumstance occurred. My family had to live in that house for the six months of the rains. Just as they were all suffering with fever, owing to the dampness continually in the house, a missionary paper from home came, in which there was a letter by the same Missionary Secretary who had greeted us with the cry of “the luxury of Indian missionaries” the first week of our life in Rangoon, again declaring that “India was the most sumptuously provided mission-field on earth!” This letter was intended to take the life out of a plea for money to buy residences for our missionaries in India and Burma that Bishop Thoburn had written. I recall this circumstance here, solely to show how little the real conditions under which we have worked in Burma are understood at home, even by those who at times have had the charge of mission interests.

CHAPTER IV
The Physical Features of Burma

It is common to tell of the physical aspects of a country in one of the first chapters of any book that may be written giving the characteristics of any land; but the object of this book is to present, first, a picture of life in Burma, as the writer and his associates experienced it. There is a logical order in taking up the study of the topography, climate, and products of Burma, as they were observed from time to time in residence and travel through that country. That is the way the observations herein recorded came to the writer after he had begun the work and care of a mission in Rangoon and the adjoining regions.

A missionary soon learns to take an interest in all that affects the life of the people among whom he labors. He finds that climate determines the products of a land to a great extent, and these in turn determine the occupations of the people. He must adjust himself to these conditions. He also finds that his plans for a people must take in their present state and their future prospects. These conditions are largely material. The wealth or poverty of a people determines their spirit and possibilities to a great extent.

Americans especially, very few of whom have ever traveled or lived in a tropical country, and who have not studied conditions in the Eastern hemisphere, except in the best-known portion of the Oriental world, have great need of enlargement of their views on Asiatic questions. In nothing is this more evident than on the geography of Southern Asia. While speaking on missions and Asiatic themes at home recently, I have often tried to gauge the ideas of my audience by asking them to guess the length of the Red Sea. I selected this body of water because it is most familiar to all Bible-students. I take the Red Sea because all have heard of it and all have seen it mapped from childhood, instead of the Gulf of Martaban, for instance, which lies off the coast of Burma; for most of my American readers have scarcely heard of the latter body of water. The answers to this question from an audience, especially if it is secured, as it usually has been, on the moment, have been at once amusing and instructive. The guesses as to the length of the Red Sea generally vary from “sixty” to “three hundred” miles, while a few have gone somewhat higher. But only one answer secured in months, and that from a schoolteacher after reflection and mental calculation, has been half the length of that historic body of water. Usually an audience has taken a laugh at the guesser and their own mental estimate when they have been informed that the Red Sea is about fifteen hundred miles long. I have sometimes told the man who guessed “one hundred miles” to multiply all his ideas of the Eastern world by fifteen, and he would come nearer to the reality than he had been hitherto.

It is common to hear at home all the land commonly spoken of as “India” as a land of a sameness of character, in climate, people, language, and products. One province of it, like Burma, is a small section of the country, just like the rest of the land, and chiefly differing from the other portions of “India” in geographical lines. But establish something of the largeness of these complex countries in the mind, and also their diversity of people and physical conditions, and the man so informed is prepared to understand that Burma may be reckoned as a land of considerable importance in itself and worthy of special study.

Burma is a land with an area of seventy thousand square miles. It lies between the Bay of Bengal and Assam on the west, China on the north, and French Indo-China and Siam on the east. It also extends through eighteen degrees of latitude, from ten to twenty-eight north. In shape it is a little like the folded right hand, with index finger only extended southward. Its greatest width is about four hundred miles, while the Tennasserim Coast far to the south is but a narrow strip of land.

The topography of the country is interesting. There are three principal rivers, the Irrawaddy (the greatest), the Salween, and the Sitiang. All these rise in the north, near or beyond the Burmese border, and flow southward. Between these river basins and to the westward of the Irrawaddy there run ranges of hills rising to mountains. They range from small, picturesque hillocks that only serve to divide water-basins to mountains above ten thousand feet in height. The valleys are comparatively narrow, but very fertile. The hills are not simply single crests running parallel with the rivers, but are extensive successions of ranges quite regular, with indications here and there of volcanic action. The strata are very much broken. For this reason the coal-fields of Burma are not of much value, owing to the broken condition of the strata. When one little portion is worked for a distance, the vein is lost, being removed or buried too deep for work.

The Irrawaddy River deserves special mention. It rises somewhere in the heights of Thibet near the headwaters of the Indus and the Ramaputra. It is noteworthy that the three great rivers of Southern Asia rise very near each other and flow to the ocean so far apart. The Irrawaddy breaks through the hills of northern Burma, and descends into the plains, widening and gathering volume till it reaches the sea. It has several navigable river tributaries, of which the Chindwin is chief. Toward the lower end of its course it connects with a network of tidal creeks that unite with its several mouths, one of which is the Rangoon River. This system of internal water-ways makes it possible to traverse all portions of Lower Burma with river steamers of various sizes, from a steam launch to river boats as large and well equipped as those of the Mississippi. The enterprising and prosperous Flotilla Company of Burma has a great fleet of these vessels running on the Irrawaddy and its tributaries, while the many steamers and launches utilize the tidal creeks. This great enterprise has no rival for this river-borne traffic. The amount of business done on the Irrawaddy is enormous. The Salween is navigable for only thirty miles by ocean steamers, and the Sitiang not at all at present, though formerly sailing vessels made ports about its mouth. Steam launches still ply on both these streams and their tributaries. On all these inland waters there are multitudes of native boats, of curious but most serviceable pattern. They never modify these Eastern crafts after any Western design. It is doubtful if modern ships have made much improvement in their water-lines over many Eastern boats, which can be seen in different styles everywhere, from the Red Sea all around the coasts of Southern Asia. They vary greatly in different countries, and have become fixed along certain accepted lines from which they do not depart, but they all seem to be good. Of all Oriental crafts I have seen, none are more picturesque than the Burma river boats.

Paddy-Boat

The mountain areas of Burma affect the country in many ways. They greatly affect the rainfall. Lower Burma receives the full force of the monsoon current as it comes in off the Indian Ocean. The consequence is a heavy rainfall each year, and a regular and bountiful harvest. Lower Burma has never had a famine. The amount of rainfall varies from one hundred to three hundred inches during the rainy season of six months. The western side of the outer range of the hills, exposed to the same current, has even a heavier fall of rain than the low lands bordering on the sea. The coast range of hills rises to a considerable altitude, and as they extend north and south, the southwest rain currents pour out their water in crossing this range, and so have little moisture left to furnish rain in the upper valleys of Burma. While the sea coast round about Rangoon, and the Sitiang and Irrawaddy Valleys, have abundant rains in the lower portions, as you go northward in each valley the rainfall steadily decreases until in portions of Upper Burma there are great areas of land that will seldom give a crop for lack of moisture. The soil in this arid region is as fertile as anywhere, and where the great and enlarging canal system of the Government is effective, they can produce enormous harvests. But left to the uncertain rainfall, there would be only failure of crops and famine. Happily this condition does not extend over the most thickly-populated portion of Burma.

In another respect the hill portion of Burma is important. Compared with the plains or plateaus of the country, there is a relatively smaller portion of the province of low elevations than that of India proper. The greatest level area is bordering on the sea, and is in consequence much modified by the sea breezes, and the heat is never very intense for a tropical country. But a large portion of the province, which is not cooled by the breeze from the sea, has also a moderate heat for the tropics. I attribute this condition of modified temperature to the fact that we have no large plains or plateaus. Unlike India, where the area that becomes superheated is immense, in Burma the area of low land is small, and therefore is continually modified by the cooler air from the large adjacent mountain tracts. This, it seems to me, accounts for the fact that all the seacoast of Burma is so much cooler than the same kind of elevation of Bengal. They both alike share the sea breeze for a certain distance; but Bengal has hundreds of miles of low plain unbroken by high hills, while Burma’s hills approach near the sea. This gives Burma a relatively moderate temperature, though so far down in the tropics. All the valleys of the tropical world are fertile. But a word should be said about the fertility of the mountain tracts of Burma. Nearly all of these hills and mountains that I have seen are covered with a dense growth of forest. The Indian hills are not so. Many of the latter are entirely barren of trees, and where there is any chance at all they are cultivated in terraces. But the virgin forests of Burma stretch hundreds of miles over hills and mountains. Here and there are villagers, it is true, mostly Karens, in Lower Burma, who cultivate only small areas; but only one year in a place, making a new clearing each year to avoid the work of digging or plowing, and then they let the last year’s clearing grow up to forest again, which it quickly does.

There is room for a vast population to make an easy living in the hills of Burma alone. If those fertile hills were in America, they would be all occupied as cattle and horse ranches, if not cultivated. Wherever the forest is thinned or cut away, a great luxuriant growth of grass and bamboos springs up, on which cattle feed and flourish. They can get plenty of grazing the year round in these hills, and there would always be a ready market for beef and for bullocks for plowing.

Among the many natural resources of Burma, there are two that require careful attention. Here we find one of the greatest rice-growing countries of the world. Here also are vast forests of the famous teak wood, that is used so extensively for ship-building and other structures.

Rice-growing is the one line of cultivation that characterizes the land of Burma. In India there are greater rice fields, because the rice lands are more extensive. But in India they cultivate other crops, and this even on the rice land. In India they frequently, if not generally, grow two or more crops on the same land in one year, or different crops on adjacent land at the same season. But the Burman grows one crop only, and that is uniformly rice. He is a rice-grower and a rice-eater. In the plains there is no other grain grown that is generally used for human food. There is a little Indian corn cultivated, but not in sufficient amount to break the force of this general statement.

The rice fields of Burma amount to over six million acres. There are often as many as one hundred bushels of unhusked rice grown on an acre. Of course, the average yield is far below this amount. Yet the aggregate rice crop is enormous. It feeds all Burma, and there are vast quantities shipped to India, China, Europe, and South America. No year since I have been in Burma has there been insufficient rice for her people. If rice of a different variety comes to Burma for the immigrants that are used to the Indian article, there is also much Burma rice shipped annually to various ports in India.

A word should be added as to rice cultivation. Perhaps all readers are aware that rice is grown usually in water, though there is some dry cultivation. The land is inclosed in very small fields, averaging less than one acre, but often not more than one-tenth of that area. There are embankments round all these fields, and several inches of water are kept always on the ground. Sometimes the water is a foot deep. So long as the rice can have a very little of the upper blade out of the water it will flourish. The ground is stirred with a wooden rake like a plow when it is covered with water. The mud is made very fine, and as deep as this mode of cultivation, will stir it. The rice has been sown in nurseries, and when from a foot to fifteen inches high it is pulled up, bound into bundles of approximately one hundred plants each, and taken, usually in boats, to the prepared field, where it is all transplanted by hand. Often the root is divided, so that from one grain there come to be grown several bunches of rice. In appearance a rice field looks very much like a field of oats. The reader will hardly be prepared to believe that it takes nearly twice as long to mature a rice crop under a tropical sun, as it does to grow a field of oats in the northern latitudes, especially in America. The rice is sown in the nursery in May or June, and the ripened grain is not harvested before the last of December or in January. It is all cut with a sickle. I have never seen any one harvesting with any other instrument in Southern Asia. The grain is always threshed under the feet of cattle, and winnowed by hand. An American sees hundreds of ways wherein this crop could be grown more economically, and some missionary will yet introduce modern methods successfully. The missionary is the only man likely to succeed in such a task.

When speaking of the great food-producing industries of Burma, that of fishing should have special prominence. Burma has a vast area of swamps submerged every rainy season, and these are classed as “fisheries,” and a very large revenue is secured from the sale of the fish. The fisherman makes an excellent living, and the people almost universally are able to eat fish with their rice. So long has this been the case that no Burman considers that he has been well fed unless he has fish of some sort with rice every day. Then he shares the characteristic of all Asiatics in desiring much condiment with his rice. He therefore takes the fish, which is of fine flavor and excellent quality when fresh, and rots it, and mixes with it peppers and other spices until it suits his taste and smell, and then feasts! Other less Burmanized people declare that his “gnape,” as he calls this preparation, is simply very rotten fish.

The teak-wood forests, before mentioned, are among the most valuable in the world. This famous wood will not shrink under the most intense sun’s rays, nor will it expand when wet with the rain. It does not warp, and has a smooth grain and works easily. In the tropics, when used for building purposes, it is not eaten by white ants, which destroy almost all other building material in hot countries. The Government has taken hold of this industry, and protects the trees from fires, regulates the cutting, and does all it can to maintain and extend these exceedingly valuable forests. The cutting of the trees, their transport to the sea, and conversion into lumber is one of the greatest organized industries in the country. The amount of money required to carry on this business in the process of cutting the timber from the stump, hundreds of miles inland, gathering it out of the forests, carrying it in rafts to the seaports, and putting it through the great sawmills, to the final disposal to the European and other purchasers, is enormous. The time element is a large one. It takes years to get these logs through the process. I have often desired to know just how long this timber has been waiting or is in transit from the time it was felled. This at least must be several years, for the logs often show signs of hard usage through a long period. They are sometimes cracked and worn as if decades old.

The Elephant at Work

It is in this timber industry that the elephants of Burma are very useful. All travelers visiting Burma have at least seen the elephant at work in the mills of Rangoon. They drag the great logs from the river, place them in position to be guided to the saws, drag away the slabs and squared lumber, pile all these in orderly heaps ready for further handling, and manipulate the logs and ropes and their own chains in a marvelous way. They go in and out of the mills with every part of the great machinery running, and never make a false motion to tramp on a carriage, become entangled in the belting, or allow a whirling saw to touch their precious skins. Why a great beast with such strength, joined to such intelligence and self-possession, will submit to the feeble and often stupid man who sits on his neck, and work for man at all, is a marvel. But the transient visitor only sees the elephant working in the mills. This is only a small part of his task. He does all the heavy dragging of the logs to get them to the river from the forest where they are grown. This is often over the most difficult ground. He will go into a thicket where no other beast can go, where a horse or an ox could not climb at all, or if he did, would be perfectly useless for work. But the elephant goes into these worst places and drags the logs over fallen trees, bowlders, and through mud, not being dismayed by muddy ditches or rocky steeps.

It is no wonder that the Government protects the herds of wild elephants. But sometimes they invade the rice fields in great numbers. When they do, the destruction is so great that the officials give license to go and shoot them. Sometimes the hunters succeed in killing a few. If they are males, the tusks are very valuable. The feet are also skinned, including the leg, sole of the feet, and the nails, and when so prepared are often used as waste-paper baskets, and are regarded as great curiosities.

Burma has great ruby mines; but as these stones are not of so much value as formerly, the mining is not to be considered as constituting a great industry. But the oil fields of Burma are very valuable, and it is supposed that the industry is as yet only in its early beginning. It is said that the company that owns the chief refinery, and many of the oil fields, will not sell any part of the stock they hold, and that they are getting rich rapidly.

It will be seen from the foregoing facts that Burma is a great land in itself. It belongs to the Indian Empire, and it is the richest province in the whole country. It pays all its own expenses, which are heavy, and gives largely to the deficit of other provinces. As a field for mission work, there is none more promising so far as natural conditions are concerned.

CHAPTER V
The City of Rangoon

Rangoon may not perhaps be rated as a great, but it is an important, city. The population of Rangoon numbers above two hundred thousand, without the usual thickly-inhabited suburbs. It is a seaport third in importance in Southern Asia. Calcutta and Bombay are the only cities that surpass it. The capital of the province of Burma, it is the center of official life. Being situated so near the sea, only twenty miles inland, and having the best of harbors and every connection with the interior, both by rail and river, its importance as a trading center is very great. Compared to other Indian cities, it is more important than many with a greater population, while it is doubtful if any city in all the seacoasts of Southern Asia is of equal importance in proportion to its population. Then, it has the advantage of being a newly-planned city. As such it has straight streets, crossing at right angles for the most part, like Western cities of the modern plan. However, this admirable arrangement has been of far less advantage than it would have been, because the blocks are too narrow to be utilized to the best advantage. This blunder has, unhappily, been perpetuated in the great new addition that has been made on the eastward of the city. It would seem that experience in this matter would have taught the municipality better things; but like other things Oriental, I suppose, they found it very difficult to get adapted to anything new. As the beginning was made that way, the end must be the same. But in the one fact that the streets are straight and at right angles, there is an advantage that is not found in any other Oriental city. The streets are kept well paved, and the general improvements are progressive, except in two very important particulars. They still use poor kerosene in inferior lamps for street lighting. Ten years ago I went to the municipal engineer, and asked him if it was not feasible to light the city with electricity, instead of the obsolete methods then, as now, in vogue. He said: “Yes, it might be; but we are not so enterprising as you in America. We will wait ten years, and see if a new thing works well before we adopt it.” The ten years are passed, and still the smoky old lamps send out their indifferent light and obnoxious odors—too many of which befoul any Oriental city—because the municipal authorities have not yet found out that electric lighting is a success. This is being written in America, where most little towns of one or two thousand population are being well lighted with electricity, while over the sea the great city of Rangoon, with two hundred thousand inhabitants and large revenues, can not yet venture on this modern system of lighting its streets.

There is, also, a lamentable backwardness in the matter of street railways. There is a poorly-built and poorly-kept street railway run by steam. But there is little comfort in the car service, and the motive power is antiquated steam engines. The street railway, such as it is, is not extended to such limits as it should be. Were the streets lighted with electric-lights and a system of electric cars adequate to the city and suburbs running, these public improvements would be in keeping with what Rangoon is in the matter of trade.

There is only one other city in Burma of nearly the same number of inhabitants as Rangoon, and that is Mandalay, the capital of Upper Burma. This city was the capital of independent Burma in modern times. When the British annexed Upper Burma in 1886, they projected the railway to the city of Mandalay, and as it already had steamer connection with Lower Burma, its many advantages as a distributing center maintained its continued growth. While it has a population nearly equal to Rangoon, it has nothing else to be compared with the latter city.

There is a very great contrast between the two cities in the matter of racial population. While Mandalay has some immigrants from other lands, like other cities and towns of Burma, the city as a whole is distinctly Burman. Rangoon, on the other hand, is so foreign in its makeup that it can not be called a Burmese city. Relatively, very few Burmans live in the main part of the city. Here you find many peoples of India. There are wide areas of the city given over to the Tamils, Telegus, Bengalis, Gujaratties, and Chinese; while yet other Indian people are found in this Indian community to the exclusion of the Burmese. The Burmese live chiefly at both ends of the city of Rangoon, where there is much trading in rice and other dealings of a Burmese character. The Burmese have given way before the immigrants of India, largely because they are an independent and proud race, and will not do the work commonly done by the coolies and servants about the city. They look upon the immigrant from India as an inferior, and they will not allow themselves to be his competitor for the more menial services and work of the city. The Burmese, therefore, collect chiefly where they have occupation congenial to their tastes. It is significant that the Burman will work at almost anything, where the Madrassis and other Indian people are not working alongside of him. But where there may be constant contrasts or comparisons in inferior positions, he will not condescend to go. So he gives way to the native as indicated, not from necessity, but from choice.

Rangoon is a great trade center. The two greatest industries are that of the lumber trade and the traffic in rice. The lumber manufacture and sale has had previous mention. I will only add that immense sawmills line the river front at frequent intervals, and the logs lie in the river in great rafts, or in heaps on land. There are perhaps scores of elephants at work in connection with these mills.

The rice mills are conducted on a very large scale. The plan is common to make advances to brokers, who go out and loan money on the growing crop and agree to take the rice, which in the husk is called “paddy,” at harvest time, at a given rate per hundred baskets. The basket holds about a bushel. Usually the price ranges about one hundred rupees for a hundred baskets, though often the rice is a fourth above or a fourth below this amount. The rupee is equal to thirty cents. As the price of rice is impossible of calculation so many months in advance of harvest, the millers who advance the money to the brokers, who are usually Burmans, and the brokers who advance the money to the cultivators agreeing to take “paddy” at a given rate at harvest, and the cultivators, all base their calculations upon guesses usually wrong, the whole system has much of the elements of gambling, like the dealing in futures on an American Board of Trade. The rice is husked and cleaned in these great mills, and sold to buyers from abroad, or in the local markets for food. Often the cleaned rice is sent to Europe, and converted into some kind of intoxicants, and comes back to curse the land out of which it grew. It is noteworthy that most of these greater business enterprises that call for great organization are managed by Europeans. But there are many merchants in wholesale or retail business that are of all races. The Chinamen are busy traders, and will doubtless have a more controlling voice in the affairs of business as time goes forward.

Of all the trade in the country, there are two features that are a source of unmixed evil—the trade in opium, and the trade in liquor. It is true that the Government tries to keep the opium trade under very severe regulations; but it is always a failure to try to regulate that which itself feeds upon vice. The amount of liquor brought into Burma is something enormous. It is true that there are more people that do not drink than formerly, and those that still drink are less given to excessive drunkenness than in earlier years; yet there are more people in the land, and there are more of the natives, particularly Burmese, that are using intoxicants, in imitation of Europeans, and therefore the quantity of liquor brought to the country to supply this demand is greater than ever before. The ship that our party went on to Rangoon carried three missionaries and three hundred tons of liquor. I have no doubt this would not be above the average cargo for steamers plying between European ports and Burma. It is astonishing how this liquor has entered into ordinary trade. Most of the great importing houses deal in liquors. Most of the retail houses likewise. So it becomes difficult for a young man who is hostile to the whole liquor business to get work in any of the retail “shops,” as they are called, without staining his hands in this unholy traffic. One of the great reforms on the temperance questions in the East will be to develop a sentiment antagonistic to the traffic, until liquor-selling can not be countenanced as a respectable business.

The New Public Offices, Rangoon

Rangoon has several good public buildings, the greatest of these being the Government House, the residence of his honor the lieutenant-governor, and the great secretariat building, which is situated on grounds reserved for its use, in the center of the city. The latter building has been completed only about five years, and when newly occupied was considerably shaken by the heavy earthquake, which shook Rangoon and vicinity. But the damage done has been repaired, and the great building adorns the city and serves the purpose for which it was erected. There is also the elegant Jubilee Hall erected in honor of Queen Victoria’s illustrious reign.

Rangoon is divided into two distinct parts. The one is on the flat land adjoining the river, and extending a third of a mile back, and some four miles in length. This includes most of the business portion and all the crowded districts of the city. Here many thousands of people literally swarm by day, and sleep twenty in a single room at night. This portion of the city is called “The Town.” It is almost always very dirty, except when washed by heavy rains. Here are still seen old buildings of every sort. However, these are disappearing more rapidly than one would anticipate, from the fact that they were originally all constructed of wood, and during the dry weather there have been frequent friendly fires of late years, and the town is by this means relieved of a good many unsightly structures. Henceforth there are to be no wooden buildings erected in the center of the city.

During the rains we are treated to a curious effect of the excessive moisture of the climate. Many of the old houses have been roofed by clay tiling. When this tiling is not frequently turned, the spores of certain weeds, which have gathered on the tiles as the rains increase and the clouds settle down in unbroken shadows over the land, spring up and grow to the height of two feet or more, growing as thick as grass in a meadow. This makes a house a very curious-looking object. A human habitation or church grown all over with weeds! When the clouds break away and the sun comes out, these weeds dry to a crisp.

Any student of a people, and most of all a missionary, is early attracted by the religious life of men. Of the many races that mix, but do not blend, in the population of Rangoon, each brings his own religion from the land of his birth. Each holds to his own faith with the greatest persistency, as a rule. Men will have dealings together on all subjects, except in religion. Here they differ widely, and they generally do not compromise their religious convictions or observance. Sometimes their dispositions to each other are that of covert hostility. But generally they get on in outward peace, but do not think of becoming proselytes to any other religion. The religious rites at the shrines are kept up faithfully. The great religious feasts are observed with much pomp. The social customs that are connected with each religion are seldom broken. So living side by side are adherents of every religion under the sun.

In the center of Dalhousie Street in Rangoon is a large pagoda, a shrine of the Buddhists, with its gilded conical shape rising far above all other buildings in the vicinity, while from its umbrella-like top there goes out on the tropical air the sweet sound of bells that hang on the rim of the umbrella. Just across the street from this pagoda is a mosque where the Mohammedan business men and passers-by go five times a day to pray. Two blocks east from these is a Hindu temple, and three or four blocks west is a Chinese temple, where their religious rites are observed, consisting mostly of offerings to devils. These temples are only samples. I understand there are a score of mosques in Rangoon. The number of Hindu temples I do not know, while there are pagodas in every quarter. There are various Chinese temples also. Throughout the city are now found several Christian Churches. Here the gospel light is held up to dispel the soul-darkening counsels of the Christless faiths. At a glance at these sacred places and religious rites it will be seen that the conflict between religious ideas and practices is general, and probably will become world-wide. The Europeans that go to that country must represent the Christian religion, or deteriorate religiously. The non-Christians must stand by their own, or in time they too will become modified. This is wholly independent of the aggressive battle that the missionary would wage against all these non-Christian religious systems. It is a significant fact that the missionaries who are in the midst of the religious life, so opposed to all they hold dear in faith and practice, have unbounded confidence in the final triumph of the gospel in leavening the present-day pagan faiths, as it did those of the New Testament times. I have yet to meet a hopeless missionary. This note of the hopeful conquering missionary force is an inbreathing of the Spirit of our Lord, who from his throne sends forth his heralds.

One fact will show how intense is the religious faith among some of the Asiatics. The Mohammedans and the Hindus are often very hostile to each other. If it were not for the hand of the English Government in India, this hostility would be almost continually breaking out into open violence in some parts of the country. As it is, it is not seldom that religious riots occur. In 1894, during a Mohammedan feast, in which they are accustomed to sacrifice a cow, the Mohammedans were determined to slaughter the animal not far from a business house of a rich Hindu, on whose premises there was also a private temple. As the Hindus worship the cow, and as the killing of such an animal, especially in religious services, is an abomination to them, they were naturally much incensed, and the Mohammedans probably meant that they should be. In this case the Mohammedans seemed to be the aggressors throughout. The fanatical antagonism was growing dangerous. The authorities were watching the movements of these two parties, the Mohammedans giving most concern. Several days went by, and the feeling was at fever heat. Sunday came, and as I rode to church with my family in the early morning, I saw on every street companies of Mohammedans carrying clubs faced with irons, hurrying toward the center of the town where their greatest mosque is, and near which they meant to sacrifice the cow. Just as I concluded the morning service, I heard the sound of distant firing. In a few moments a Mohammedan ran by the church, with his face partly shot away. The excitement in the city grew as the facts became known.

The Mosque, Rangoon

The deputy commissioner and other officers were present at the center of the disturbance with a small company of Seik soldiers. The mob grew to many thousands, and the officers commanded them to disperse. This order they refused in derisive language. Then blank cartridges were fired to frighten the multitude, and still they refused to disperse. As there was nothing left to do, the troops were ordered to fire into the crowd that thronged about the mosque. Some thirty or more were shot, several being killed outright. This dispersed the crowds, but there was rioting for days whenever Mohammedans would find a Hindu away from his associates, or in unfrequented or unprotected localities. Had it not been for these rigorous measures of the authorities, the whole community would have been given over to violence. As it was, the whole Mohammedan community was doubly policed for six months, and the extra expense was put on to the tax of that particular community. This was effective in keeping order, and when the time had run its course, the Mohammedans petitioned the local Government that if these extra police were taken away, they would behave themselves, which they have done ever since.

While “the Town” is such a center of life and strife, the suburbs are a place of quiet, rest, cleanliness, and beauty unsurpassed. The military cantonment is here, with perhaps nearly a mile square, laid out in large blocks and roomy compounds, or yards. A rule has long been in force in the cantonment, that there could only be one house erected on a lot. Most of these lots contain from one to four acres. This gives the room necessary to beautify the grounds, and to secure pure air. The cantonment is now being curtailed, and doubtless this admirable regulation may be modified. But as this land rises a little higher than the town, and, being a little apart from it, it will continue to be of great value for homes. The entire suburbs have a fine growth of trees, many of them natural forest trees and others ornamental, and planted for shade.

Entrance of Sway Dagon Pagoda

The chief object of all the region, the great Pagoda, is situated about the middle of this cantonment portion of the suburbs. But the suburbs run far beyond the cantonment. It reaches on three sides of this reserve, while the whole region to the northward is being occupied and built upon. There is a fine grove of forest and fruit trees extending most of the way to Insein, nine miles from Rangoon, and nearly all the intermediate area is built up with fine residences of Europeans, or rich natives. The homes out in the groves, and with large fruit gardens, furnish the ideal place for rest and refreshment after the work of the hot day in “the Town.” It is a fact that Europeans who have lived for a while in this portion of the city of Rangoon seem loath to leave it for any place. If they go back to Europe, they mostly return again to Rangoon. Government House, a large palatial building, the residence of the lieutenant-governor, is the central attraction of all the fine residences of this region.

There are three areas of great beauty reserved by the authorities—the Zoological Gardens, the Cantonment Gardens, and the Royal Lakes. All these reserves are beautiful with every variety of tree, bush, and flower that grows in the tropics, and the grounds are laid out with artistic care, and lakelets beautify the whole. But the “Royal Lakes” are a series of natural and artificial water basins, all connected and adorned with beautiful little islands and curved shore lines. A portion of the inclosure is kept as a public park, and a winding drive is maintained along the water’s edge, which gives an ever-changing picture of tropical beauty. The effect of the palms, the mangoes, and other shade and ornamental trees, toning down the fierce glare of the sun, and these shades reflected from the clear water on a tropical evening, is a blending of color that I have never seen anywhere equaled. The world has many places of beauty, but of those views I have seen nothing equals the “Royal Lakes” of Rangoon for combinations of charming scenery in a limited area. Evening and morning this drive is crowded with vehicles of every type. Rangoonites of every race are out taking in the air and scenery. Here in the evening may be seen hundreds of people dressed in the coolest apparel, visiting and resting, while two or three evenings a week the band entertains with music. It is no wonder that Rangoon makes an attractive city for business and pleasure for any whose lot is cast in this tropical land. The heat is never as intense as in Indian cities, and always in the hottest weather it is modified with a sea-breeze. In the long and heavy rains also the people seem to get no harm from a frequent exposure.

Royal Lakes at Eventide, Rangoon

CHAPTER VI
Europeans, Anglo-Indians, Eurasians

All people of foreign blood from western lands, and the descendants of these, however remote or however little the trace of Western blood they have, are in India technically called “Europeans.” Before the law they have the rights of a trial by jury, and in the school laws they are classed as “Europeans.” But it is far more accurate to divide this class into three divisions—the pure “Europeans,” the “Anglo-Indians,” and the “Eurasians.” By this division the Europeans are people born and reared in Europe, or America, who are now found in Southern Asia. The Anglo-Indians are those people of mixed European blood who have been born and reared in India. The Eurasian, as the name implies, is a man who has both European and Asiatic blood. For the purposes of comparison these may be named in two classes, the Western born and bred man, the European, as distinguished from Eastern born relatives, Anglo-Indians and Eurasians. I want it made very clear that in discussing the characteristics and relations of these several peoples, that I am not drawing invidious comparisons. I have no sympathy whatever with asperities heaped upon men because of their race; neither do I patronize any man because of his race. I long ago concluded that character is not a matter of race; that lovable or royal manhood is not a question of ancestry or position, but that nearly all essential differences in men are due to environment and to personal conduct, for which each man is responsible. But comparisons not invidious must be made to bring out the various features of social and business life that enter into the complex racial intermingling of Southern Asia. At best this complexity of life can be but partially understood by readers in America, who have never seen anything quite like it.

The characteristics of Europeans and Americans are well known in the Western world. My subject calls for only those characteristics which they hold in common, and these features of character as modified by residence in the tropics and under the social conditions of Asia. These characteristics are contrasted in a decided way, as compared with any and all Asiatic trained men of any race or racial mixture. These elements of character are most noticeable in the energy that takes them to the tropics, their capacity to organize business or government, and maintain a modern and systematic organization of the highest efficiency, and that peculiar capacity for just and progressive governmental domination. This energy and this capacity for organization, which of course involves the power to work out painstaking details, are characteristic of the Northern civilization, and never found in the same degree, as far as I know, among any peoples that have been bred in the tropics. It is a matter of great importance in working out the simplest framework of a theory of racial influence in the world to recognize the fact that all real pioneering, all colossal accomplishments in all lands in modern times, have been made by men bred in the colder countries of the temperate zone. These are the men who forge the world forward in their own native climes, and in the frigid zone, and also in the scorching tropics. The tropical world presents no people who hold their own with these exotics, even under their native skies. It is this quality of the European that makes him the dominating man in India. He creates and fosters government and business enterprises on a large scale. As a man, the European is a mightier personal force than Asia can produce.

That this energy is largely a result of climate and social environment is very plain when we compare the Western man with the characteristics of the descendants of Europeans who have had only an Indian upbringing. And in all comparisons I will class the Anglo-Indian and the Eurasian together, for so they belong. They both follow the same habits of life, so far as style of living is concerned, similar to that of the European resident in India. In these respects they have much in common with all Europeans. They are all classed together as compared with the native. But here the similarity between the imported man and his Indian-bred relative comes to an abrupt end. The driving and conquering energy of the Western man is wanting in his relative of even one generation of Asiatic breeding. It is clear that this difference, which all observing men recognize, is purely due to environment of climate and social customs. They are as bright in mind as the Western men. They are excellent students to a certain point. They are specially facile letter-writers. But the line of occupations which their Asiatic life and conditions fit them for, is very limited indeed. The limitations of their lives are many. The most depressing of all their conditions grows out of the fact that they from infancy are dependent for the greater part of all life’s duties on the native servant. The baby is nursed by a native ayah; his clothes are kept in order for him by a servant. He is fed, clothed, and cared for by half a dozen menials. His boots are blacked for him; his books carried to school; his umbrella held over his head; his pony is groomed, saddled, and led while he rides, by a servant whom he is accustomed to command in everything. He is helped and coddled out of all independence and self-helpfulness. In all this he is not to be blamed, but pitied. In this he does as all his relatives and neighbors do. His household and business methods, all that he sees, is being done this way. Not one man of European descent in India lives entirely by his own efforts, as is common in Western countries. His dependence on menials is therefore a necessity of respectable life, as he sees it. He is not to be blamed, for he sees nothing better around him. But this admission does not require that we approve the social conditions that unman him and rob him of much energy and resourcefulness in the matter of self-help. It is a fact that he develops a softness of character in matters of personal habit, and lacks in the energy which is required only by long and sustained self-dependent work. For this reason all the hardier traits of manhood are feebly developed, or lacking. You do not find these men entering callings where hard service is required. They do not make either soldiers or sailors. Some of them become engineers, but they are only found in places where the work is largely done by native helpers, and even here few of them compete with the Scotch or German engineer.

But the difference wrought by social conditions is seen more in matters of disposition than elsewhere. No race of the human family can boast of good dispositions. However, we do find that Indian-born men are unduly sensitive. They are usually easily “offended,” even to pouting. They are sensitive of their “status,” whatever their positions may be. A multiplied illustration of this supersensitiveness is found in the recklessness with which men will resign from any and every post when, for some reason or without reason, their feelings are hurt. They will often go from comfort to beggary just because they may be displeased with their treatment. And that which seems almost a paradox, compared with the preceding fact, is that they will stand almost any amount of outright snubbing from people whom they respect for some pretentious assumption of superiority. I have been puzzled many times to understand how it was when I went to a disgruntled man with soft speech to pacify him, if for reason or without it he was disaffected, to find that he would take my approach to him as a sign of weakness, and be confirmed in his unlovely manners. But I have seen the same man benefited by the sharpest rebuke which gave him no quarter at all.

But while the Anglo-Indians have all the disposition in common with the Eurasian, they are distinguished in common speech in a way that often causes much pain to high-minded Eurasians. They are called “Half-castes” and “Niggers.” They are scorned for being born of questionable parentage. This is by no means true of the most of these unfortunate people, as an increasing proportion of them are born in wedlock, and often are the children of cultured and orderly homes, the equal of any on earth. But when true as a fact, it does not affect their character or real moral worth. But there is a sting, the more painful for its injustice, on the innocent child born of mixed parentage, when born out of wedlock, which in the cruelty of social speech attaches more shame to the innocent child than guilt to the heartless father. I have been led to believe that this injustice accounts for much of the supersensitiveness in the whole Eurasian community. Then they labor under the disadvantage often of having a very dark skin. It is a curious law of nature that the Eurasian child often has a darker skin than even his Asiatic parent. In a country where shades of color, light or dark, are measured by a supersensitive scale, and social recognition is to some extent based upon this absurd measurement, it will be seen that the Eurasian, especially if very dark, is overmuch pained that he has not a white skin, and he feels the fling of the term “Nigger,” often on the lips of those whose only whiteness is in their skins.

One more characteristic of the Asiatic-bred men of European descent may be given. They do not take kindly to burdensome responsibilities, even after Indian pattern, especially for their own kindred and race. In a country where there are more charitable institutions in proportion to the population than in any other in the world, and perhaps greater need of such institutions, yet it remains a painful fact that, with a few exceptions—so exceptional as to make the real nobility of the mind of the few more striking—there is a very small part of the money necessary for their support given by the Anglo-Indians, or Eurasians. The greatest amount of money to keep these institutions going is given by men foreign to the country. But another like fact of note is this, that there is not one such institution, so far as I can learn, the burdensome responsibility of which is actually carried by an Indian-bred man, or company of men. There are many working faithfully in subordinate capacities. But when it comes to organizing and maintaining such an institution, and bearing its burdens through crises, the Indian-bred men have not been found under the load. The suggestiveness of these facts is a commentary on either the lack of real charity, or lack of energy to bear responsible burdens. Having been in this sort of work in various capacities for all the time I have been in the mission field, I feel it is due to the institutions of this kind, and the workers who bear the burdens of the same, to point out this failure of this branch of the Indian peoples to measure up to a manifest duty, and to say further, that I believe this shrinking from personal responsibility to be a direct result of training from childhood, which teaches them to avoid unpleasant tasks and drop them upon others. They would order a servant to do the work if it could be done that way; but if not, then the Western man or woman must do it, or it goes undone.

One more characteristic must be mentioned. It can not be denied that the lack of manly independence in a majority of Indian-bred men leads them to be forever asking somebody to do something for them. Many of them will appeal to ministers especially, and all charitably-disposed people, to get them into positions for which they are often wholly unqualified. They will ask you to aid them with money; borrow or beg without any sensibility of its unmanliness whatever. It takes a very large part of every minister’s time to respond to these incessant calls for “help.”

It would take reams of paper to write all the supplications, petitions, and applications for positions, when the applicants for aid should present themselves in person and ask for posts, conscious of their own ability to sustain themselves. A Scotchman in Rangoon, whom I knew, and a man with most kindly heart, in a position where he was often besieged for employment, grew so tired of this unmanly method of applying for employment, that he became annoyed every time he saw a man with one of those letters of recommendation coming to him. He warned me repeatedly that, as a minister, I ought not to write these letters of recommendation to business men, and in later years I ceased to do so. One constant form of this appeal for some special favor has been repeatedly to approach the Indian Government to retain certain positions for the special benefit of this community. The Anglo-Indian and Eurasian associations have repeatedly memorialized the viceroy to order these favors. Lord Curzon, the present viceroy, gave their memorials special attention, and as a result he delivered a reply of the most searching kind, and urged the people of this community to carve out something worthy themselves, instead of being continually memorializing for special favors, and refused to aid in the special class regulations. The delegation retired, “thanking his excellency for his sarcastic remarks.” Yet I fear it will take more sarcasm before the right mettle is put into this people, as a class.

Now while I have written these facts as I see them, I wish to avoid absolutely a mistake commonly made. While we point out these weaknesses in a community, we must not stop there, as the manner of some is. There are those who would not allow themselves to speak of the real worthy ones among these peoples as heartily as they would of the deficiencies of others. I want to be fair and to lean in statement where my sympathies have always been, with the better and noble characteristics of these unfortunate people, as I have known and valued them, and recognize the possibility of toning up the moral fiber, if they are taken in hand as boys and girls before being confirmed in the weakening customs of the country.

The youth, both boys and girls, of these families have many among them who will take a fine education. They do excellent work in school. Some take a university course. A greater number ought to do so. They make very good clerks where nothing but writing is to be done. This has been the chief employment of the men hitherto. They are very fair teachers. A few have been employed in our mission, who for painstaking care and faithfulness can not be excelled. Some of them have been inspired to be and do all that is worthy and noble. There are missionaries from among these peoples whose ministry has been blessed of God, and greatly edified the Church. It is a fact, however, that for the last dozen years there has been almost a dearth of such applicants for admission to our ranks. It is also true that the falling off in these applications corresponds nearly with the time that those who were in our Indian Conferences were advanced to the full status of American-trained missionaries. Let this be pondered and remedied. Some of the young people have done nobly. A few have honored themselves and the Church by an education in America, and returned to devoted service for their own people. But happily we have an illustrious soul of this community, recently translated, whose going has made earth poorer, except in hallowed memories of her sainted life, and heaven richer. When we meet one such soul as the sainted Phœbe Rowe, we lift up our hearts with thanks to Him who has made the Christ-life so real in flesh that we could look upon. Phœbe Rowe was a Eurasian. She had all the Indian conditions, but from very early life she was a devoted Christian. In riper years she developed Christian graces to the highest possibility. After a notable service in many capacities, she closed her career by a long term of service as an evangelist to the poor native Church of India. Her life and labors have been recorded, and are the property of the Church. I only write to say of her that she was the most perfect fruit of our Indian Mission. Bishop Thoburn, in his address before the Central Conference in 1900, spoke of her departure, and said, “Phœbe Rowe, the most peerless saint I have ever known.” One such saint is a prophecy of all possible good among these people.

The climate and social conditions do affect Europeans also. This is manifest in very many ways. From having servants to do the necessary work for them, they easily drift into the habit of leaning back in an easy-chair, and calling “boy” for everything they want, from a drink of water to a toothpick. I saw an extreme case. A young Scotchman, just out of the office in the evening, went to the Royal Lakes and called for his boat. His servant dutifully brought it to the low platform; waiting the pleasure of his master. The young man turned him slowly round and sat down in the boat, but left his legs stretched on the platform. The servant went out and lifted one leg in, and the other leg likewise. When the whole man was in he pushed the boat off the shore, and the master took lazily to the oars!

The habit of being waited upon in everything tends to develop the domineering habit among almost all people. Little children often fairly drive the servants about as they assert their pettishness. Grown-up people often act as spoiled children in the same way. A young man who comes from Europe from conditions where he had to do every kind of work himself, soon learns to order his servants around with more pomp than any born lord. The tendency of this kind trends also to extravagance in living. It is so common for men getting a good salary to live beyond their means. It is a common thing when an officer on good salary dies, for his friends to take up a public subscription for his widow, who will often be found to be without support of any kind.

In these respects, the climate and the environment are seductive. The sterling simplicity that makes Westerners great is easily frittered away in the East. Men go in for display. They keep what they call “establishments.” They are much given to drink. Too often they debauch. It is certain that a young man runs far more risk in this tropical climate of making moral shipwreck than in Europe or America. Take away his moral props with which he is surrounded at home, and he quickly forms alliances to his own heart. Concubinage is very common. At first the youth is ashamed of this relation, but later he is likely to flaunt this sin in the face of all men. He sometimes acts as if he were perfectly reckless of moral consequences. The good name he brought to the country and his own loved ones at home are forgotten. It is a common saying, “He left his morals at the Suez Canal.”

But while this is true as a tendency, it is the joy of the writer to emphasize the fact that not a few men, young men, come from Europe to the tropics and keep themselves pure and noble in the midst of all that is seductive in climate or society. I have known a goodly number of such, and count them among the most genuinely noble men that I have met. There are men of many years in the country whose moral worth has grown with a steady growth as the years have gone forward, and have made themselves a name that is a rebuke to every dishonorable or unclean life, and a tower of strength for themselves, and a mighty bulwark against popular evils that degrade their fellow-countrymen. These men, with their time, business sense, and their money, are always actively on the side of right and righteousness. No people have had more such friendships in India than the Methodist missionaries. I have been specially honored with a wide acquaintance with such noble men.

CHAPTER VII
Characteristics of the Races of Burma

The cosmopolitan character of the population of Rangoon has been given, and it is only necessary to add that all towns near the sea and on the railways have the same intermingling of foreign and native peoples. But there is a much greater preponderance of those races which are at home in Burma. As you go inland, of all the immigrants the most ubiquitous is the Chinese.

The Burmese are easily the chief people of Burma over any other race, native or immigrant, in any part of Burma. Indeed, they rank high among all peoples of Asia. I am aware that when I exalt the Burman, I invite the criticism of the champion of other races. It is a common observation that missionaries especially come to champion the worth and virtues of the peoples among whom they labor, and perhaps estimate them above their value, as compared with other races. This trait is worth something to the world in that it brings to the front one class of optimists of the value of men as they are, or of what they shall be. When any man loses faith in any race, he can no longer be of signal service to that race.

In rating the Burmese people highly, I am not aware of being prejudiced in their favor by reason of exclusive association. Our mission work has brought us into contact with nearly all the races in Burma. As a result of our experience, the Burman must be given a place second to none. Personally, I believe he has more to be said in his favor than any other Asiatic race of which I have any knowledge.

I know it will be said that he is lazy and unreliable. The former accusation is well-nigh universal. To undertake even to qualify this charge of indolence is a large task; but still I am ready to say something for the Burman’s industry. It is admitted that several of the races of India are ploddingly industrious. The Burman’s industry is less continuous, but I think not less genuine. He has more festivals and idle days, but he certainly works rapidly, and for long hours, when he works.

This is especially true of the cultivator. He is in the field a little after daylight, and with only a short time of rest at midday he works on till dark. In harvesting time he does the same. One evening when darkness had fallen I was going up a tidal creek in a boat making my way to the village of Naunguyi, when my attention was attracted by sounds on the bank, and looking up I could see outlined against the sky two Burmans loading a cart with rice sheaves. It would have been too dark to see them if we had all been on a level. These men had been working since daylight. During the threshing time the work is often kept going on the threshing floors till midnight. Now I am persuaded that men naturally indolent do not work in this way. In clerkships, and as subordinate officials, they do not compare unfavorably with other Asiatic races; while the Burmese women are notably industrious, whether in the village, or in the bazar in the cities.

Eight or ten years ago we heard much of the hard-working, money-loving Madrassi supplanting the Burmese land-owner and cultivator of Lower Burma. But with a somewhat close observation I am convinced he is not succeeding in this much faster than the Burman finds it to his own advantage to allow the black man from across the Bay of Bengal to succeed him. The same thing is true if it comes to larger trading. In such lines as the Burman cares to enter, he gives a good account of himself. If there is one man who will beat him in trade, that man is the Chinaman. There are certain kinds of employment the Burman dislikes, and he avoids them; but in his chosen lines he is not discounted by comparison.

The Burmese are racially very proud. There is a good deal of dignity in this pride, as well as of less worthy elements. Among themselves the Burmese have no caste system, except that of the pagoda slave, hence all kinds of work are honorable. But when the Indian, with his caste system, comes in and classifies life into the infinitesimal distinctions of respectability, and the reverse in all kinds of work whereby all domestic service is put under this caste system, the proud Burman refuses to be a servant! Who can blame him? He is a standing protest against a system that is wholly wrong. In Upper Burma, where he is not so much in competition with the caste man, he takes fairly well to all manner of work.

Even when he competes with the coolie labor of other races he maintains himself. This was strikingly illustrated in cutting the new road up Thandaung three years ago. The officers tried Karen labor till it failed, though the work was in their own hills. Then the Madrassis were brought in, and they gave way after repeated trials. Then, as a last resort, the Burmese coolies came and completed what the other races had failed to accomplish.

It is certainly true that the Burmese race is much respected by most Europeans. I do not think any other Asiatic race is equally respected by foreigners resident in Burma.

The manners of the Burmese are pleasant. The Burman is a friendly man, and approachable. There is none of the exclusive, non-communicative characteristics about him. He will share his house and his food with you always. His religion, while having something of bigotry in it, as almost all religions have, is not offensive to men of other faiths. The toleration by Buddhism of other faiths, perhaps more apparent than real, yet is sufficient to attract much favorable comment in Burma.

One fact much to the Burman’s credit, in comparison with the other races of Asia, is his ability to read; that is, a very large majority of the men read, at least to some extent, and a good many women. Lately in America we have heard the school system of the Chinese much lauded. And since Minister Wu, at Washington, has so distinguished himself and his race by his striking addresses, many people have jumped at the conclusion that an ignorant Chinaman is the exception. But I am told by those who ought to know, that in China only about one man in a hundred, and one woman in ten thousand, can read. The Japanese alone of Asiatic races are more literary than the Burmese.

The Burman is peculiarly proud of his knowledge of the Buddhist doctrines. He calls them the “law.” In consequence of the system of doctrine he upholds, he is unwilling to be taught religion by a man whom he has hitherto believed incompetent to teach. It is this, I believe, which makes him unwilling, as a rule, to be taught Christianity by a Karen. All his racial and religious pride comes up as he faces the suggestion of the Karen teaching him, whom he would always regard in a peculiar way as a “son of the jungle.” He knows the Karen formerly had no social standing and no written language, while his vague demonology was wholly wanting as a system of religious teaching. No, he is not ready to receive Christianity from the Karen.

For hundreds of years the Burmese have been the dominant people in the land of Burma, and the Shans, Chins, and Karens were conquered and dominated by them. They have had some able rulers, and at times have had a strong enough government to wage war with distant people; even with China herself they were often at war.

A Burmese Family

The Burmese have a distinctly developed racial type. They, like all peoples in Burma, China, and Siam, are of the Mongolian type of men. Their complexion is much lighter than most Indian peoples, and they naturally look upon the black man from across the Bay of Bengal as the “Kalla,” dark of color and an inferior. While they have distinct racial features, they evidently are a blending of the Chinese and the Malay. This has been noticed particularly by comparison between the Burmese and the Filipinos. Visitors to Manila, who are acquainted with the Burmese, say the resemblance to the Filipino is very striking. We know the Filipino has a Chinese and Malay infusion of blood.

The more than six millions of Burmese people are the chief people of this land, whether studied from a governmental, racial, or missionary point of view. To the American interested in missions it is of special importance to remember these people. In America there is just now much interest in carrying the gospel to eight or ten millions of people in the Philippine Islands. This interest is largely because they are under the American flag. Let not the millions of Burmese Buddhists be forgotten while hastening to new fields.

The Shans take second rank among the races of Burma, though much more attention has been given to the Karens by the missionaries. The Shans in appearance are the most like the Chinese of any of the inhabitants of Burma. They are racially closely related to them. Their language, appearance, and dress bear out the resemblance.

The Shans are found widely distributed in Burma; but they live chiefly in the hills in the northeast of the province. Like the Chins, Kachins, and several tribes of the Karens, they seem to prefer residence in the hills. In this they all contrast with the Burmese, who always prefer a home on the plains, and they are never for a long time or in large numbers resident in the hills in any part of Burma. The plains are the richest part of the country, and as the conquering Burmese came down from the north they naturally occupied the fertile portions of the country, and have remained there, the weaker peoples taking to the hills and finding their permanent home in places relatively difficult of access and easy of defense.

The Shans are a strong race, and a little taller than either the Burmese or the Karens. They are raisers of cattle and ponies, and are great traders, bringing the products of the distant hills to the railway centers.

In religion the Shans are Buddhists. They have a written language, and the Bible has been translated into their tongue by the Baptist missionaries.

In matters of moral purity the Shans must be rated very low. By those best informed, it is said that their girls are nearly all corrupted before they are grown. A missionary resident among them for years, told me that the principal chief had in his reception room a picture portraying all the vices known to the human race, placed on the wall in plain view of every one who came to see him. Here men, women, and children, when calling on the chief, looked upon this horrible picture, and discussed it as a commonplace affair.

The missionary, who was the chief physician, told him he would not come to his house again if he did not take that picture down from his walls. The chief expressed surprise, and readily agreed to take the picture away, and explained that he did not know it was wrong to have it there. “Did not know it was wrong!” Can any one regard this absence of the moral sense among an entire people, and not believe in the need of Christian missions? The hundreds of thousands of Shans must be included in the plans for the evangelization of Burma.

The Karens are a distinct people, but of a number of different tribes or divisions. During Burmese domination they were very much oppressed. For the most part they lived in villages apart from the Burmese. Many of them lived far back in the hills, probably for better security, and certainly for freedom from interference on the part of the Burmese. Owing to this exclusive village life for long ages they have become very clannish. The Karen, while admitting that the Burman is the superior man, still preserves his racial pride. His village is very dear to him. Unlike the Burman, who moves annually or monthly, if it suits him, and seems about as much at home in one place as another, the Karen does not easily become dislodged from the village where he was born. Lately there has been some migration from the hills to the richer plains, but still the community life seems to be pretty well preserved.

This village life has its advantages and disadvantages. The cultivation of rice is made in a community. While each man has the field which he clears, it is so ordered that no one in the village is left entirely destitute. The land has been held as a village, and is therefore not easily alienated. The area belonging to a given village is great, especially in the hills, but the amount cultivated is very little.

The style of cultivation, if indeed it should be dignified by that name, is unique, and will never be adopted by a people of advanced methods of agriculture. The hills are heavily wooded, and when a suitable area is selected for the next year’s cultivation, the whole village proceeds to cut it down with the most complete destruction. After the forest is felled during the dry season it becomes very dry, and just before the rain fire is touched to it, and the flames with a terrific rush cover the entire clearing in a few moments, and consume nearly every stick of wood. The few logs which remain are collected and burned, and with the beginning of the rain the rice is planted on the steep hillsides, the earth being enriched by a heavy coat of fresh ashes. The ground is not plowed, but the grain is dropped into small cuttings made by the thrust of a small spade-like iron on the end of a long handle. The sprouts that spring from the roots in the ground are cut away as the rice grows. The harvesting is with the sickle, and when threshed is carried to the village, frequently a long distance away, on the backs of men and heads of women, the latter carrying the larger loads, as is usual in the East. This is most laborious and tedious. As there are only mountain paths, and as the Karen, even when well to do, does not care for road improvements, he climbs up and down as his fathers have done before him for hundreds of years.

As the soil is never cultivated, they depend on the fresh ashes to force their crop. This requires a fresh clearing every year, while a new jungle growth springs up on the last year’s field. They do not wish to cut the jungle oftener than once in ten years. It will be seen how wasteful is this strange method of cultivation. How wonderful the forest growth that will maintain itself over all these hills under such destructive treatment!

The Christian Karens are a living miracle of the century of Christian missions. They need much teaching yet; but when one sees these people so uplifted from the state they were once in, be what he may, he must believe in Christian missions. The Baptists, under God, deserve nearly all the credit for the conversion of this people.

The Karen, as a man, is a study. He is affectionate, especially toward his missionary. Yet he will often be guilty of conduct quite at variance with that sentiment. Yet of this conduct he will repent again soon; but it is a repentance usually without tears or apparent sense of regret. He will take offense easily, and a little later reappear with a smile on his face, as forgetful of his recent temper as a child. But he is not a child. He enjoys a joke, even at his own expense. He is also a very obstinate man, even when his obstinacy is against all his own interests.

But if you would see the Karen at his best, go to his village and see his children in school, a school which the missionary founded, but which the village now supports. Remember the missionary gave this people their written language. Attend the evening prayers when the village pastor leads their devotions in their simple chapel. Hear them sing! There is probably no more inspiring singing in the world. You will want to hear them again. Go to church on Sunday, and hear a sermon by a trained preacher, whose great-grandfather worshiped “gnats” or demons, who he supposed inhabited the surrounding hills and had his life in their malevolent control. How great is the distance from the demon-worshiper to the intelligent and devout Christian! The missionary was the human agent, and God the author of this transformation through the preaching of the gospel. Yet some people would say they do not believe in missions!

The Chins and Kachins inhabit the hills of North and Northeast Burma. They are kindred peoples. There are possibly two hundred thousand of them. Like other isolated people, they have everything to learn from civilization and the Christian religion. The Government officer and the missionary have undertaken the problem of these people.

The Chins have given much trouble to the Government within the last few years. They lived formerly by raiding the peaceful people of the plains. When the English Government annexed Upper Burma, it punished them for this. Soon the whole hill country rose against the Government. A band of soldiers was dispatched into the hills to subdue them. After some sharp fighting they sued for peace, promising good behavior. Sir Alexander MacKenzie, the efficient chief commissioner, was then the head of the province of Burma. He instructed Mr. Cary, the political officer of the Chin Hills, to bring several Chin chiefs to Rangoon to see the city and the emblems of authority and power of the Government. His idea was that if these savage mountainmen saw the power of the Government they would be induced to keep the peace. He treated them kindly, but told them they must respect their neighbor’s property and obey the Government. But this wholesome exhortation of the chief provincial officer of the great Indian Empire was wholly lost on these daring, but ignorant, men of the hills. Their whole life ran riot over all obligations recognized by civilized men. Almost immediately they began again to rob and kill. This time they were more severely punished. Their villages were burned and they were defeated in any attempt to give battle, though the punitive force, almost all of native soldiery, under the energetic and capable political officer, Mr. Cary, was very small. They were fined fifteen hundred guns. Of course, they protested they did not have three hundred. But under pressure they surrendered the required number.

Here was a revelation! Every antiquated gun of Europe, of fifty or one hundred years ago, had been brought by unscrupulous traders and sold to these wild tribes! The sales had not been made recently, it is true; but nevertheless the only firearms these wild men had they had secured probably of British traders of earlier years, who disposed of them along the coast and they had been carried inland, where years afterward they were used in armed robberies of peaceful subjects of this empire and against British authority. Some so-called civilized men sacrifice much of civilization for a little gain in trade.

After the country was substantially disarmed, a large number of these chiefs were brought to Rangoon by Mr. Cary to attend a more imposing display of the greatness of the Government. On this occasion the viceroy summoned them and their official head, Mr. Cary.

The viceroy is appointed for five years, and usually once in his term he visits Burma. Lord Landsdowne was the viceroy, and held a durbar, an official reception, attended by all officials and the general public. At this durbar he recognized the eminent service of Mr. Cary, and decorated him before the great assembly. His excellency also called forward these Chin chiefs, and gave each a beautifully ornamented large knife, as a token of his good will. He probably could not have given any present so highly valued. Most half-civilized men live with their knives in their hands.

At this time a touching incident occurred which ought to be perpetually remembered to the credit of a brave and unselfish officer. Mr. Cary was the honored guest at the quarters of the chief secretary of government. The Chin chiefs were camped at the Royal Lakes, living in their usual uncivilized manner. They probably were eating more than they ever had eaten before in their lives. At any rate, cholera broke out among them. On receiving report of their distress, Mr. Cary left his comfortable quarters and the society of his superior officers, and went into the camp of these chiefs and nursed the sick and dying. Some of them died in his arms. The cholera is the worst epidemic of the East, and most to be dreaded. Yet this brave man risked his life to nurse these wild men, who had been, until very recently, trying their hardest to kill him. It is such heroism as this on the part of British officers that makes the British rule great throughout the world. They stop at no sacrifice of their own lives to put turbulent countries in order, and then are no less heroic in times of peace in serving their high trust of poor and dependent people.

I rode all day with Mr. Cary and his fifty wild chiefs on their homeward journey. I was greatly interested in the story of the pacification of all that Chin and Lushai country, of which he had the management. I was surprised that Mr. Cary attributed his practical ability in all his arduous labors to the drill he received on an American farm and as a cowboy in the Northwest for four years before going to Burma. Though an Englishman, he had spent these years in America.

The Karens, Chins, and Kachins are being rapidly converted to the Buddhist religion. Christianity and Buddhism are in an unconscious race to win them to one or the other of these faiths. The first to reach them will win them to its system of religious teaching.

CHAPTER VIII
Buddhism

Burma is a land of Buddhism and pagodas. The pagodas are the shrines of the Buddhists. They are found all over Burma in almost countless numbers, in every condition from the newly-completed to the decayed structure. On the higher hills and mountains they are usually built on the most conspicuous spurs, where they can be seen to best effect from all the region round about. In the low hills the same principle is followed, the most conspicuous place being selected. On the flat plains among the rice fields they make artificial mounds, to serve as the site of their temples to be placed thereon.

In the Buddhistic system of religion the building of pagodas is accounted one of the chief works of merit. Their preservation is of little consequence, so that the country is dotted all over with multitudes of abandoned pagodas, overgrown with jungle and in all stages of decay. You can scarcely dig into any old mound anywhere in Burma without finding the brick outlines of some ancient pagoda.

Pagodas are all always built after one pattern. This pattern allows of a structure not higher than a man originally, being enlarged to the size of the Great Pagoda at Rangoon without change of architectural plan. In this respect the pagoda is probably the only style of building ever planned by man that has been commonly adopted, in which this structural possibility is found. The pattern is that of an irregular cone built of brick and earth, most commonly of brick, with the outer surface plastered. At the base is a little cavity, in which some precious relic is placed, and over this rises the solid structure of the pagoda. The base is usually circular, and the superstructure retains the same shape, excepting that it curves irregularly to smaller circles. The top is always finished with an umbrella-like structure often with rings suspended from its outer rim. The rims of the umbrellas are usually made of some kind of metal, from which are suspended a great number of bells. The bells are usually rung by a brass imitation of the leaf of the peepul-tree, the sacred tree of Buddhism. This leaf is loosely, suspended alongside of the bell, and as the gentle breeze peculiar to the tropics, especially Burma, puts them in motion, they gently tap the exterior of the bells. You are likely to be charmed with the delicate melodies of the bells until you come to feel what a hollow, comfortless system Buddhism is. A pagoda is a tomb, or at least a receptacle of relics of some revered personage. The ashes of a priest’s body that has been cremated are often put into a pagoda. Reputed remains of Gautama are, of course, the most valued. However extravagant the fiction that surrounds these cherished objects, the credulous Burman professes to believe in them absolutely. This is conspicuously true of the great temple at Candy in Ceylon, and the great Sway Dagon Pagoda of Rangoon. The managers of the former profess to have in their possession one of Gautama’s eyeteeth, which is shown to pious, or noted visitors. A story is invented accounting for the disappearance of three of these useful dentine members, but the fourth and only possible one, not accounted for otherwise, has found its way by the traditional route to the temple of Candy. It is there the object of great reverence, and pilgrimages, often from long distances, are made to this shrine in order to look upon and worship this tooth. That which is shown as the eyetooth of Gautama is a piece of bone about two inches long, and half an inch thick. It is as large as the tooth of a horse, and could not by any possibility ever have been one of any man’s set of teeth. It is in appearance much like a piece of smoked ivory. Yet this piece of bone is reverenced to a degree that perhaps no other relic of Buddhist tradition possesses. After making great offerings to their own pagodas, the Burmese, two years ago, made a beautiful golden casket and sent a pretentious commission to Candy with this casket, the gift of the Burmese Buddhists, as the permanent receptacle of this much-lauded tooth.

That which makes the great Sway Dagon Pagoda famous above all others, is that it contains relics of Gautama. The story is that Burmese merchants made their way to India, while Gautama was alive, and becoming converts of his teachings, or system of belief, they were about to return to Burma, when Gautama gave them some relics of his person, saying that while they kept these relics they would observe his system of doctrine. He then tore off a small piece of his priestly robe, gave them his simple begging bowl, and pulled eight hairs out of his head, and gave them these also as keepsakes and reminders of his teaching. These gifts they brought back to Burma, and over them erected a small pagoda, which formed the original portion of the present great structure that has become so far famed in the Buddhist world. The original structure must have been as insignificant as many that are seen elsewhere. But as time went on, and the invention, for it could have been nothing else as in the case of the eyetooth at Candy, was accepted, the pagoda became more and more famous, and its size was increased until its present dimensions were reached. It is now 1,350 feet round its base, and rises to the towering height of 328 feet. Its height is exceeded only by the pagoda at Pegu, but its general dimensions are far greater than the latter, and its fame has no rival. Reliable accounts of the time of building the original pagoda are wanting. But it is pretty certain that its present dimensions were reached some five hundred years ago. I have been unable to learn when it was first covered with gold leaf.

Shrine, Sway Dagon Pagoda

The structure of this pagoda has many other important features. Round its base are found many forms of elephants, and small pagodas that fairly line the lower circle. There are four shrines at the cardinal points of the compass. It will have been noted that the pagoda, unlike all other designs of sacred buildings given to worship, has no interior chamber. Excepting the small cavity given to the relic, there is solid masonry throughout the vast structure. But the most striking display of the pagoda is its covering of gold leaf. From base to top every inch is covered with this golden coat. The devout Buddhists are always renewing this gilding. No provision is made to prevent the rains that beat upon the pagoda for six months of each year from washing away this golden covering. Its rusty appearance on any part simply calls for more offerings for more regilding, by which the devout Buddhist expects to gain much merit. I have been unable to learn the cost of gilding the exterior, though it must be very great. The pagoda is regilded about twice in ten years. It is difficult to determine the cost, as the gilding is put on in patches. The renewal has never been done systematically, but by piece-meal. Besides this, the umbrella that crowns the pagoda and its pendent rings are studded with precious stones and jewelry to the value of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The four shrines are ornamented with hand-carving wrought out with great pains and skill. There are two very large chests near the entrance to the pagoda area, into which all devout Buddhists visiting at this temple drop their offerings. These gifts are taken care of by the trustees of the pagoda, and expended on its maintenance. Round about the temple is an open court, which would accommodate many thousands of visitors, and ofttimes it is crowded to its fullest capacity. On the outside of this court, and inside the walls that make up the four sides of the square known as pagoda hill, there is a grove of palms and peepul-trees. The latter is the sacred tree of Buddhism, and it is usually found wherever pagodas have been built. Underneath these trees, and entirely surrounding the pagoda inclosure, there are many large pavilions, most of them open to all comers, where images of Gautama are numbered by the hundreds. A few images of Gautama are in closed structures behind glass and iron bars. Other symbols of the Buddha or his teaching are there also; but images of Gautama are by far the most numerous. Gautama is represented as reclining on his right side, with his head supported by his hand; as sitting, which is the accepted position; and standing. These are three chosen attitudes. These three postures are all that are commonly used. The images are made of brass, of marble, and of alabaster. Some of them are of the normal size of a man, and some of them are many times larger, but all bear the impassive features of a man absorbed in meditation. These images always bear distinctly Burmanized features.

There are also great bells about the Sway Dagon Pagoda. The larger bells are supported on great wooden beams, and are rung by all the worshipers, and even by the idle passer-by. But the strange thing about all this area of the pagoda is that it is open to all peoples, and no objects except the inclosed images are protected in any way. This is not true of either Mohammedan mosques or Hindu temples. All Buddhists take off their shoes or sandals before going up the steps. And if any Asiatic should attempt to go up the stairs with shoes on, he would be ordered to make bare his feet. Europeans are not so restricted. But this appears to be the only special requirement for admission to the pagoda area. So it comes to pass that the devout Buddhist strikes the great bells with the wooden beam, or horns of an elk that are kept for that purpose, and the next passer-by may be an idle globe-trotter, who strikes the bell to only test the melody of its sound.

Worship at a pagoda is a study. The idea of worship in Buddhism differs so widely from that of any other religion, that it makes the student of comparative religions pause with astonishment. Buddhism is very much a religion of negations at best. There is little that is positive in it. There is no God according to pure Buddhism. It does not teach an unending personal immortality. The character of existence beyond death is believed to be through various transmigrations of beasts, demons, and elevated spirits to final extinction of personal existence in Nirvana. Continued existence is considered a calamity. To extinguish personality in Nirvana is the supreme goal. In that loss of personal identity man passes from under the necessity of being reborn. In all the struggle in which man is engaged he has no aid from without himself. His own meritorious acts must bring him through all lower existences, and finally drop him into the oblivion of neikban. Before men can reach this goal, they must have passed through myriads of existences, many of these lives being spent in hells filled with all tortures. The hells of Buddhism are filled with terrors measured only by the wildest imagination, lasting through millions of years. Buddhism is a system in which there is no God to hear a prayer or speak a consoling word. Then what is worship under such a religion, if indeed it be a religion? The people and the yellow-robed priests fill the spaces before these several shrines, and there offer flowers and food to the images of Gautama. Or they sit upon their heels about the open court that surrounds the pagoda, and offer their flowers toward the pagoda, lifting them toward the top of the gilded dome, while they laud the great teacher of Buddhism. In none of these acts is there any real prayer. There is no confessing of sin or need, nor hope even that Gautama can hear, as he is supposed to have ascended to Nirvana and to have attained to annihilation of conscious self. The whole of their worship seems to be made up of laudations of the name and character of Gautama, and his law, and the Buddhist priesthood. All worship consists in praise of an extinct personality on the part of a man whose highest hope is to attain unto like personal extinction! But in all the dreary and weary struggle there is no eye to pity and no hand to help to attain this goal of spiritual suicide.

Front of a Gautama Temple

One of the incongruities about this great pagoda I found in the fact that the watchmen are Hindus. Perhaps no temple of non-Christians, save that of Buddhists, is cared for by men of other faiths. Christian Churches in Southern Asia do often employ Hindus or Mohammedans to care for them and act as collectors of their funds. But none but Mohammedans go into a Mohammedan mosque, and only Hindus enter a Hindu temple. There sits a Mohammedan also inside the pagoda area selling coffee and bread to all who wish to buy. Bishop Thoburn once remarked that perhaps only in Burma, and that at a Buddhist place of worship, could such an incongruous sight be witnessed.

Another feature of the pagoda area is that at its four sides, east, west, north, and south, it is bounded by brick walls, rising four or five feet above the pagoda area, and of several feet in thickness. The Burmese fortified the pagoda, and the English have done likewise. At the base is another higher wall, and inside of this a moat. The English soldiery guard the pagoda hill, and the ordnance department of the British garrison stationed at Rangoon is inside the outer wall on the west of the pagoda. The guard is not seen about the court. In the northeast corner of the pagoda area are several graves of British officers and soldiers who fell in storming that fortress in 1852. From the southeast corner of the inclosure you see the slope up which that band of soldiers charged, and half down the hillside are a number of graves which are unnamed, and around them a wall is built. Here the common soldiers fell in that charge. They died for “Greater England.”

From the pagoda wall you can get one of the finest views in Lower Burma. To the south and southeast lies the greater part of the city of Rangoon. At the lower extremity of the city the Pegu and Rangoon Rivers unite their ample breadth of waters. The great rice mills line the river and its larger tributaries, and lift their tall chimneys above every other building of the city. To the left the beautiful Royal Lakes reflect the tropical sunlight in dazzling brightness, while to the northward the sweep of vision includes many stately houses of the residents of Kokine, the fashionable suburb of the city.

CHAPTER IX
Buddhism; How Maintained

The hoary system of Buddhism must have some elements of vitality to keep it in existence through the twenty-six centuries of its history. That it has long since passed the stage of its greatest power is quite easily believed. That such a system could remain the religion of progressive races under the light of the present and the future, as indicated by the present, few will maintain. That the number of its present adherents has been greatly exaggerated, there is no doubt. Some of the peoples which have been classed as Buddhistic in religion are clearly not distinctively of that faith.

Sir Monier Williams, in his great work on Buddhism, says that of real Buddhists, who are not more identified with some other religion than with it, number not over one hundred millions of adherents, instead of five hundred millions, as some have claimed. He declares that Christianity, and not Buddhism, is the strongest religion numerically in the world.

But a religion with even one hundred millions of reasonably faithful adherents of its doctrines and practices demands our respectful study. It is not possible within the limits here defined for the writer to discuss the many-sidedness of Buddhism, for all the elements of a faith must have consideration in an attempt to set it forth comprehensively. It is the writer’s intention merely to outline some features of Buddhism most apparent to a missionary whose work lies in a Buddhist country. Buddhism is said to be in its purest form in Burma and Ceylon.

A few general statements may be made. Buddhism never claimed to be divine in its origin. It was originally entirely atheistic. It is hardly entitled to be called a religion. It is the most pessimistic philosophy ever taught among men, or even conceived as yet, by any teacher. It inveighs against all natural desires or emotions however exalted, and disallows the holiest relationship. Society itself could not exist if the fundamental teachings of Buddhism were observed. All innocent joys are prohibited among those who would attain to Nirvana. It makes self-destruction the highest aim of man. To cease to be born, and to extinguish personal consciousness, is set before its followers as the final goal to be sought. How can such a system, so opposed to all that men love, find millions of adherents?

There certainly is a fascination about the supreme renunciation in the system. Gautama certainly renounced much; and doubtless many of his followers have made such a sacrifice of desires as he. It is not here maintained that this renunciation is wholly unselfish, but that it lies at the foundation of Buddhism; and however unhealthful a sentiment it is, it has always appealed to many minds. Those who will not make such renunciations themselves revere those who do, and help sustain a system that teaches such tenets.

Another source of the power of Buddhism is found in the system of doctrine taught. It is all the stronger in that, as a system, it is connected with a great teacher. It is true that Buddhism has more in it which Gautama did not teach, than of that which he did teach. But it is very easy for the Buddhist to connect any teaching of his religion directly with his idea of Gautama. When a religion with a system of doctrine meets with the nebulous beliefs and incoherent practices of demonology, or like beliefs, it must steadily gain adherents. Buddhism has a literature of much importance. To have sacred books, which can be appealed to in support of the voice of the living preacher, or teacher, is a great source of power. We see in Burma that the more backward races are becoming Burmanized and converted to the Buddhist religion. When they have become Buddhists, as in the case of Karens, it is the testimony of all missionaries that they are much more difficult to convert to Christianity. This Buddhist “law” is one of the three objects of reverence, or worship, enjoined by Gautama.

Gautama exalted the brotherhood of monks. They have become one of the three objects of veneration. Dressed in their yellow robes and admitted to the monastic order, they are thereby exalted in the minds of Buddhists far above the ordinary man. So much so, that in all addresses to them the highest terms of honor are used. On some occasions they are actually worshiped. When a monk, or poungyi, leaves the assembly of monks, which is frequently the case, he at once drops to the level of the ordinary man. But while he is a member of the order, he is regarded as a superior, worthy of all reverence even by his own family. These monks, with their yellow robes and beads and boy attendants, are everywhere, except at weddings and festivals, though often gathering in crowds a little apart from the latter. The daily going forth with the begging bowl to receive the food given by the devout, or even respectable laity, is an object-lesson in Buddhism. The distinctive buildings called choungs, in which the monks always live, are found in every village; and whole blocks of these buildings in all towns and cities proclaim the teachers of Buddhism. These houses of the monks are invariably the best buildings in the village. This conspicuous advertisement of the monastic teachers does much to keep the system which they represent ever before the people in a conspicuous way.

Buddhist Monk and Attendant

But the monks do two distinctive services for their faith of a more positive kind. They teach practically every boy in Burma. They teach the boys to read, and they indoctrinate them. No boy is considered to have a human spirit at all. He must remain an animal until he has spent at least one day in the monastery. But aside from this approach to the sacred order of monks, all Burmese boys attend school for some length of time, and usually learn to read their language passably well. They certainly learn the Buddhist doctrines. So it comes to pass that most Burmese know what they believe, however inconsistent with this belief they live. They also learn the elements of arithmetic, as well as the grotesque teachings of Buddhism in geography of these teachers. In estimating the strength of Buddhism, and its ability to maintain itself, the monastic school, uniting a religious order with the instruction of all the male childhood and youth, stands easily first of all its sources of power.

There are schools conducted by laymen in almost every large village. These schools do not generally have a continuous existence, but so long as a teacher can get scholars he keeps his school going. In these lay schools also some Buddhistic instruction is imparted. So that the Buddhist youth is the exception who has not been indoctrinated with Buddhist teaching. Without knowing why he is a Buddhist, nevertheless he proclaims himself as a Buddhist, and will give a fair statement of his belief. The missionary must bring his message to a mind pre-empted by Buddhist doctrine taught by the yellow-robed monk.

From this statement of the Buddhist school system of the Burmese, and to its power as a religious agency, the reader, as does the missionary, will see the imperative need of Christian schools to take the place of the Buddhist schools. Their efficiency as a missionary agency can not be over-estimated. Each of the large missions now operating in Burma has adopted this strategic agency with very encouraging results. Many Buddhists do not hesitate to send their boys to a mission school if it is equipped to do superior work. Here, then, is Christianity’s greatest opportunity among the young. That mission will show greatest wisdom which gives Christian schools of the higher grades special attention.

There are doctrines of Buddhism, aside from the moral precepts or regulations for the conduct or belief of its adherents, which may be, all unconsciously to the Buddhist, of great attraction. Buddhism, as has been noted, like most other Eastern philosophies, teaches that men pass through many births through countless ages, and transmigration through men, animals, and spirits. This transmigration may be endless, and will be, if the individual does not attain to Nirvana. Now, while a man’s place in the scale of being is determined by the conduct of the life that now is, there is nothing final in this life as affecting destiny. If he sinks in the scale of being, he can rise in the same by his conduct in another existence. The time taken to make his recovery from the consequences of his demerits in this life may be ages; still he can retain all that he has lost by a bad life here. It therefore comports with men’s wish that they can commit acts not wholly agreeable to the known or believed rules of conduct, and yet they believe they can escape after a long time the consequences of such trifling with their moral code. It is a pleasant belief of human nature, wishing to indulge in that which is forbidden, to sacrifice some future blessedness for a present gratification, if at the same time the man can believe that the loss may at some future time be recovered. To a temporizing conscience this is a very comforting doctrine.

Buddhism teaches that character and states of existence are determined finally by a man’s unaided efforts. Human nature in all lands takes kindly to such teaching. If men could purchase salvation at a price in payment or sacrifice of even life itself, there would be many applicants for eternal life, who will not receive it as a gift. Buddhism is very complimentary to self-conceit when it teaches that we need no God to enlighten us, no Savior to save us, but that we can recover ourselves. That only our own acts can affect our scale of being and ultimately determine our destiny, in every varying merit or demerit, is believed. Building and gilding a pagoda lays up a great store of merit, and to engage in meditation is the most meritorious work of all. Their whole system of the merit of works breeds inordinate conceit, and hence is a very pleasant doctrine to men. To save themselves, and not to be saved by the vicarious sacrifice of another, is pleasing to pride. I think all agree that this belief in self-acquired merit is one of the strongest bulwarks of Buddhism.

The student of religion who looks for its effect on the people, is at first perplexed at a singular paradox among the Burmese Buddhists. He finds a religion that frowns upon the innocent joys of life, and much more upon all spectacular demonstrations. It especially discourages theatricals and feasting. The natural effect of such a religion would be to depress the spirit and overshadow the life. It would pluck up all gayety from a people. But we find the Burmese Buddhists the gayest and most light-hearted race of the Orient. Their religion to the contrary, they have more music, dancing, and theatricals than any other people. And in all this they regard themselves as the most consistent Buddhists. They even connect a festival with almost every special religious duty. It therefore comes to pass that they harmonize festal joys with the utter prohibition of them by their religion, and count the practice and the “law” that interdicts it equally “good.” By observing this fact, it is clear that the drastic prohibitions of Buddhism have no place at all in life practice. If, therefore, this contradiction of Buddhism does not add to its strength, it at least allows the adherent to accept and reject such portions of the Buddhist law as may be convenient, and as suits his fun-loving and easy-going disposition. In this way the Burman comforts himself with the belief that he is a devout Buddhist, and at the same time escapes all the depressing effects on his nature that would result if he actually undertook to keep either the letter or spirit of the Buddhist law. So it appears this paradox is explained.

Funeral Pyre of a Burmese Priest

Examples of their ability to turn any circumstance into a festival is seen at their funerals. When an ordinary man dies the friends gather and bring food, and keep up a several days’ feasting. On the day of the funeral long lines of oxcarts are drawn up, each with some offering for the poungyis, or priests. These gifts to the priests seem to be about the only religious part of the ceremonies. Then with bands playing, and often dancers and buffoons performing at the head of the procession, they move away to the burial ground. On several occasions I saw half-drunken men carrying the coffin on a tall, loosely-constructed framework, dancing with all their might under their burden. Sometimes it seemed the coffin would fall to the ground.

I have seen the burial of a Buddhist nun where the procession contained sixty-one stands of presents, one for each year of the nun’s life, carried in front of the corpse. These presents were intended for the priests, and they enabled the donors to gain merit, make a show, and enjoy a festival all in one. The presents were of plates, towels, and carpets, amounting to about ten dollars a stand, or over six hundred dollars in value in all. The poungyis often preach against the festivals, but I have never heard that they ever refused to receive the presents, an indispensable feature of the display.

There are great festivals gotten up at the burning of a priest who has been much venerated. He may have enjoyed a reputation for great learning, and perhaps lived to a good old age. The body is kept, if the priest should die in the rainy season, until the dry weather brings a time suitable for camping in the fields. Arrangements having been completed, a place, usually a cleared rice field, is selected, and booths are constructed to accommodate the gathering people. Material is procured, and a very large skeleton framework of dry poles is constructed in imitation of the seven-fold roof of a monastery. This framework is covered over with matting and paper, on which is much ornament, usually of a pictorial character. Great ropes are drawn high up into the framework, where it is designed the coffin shall be placed before the burning. A procession is formed to bring the body in great state, with all kinds of symbolical banners and imitations of the sacred elephant. The casket is placed on these great ropes, and skillfully drawn into the tower of the structure. When the body is once in its place, the younger men hastily take up burning spears, as fire brands, and hurl them into the combustible material, and in an instant all is aflame. Soon there is nothing but ashes. The camp is broken up, and the people return home. They have had a great festival lasting in preparation over many days, and have performed a pious work of merit. They have violated much of Buddhist teaching; but by their spectacular festival they have helped to perpetuate Buddhism in the community. I witnessed preparation for one such burning near Rangoon. The firing of the pyre occurred on Sunday, amidst a great throng of all the nations represented in Burma. The full account was given in the daily papers, and it is said that thirty thousand dollars was spent in cremating the one body, that of a noted monk. Recent word from Mandalay tells of the cremation of the body of the chief bishop of Buddhism in Burma. It is said twenty thousand people were present at this festival. Yet the bishop had always preached that all festivity was wrong, and the whole Buddhist people declared the “law” was good.

The same contradictions are apparent in their theological teaching. One instance will suffice as an illustration. Fish is a common and much appreciated article of food in Burma, and has been for centuries. The people have come to regard fish as necessary to their food as rice. This creates a great demand for fish, and consequently calls for a multitude of fishermen. But by Buddhist teaching the fishermen, or the hunter, is doomed to the deepest hell for taking life. They teach that there are four great hells, one below another, and the fisherman is doomed to go to the bottom of the lowest hell, and can not get out till he spends fifty million years in each of the four hells. And only after that could he hope to be born a man again on earth. Meantime the well-fed Burman who fattens on the fish, who made the fisherman necessary, thinks he not only has no responsibility for the other’s sin, but is making good headway toward Nirvana! The fisherman, when interviewed, is quite at ease. Question him of the sin of taking the life of the fish, and he will confidently tell you: “I do not kill the fish. I only drag it out of the water, and the hot sun kills it.” Both declare themselves good Buddhists, and that “the Buddhist law is good.” It leaves liberty enough for any number of specious pleas to avoid personal responsibility for violating the Buddhist prohibitions, while the votaries of Buddhism are still pretending to keep the “law.”

CHAPTER X
Buddhism and Christianity Contrasted

Comparative religion is one of the most fascinating studies. In Christian lands well-informed people are ever ready to receive any new light on any of the principal religions of the world. In the East also there is inquiry after the tenets of differing faiths. It is true the inquiry in the Orient is confined to a few of the most advanced minds, and it is also doubtful if the inquiry is often fairly made. The disposition seems to be to assume, to begin with, that some religion like Hinduism, or Buddhism, is the religion of most truth, and then to show that Christianity has some things in common with these faiths. The deduction is then easily drawn that one can be an eclectic in religion. I have seen Europeans in the East who, in an off-handed way, would say: “It is wrong to try to convert the Burmese from their Buddhism to Christianity. Their religion is better for them than ours would be.” I have not heard such a remark from any one who pretended to be a Christian in any devout or spiritual sense. He would be a Christian only in the sense that he belonged to the European community, who are always called “Christians” by those of other faiths.

Buddhism has had much praise for its moral precepts, and its general practice of total abstinence from all alcoholic drinks. This prohibition has been widely observed. It is probable that Buddhism was the first religion to require total abstinence. Then Buddhism gave woman a freedom that no other religion of the East allows. Contrasted with Hinduism or Mohammedanism in this respect, Buddhism must be highly commended. But it is another matter when men assume that one religion is as good as another, or estimate Buddhism as a religion of comfort and light, when it has neither.

It is not the purpose of this book to attempt a comprehensive statement of comparative religions, much less a discussion of that idea. But it is my purpose to set before the reader that wherein Buddhism is contrasted with Christianity, believing that Christianity, and it alone, satisfies the wants of any human soul. I have desired to show wherein Buddhism fails in all essential features to measure up to this need of man for a perfect religion. It is not intended to disparage any incidental good that Buddhism may possess, but to show the contrast with Christianity in its fundamental teachings. In this I am not dependent on my own research, but can accomplish my purpose best by quoting from Sir Monier Williams. This great scholar and author published his works on Buddhism as a culmination of extended studies in the great religions of the world. It is the ripest fruit of his high scholarship. He published this work just a few years before he died. From his chapter on “Buddhism Contrasted with Christianity” I have quoted at length, believing his contrasts are exhaustive and entirely truthful.

This eminent author doubts if Buddhism is a religion at all. After postulating that every system assuming to be a religion must declare the existence of an eternal God, and the immortality of the soul of man, he further declares that such a system must satisfy four requisites:

“First. It must reveal the Creator in his nature and attributes to his creature, man.

“Secondly. It must reveal man to himself. It must impart to him a knowledge of his own nature and history—what he is; why he was created; whither he is tending; and whether he is at present in a state of decadence downwards from a higher condition, or of development upwards from a lower.

“Thirdly. It must reveal some method by which the finite creature may communicate with the infinite Creator—some plan by which he may gain access to him and become united with him, and be saved by him from the consequences of his own sinful acts.

“Fourthly. Such a system must prove its title to be called a religion by its regenerating effect on man’s nature; by its influence on his thoughts, desires, passions, and feelings; by its power in subduing all his evil tendencies; by its ability to transform his character and assimilate him to the God it reveals.”

This writer claims what all must admit, that early Buddhism failed in all these requisites, and was not a religion. It refused to admit a personal Creator, or man’s dependence on a higher power. “It denied any external Ego in man. It acknowledged no external revelation. It had no priesthood—no real clergy; no real prayer; no real worship. It had no true idea of sin, or of the need of pardon, and it condemned man to suffer the consequences of his own sinful acts without the hope of help from any Savior or Redeemer, and indeed from any being but himself.”

A few years ago a former bishop of Calcutta saw a Buddhist in a temple, and asked him, “What have you been praying for?” “I have been praying for nothing.” “To whom have you been praying?” He answered, “I have been praying to nobody.” “What, praying for nothing to nobody?” said the astonished bishop. This is a fair sample of the religious expression of Buddhists.

This eminent writer admits that later Buddhism has developed a great reverence for Buddha, the law, and the monkhood, which is some expression of man’s sense of need. But in reality this is a cry from the hungry heart of man for God, which Buddhism does not recognize nor foster. Pure Buddhism is atheistic. This author also considers what claim Gautama has to the title, “The Light of Asia.” He first points out that “his doctrines spread only over Eastern Asia, and Confucius, or Zoroaster, or Mohammed, might equally be called ‘The Light of Asia.’” He also maintains that Gautama was not a true light in any sense; that he claimed little higher than intellectual enlightenment resulting from intense concentration of all man’s intellectual powers in introspection. He did not claim to have any voice regarding the origin of evil, nor concerning a personal God. His “light,” in this respect, was “sheer darkness.” And so the system he founded is as devoid of “light” as midnight. “All that he claimed to have discovered was the origin of suffering and the remedy of suffering. All the light of knowledge to which he attained came to this: That suffering arises from indulging desires, especially the desire for the continuity of life; that suffering is inseparable from life; that all life is suffering; and that suffering is to be gotten rid of by the suppression of desires, and by the extinction of personal existence.”

Here he makes his first great contrast in the teachings of Christ and Gautama, and says in part: “It is noteworthy that both Christianity and Buddhism agree in asserting that all creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, in suffering, in tribulation. But mark the vast, the vital distinction in the teaching of each. The one taught men to be patient under affliction, and to aim at the utter annihilation of the suffering body.” Further: “But, say the admirers of Buddhism, at least you admit that the Buddha taught men to avoid sin, and to aim at purity and holiness of life! Nothing of the kind. The Buddha had no idea of sin as an offense against God; no idea of true holiness. What he said was, Get rid of the demerit of evil actions, and accumulate a stock of merit by good actions. And let me remark here, that the determination to store up merit, like capital at a bank, is one of those inveterate propensities of human nature, one of those deep-seated tendencies in humanity which nothing but the divine force imparted by Christianity can ever eradicate. It is forever cropping up in the heart of man, as much in the West as in the East, as much in the North as in the South; forever reasserting itself like a pestilential weed, or like tares amidst wheat, forever blighting the fruit of those good instincts which underlie man’s nature everywhere.”

He shows the contrast of Gautama and Christ; the former claiming to be self-sent, having no divine commission and no external revelation, while the latter claimed to be sent from God; to be the Son of God, whose every word has divine authority; that the gospel is to be proclaimed to every man in all generations, and that Christ himself was the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He proceeds to contrast the Christian Bible with the Buddhist: “The characteristics of the Christian’s Bible are that it claims to be a supernatural revelation, yet it attaches no mystic, talismanic virtue to the mere sound of words. On the other hand, Buddhism utterly repudiates all claim to be a supernatural revelation; yet the very sound of its words is believed to possess a meritorious efficacy capable of elevating any one who hears it to heavenly abodes in future existences. In illustration, I may advert to a legend current in Ceylon, that once on a time five hundred bats lived in a cave where two monks daily recited the Buddha’s law. These bats gained such merit by simply hearing the sound of the words, that when they died they were all reborn as men, and ultimately as gods.”

We are given another contrast in the kinds of self-sacrifice taught by the two systems. “But again I hear the admirers of Buddhism say: Is it not the case that the doctrine, like the doctrine of Christ, has self-sacrifice as its keynote? Well, be it so. I admit that he related of himself that, on a particular occasion in one of his previous births, he plucked out his own eyes, and that on another he cut off his own head as a sacrifice for the good of others; and that again, on a third occasion, he cut his own body to pieces to redeem a dove from a hawk. Yet note the vast difference of the sacrifice taught by the two systems. Christianity demands the suppression of selfishness; Buddhism demands the suppression of self, with the one object of extinguishing all consciousness of self. In the one the true self is elevated and intensified. In the other the true self is annihilated by a false form of non-selfishness, which has for its real object not the good of others, but the annihilation of the Ego, the utter extinction of the illusion of personal individuality.”

The doctrines which Christ and Gautama bequeathed to their followers present an equally great contrast. From the vast difference between them it is comparatively easy to believe the statement from Christ that he brought a divine revelation, and from Gautama that he was self-sent and had no revelation to make to his followers. The contrast between the two systems has been arranged by the same author.

“According to Christianity: Fight, and overcome the world. According to Buddhism: Shun the world, and overcome it.

“According to Christianity: Expect a new earth when the present earth is destroyed; a world renewed and perfected; a purified world in which righteousness is to dwell forever. According to Buddhism: Expect a never-ending succession of evil worlds coming into existence, developing, decaying, perishing, and reviving, and all equally full of everlasting misery, disappointment, illusion, change, and transmutations.

“According to Christianity, bodily existence is subject to only one transformation. According to Buddhism, bodily existence is continued in six conditions, through countless bodies of men, animals, demons, ghosts, and dwellers in various hells and heavens; and that, too, without any progressive development, but in a constant jumble of metamorphoses and transmutations.

“Christianity teaches that life in heaven can never be followed by a fall to a lower state. Buddhism teaches that life in a higher heaven may be succeeded by a life in a lower heaven, or even by a life on earth or in one of the hells.

“According to Christianity, the body of a man may be the abode of the Spirit of God. According to Buddhism, the body, whether of men or higher beings, can never be the abode of anything but evil.

“According to Christianity: Present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy, acceptable to God, and expect a change to a glorified body hereafter. According to Buddhism: Look to final deliverance from all bodily life, present and to come, as the greatest of all blessings, highest of all boons, and loftiest of all aims.

“According to Christianity, a man’s body can never be changed into the body of a beast, or bird, or insect, or loathsome vermin. According to Buddhism, a man, and even a god, may become an animal of any kind, and even the most loathsome vermin may again become a man or a god.

“According to Christianity: Stray not from God’s ways; offend not against his holy laws. According to Buddhism: Stray not from the eight-fold path of the perfect man, and offend not against yourself and the perfect man.

“According to Christianity: Work the works of God while it is day. According to Buddhism: Beware of action, as causing rebirth, and aim at inaction, indifference, and apathy.

“According to the Christian Bible: Regulate and sanctify the heart, desires, and affections. According to the Buddhist: Suppress and destroy them utterly, if you wish for true sanctification.

“Christianity teaches that in the highest form of life, love is intensified. Buddhism teaches that in the highest state of existence, all love is extinguished.

“According to Christianity: Go and earn your own bread and support your family. Marriage, it says, is honorable and the bed undefiled, and married life is a field on which holiness may grow and develop. Nay, more: Christ himself honored a wedding with his presence, and took up little children in his arms and blessed them. Buddhism, on the other hand, says: Avoid married life; shun it as if it were a burning of live coals; or, having entered on it, abandon wife, children, and home, and go about as celibate monks, engaging in nothing but in meditation and recitation of the Buddha’s Law—that is to say, if you aim at the highest degree of sanctification.”

Then comes greatest of all distinctions, which separates Christianity and Buddhism.

“Christianity regards personal life as the most sacred of all possessions. Life, it seems to say, is no dream, no illusion. ‘Life is real. Life is earnest.’ Life is the most precious of all God’s gifts. Nay, it affirms of God himself that he is the highest example of intense life, of intense personality, the great ‘I Am That I Am,’ and teaches us that we are to thirst for a continuance of personal life as a gift from him, nay, more, that we are to thirst for the living God himself and for conformity to his likeness; while Buddhism sets forth as the highest of all aims the utter extinction of the illusion of personal identity—the utter annihilation of the Ego—of all existence in any form whatever, and proclaims as the true creed the ultimate resolution of everything into nothing.”

“What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” says the Christian. “What shall I do to inherit the eternal extinction of life?” says the Buddhist.

Surely in this comprehensive list of contrasts the great scholar has shown that there is an immeasurable height of moral and spiritual philosophy, and revealed truth concerning God and man in the Christian religion that Buddhism never conceived. It has no excellence in moral precept that is not better stated by Christianity. Christianity sheds a broad, clear light on the way to find salvation from sin. Buddhism has no light, and no consolation. The human heart finds rest in the one, but the other can not bring a moment’s peace to any anxious or agonizing soul. Buddhism is a pessimistic, dark, and desolate system of philosophy, mistaken for religion.

CHAPTER XI
Ripened Fruit of Non-Christian Faiths

In setting before the reader the following account of painful scenes, most of which I have witnessed, in connection with religious rites, I am aware that some may say that these facts, though admitted to have taken place, are not characteristic of the religion in which they are found. Having given much attention to this pertinent question, I am convinced that they are some of the legitimate fruit of religious systems without Christ. This book is not written to theorize about religion, so much as to give an account of what a missionary sees living in Burma in direct contact with its varied people.

The theoretical teaching of Buddhism, Mohammedanism, or Hinduism may be one thing, while the practical religious usages may bear quite another character. A people may naturally be very agreeable and have many lovable traits, and yet their religious rites may degrade and not uplift the natural man. The saddest part of the following account is found in its degradation of the ordinary healthful sentiments of the people, in the name of religion.

Then, again, what is done openly in the name of any religion, is done that it may be seen and recognized as of that religion. Therefore, it is certainly characteristic. If the observance of this is repeated, or is related to that which is of frequent occurrence, it is certainly characteristic. That which is here recorded is the natural fruitage of the religions which cheat the natural hunger of the human heart for the favor of God, whom all have sinned against, but whose loving mercy is not known among these Christless millions.

Before giving an account of the cruelties still observed by devotees and fanatics, it is well to remember some terrible practices which have been abolished in recent years. These include suttee, or widow-burning, hook-swinging, the Juggernaut, and marriage of little girls. These were all religious practices, but they were abolished by the Government. Theoretically and practically, the English Government in India is neutral in religion. Only a Christian Government could be strictly neutral in religious matters, though other Governments at times have been tolerant of other faiths to some extent. By proclamation, the English rule in India is neutral in religion. This proclamation is adhered to literally, so that a Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist has just as much protection under the law as a Christian, and neither has any powers above the other.

How, then, does it come to pass that the Government has interfered in religious rites? This was done only when such rites actually took life, or endangered life. The Government’s first duty is to protect the lives of its subjects, even against self-destruction, where that is possible. Many questionable deeds are yet done by devotees in which the Government has not interfered, though some of them are exceedingly cruel, because they have not actually endangered life.

But suttee, or widow-burning, has been prohibited by the Government, though still practiced among the Hindus beyond the English border. Bishop Thoburn gives an account of the burning of four widows in Nepal, a little more than a quarter of a century ago. The dead husband had been high in the service of the Indian Government, and had been honored with a title by Queen Victoria. He was a Hindu, and he died over the border in Nepal, and four of his widows were burned with his body. This shows the spirit of Hinduism where it is not restrained by a Christian law. You can not burn people on any pretext under the British flag.

Hook-swinging was another horrible practice, which was put down in the same way. Devotees were placed on hooks suspended on long ropes fastened high above, and the hooks fastened deep in the flesh of the devotees. The body was then swung from side to side till its momentum tore the hooks from the flesh, and the torn and bleeding body fell to the ground, perhaps to die, certainly to be permanently maimed. The law suppressed this practice, and it is no longer perpetuated except in remote regions and under great secrecy.

The car Juggernaut, with its great idol, when drawn along the roads at the Juggernaut festival evoked such fanaticism that men threw themselves under its great wheels, and were crushed. This practice has been prohibited by law. The festival is still observed, but men do not throw themselves under the wheels. I have seen the great car, with its hideous idol, drawn past our mission-house in Rangoon, attended by thousands of Hindus, with all the noise and confusion of an Oriental procession; but there is no blood on its wheels now, and no crushed bodies are left in the street.

There was another even more terrible custom prevalent in India for ages, in which the Government had to interfere. It has for centuries been the custom of Hindus to give their little girls in marriage when tender children. They were married at ten or eleven years of age, or even at nine years. To appreciate this monstrous cruelty it should be remembered that a child of the same age in Western lands is much stronger than a child in India. There were many mothers in India at twelve years of age. The cruelties of this practice of child marriage were such that they can not be written. Let it be remembered that this practice existed for hundreds of years, and that practically all the Hindus approved it, although the sufferers were their own children. And when the terribleness of the practice was so pressed on the Government that it could not avoid taking action, and consequently framed a bill to raise the age of consent to twelve years, before which it would be unlawful to consummate marriage, the whole Hindu world rose up in protest. They charged the bill to the oppression of the Government. Fifty thousand Hindus met in public protest in the city of Calcutta. This protest was from Hindus directed against a righteous law for the protection of their children from this age-old cruelty!

To the writer it has been an experience of a painful kind to find a few Americans crying out against the “Oppression of England in India,” when they are only echoing the cry of the Hindus against the righteous law. But the law was enacted, and has had a wholesome effect so far as it is not evaded by false statements of the age of the girls, which are often made.

But if England had no other justification for her Government in India than these four enactments, the Government would have much to its credit. But these are legal protections thrown around her people to prevent them taking life, or perpetuating cruelty in the name of religion. If monstrous things are still done, it is a comfort to know that these named have been abolished.

Once each year a sect of Mohammedans torture themselves by running through the fire. This torture occurs during the feast which follows the Mohammedan fast, or lent. During this fast the Mohammedan community eat nothing from sunrise to sunset. They may eat a great deal after sunset and before sunrise. Having fasted in this manner for forty days, they feast for three days. But this does not include all of the community. There is a division of the Mohammedans dating back to the death of Mohammed. A quarrel then arose over his successor as leader of the Mohammedans. One party held to Hassan and Hoosan, the sons of the prophet; and the opposing party stood for another leader. This division led to war, in which Hassan and Hoosan were slain and their party defeated. This contention has been maintained until the present, and those of the conquering party are known as Sunni Mohammedans, and the followers of Hoosan and Hassan are called Shia Mohammedans. The latter will not feast with the other party, and take this occasion to torture themselves by running through the fire, as a protest against the opposing sect.

The preparations for this torture by fire are made deliberately, and it is carried out on a large scale. First of all, they must secure the permission of the Rangoon magistrate to this ordeal. Then they publish the places where it will occur, for it is celebrated in several localities on the same night. Ditches are dug deep enough to hold a great mass of coals, and two or more rods in length. On the day appointed, a large supply of dry wood being provided, a fire is kindled in the ditches about noon, and is kept burning until long after dark. Meantime the ditch has been filled with coals smoldering, and kept alive, but not allowed to burn to ashes. As the earlier hours of the night have been passing, multitudes of all nationalities have gathered at the scene of fire-running. They have to be kept at a distance by a cordon of rope stretched about a considerable circle. As midnight passes, a spirit of expectancy takes possession of the waiting multitude, which is increased by shouts and excitement in a side street not far away. These are all according to the Oriental’s idea of working up a climax of interest in his spectacular display. A little after midnight the fanatics who have been selected to undergo this torture come rushing from a side street, carrying banners and shouting in increasing excitement as they enter the arena and approach the fire on the run. Crowding close together at the end of the ditch of fire, they wave their banners, chant, shout, and shriek until a frenzy possesses them, and then they plunge into the fire with their bared feet and legs! The first man to leap into the fire sinks more than half way to his knees in the fiery pit, and the next step also, and so through the ditch. As might be supposed, he plunges through as fast as possible with his greatest strides. He is followed in turn by every other of the twenty or more fanatics of his company.

They immediately collect at the other end of the ditch, and with even greater frenzy than before scream, stamp the coals from feet, and plunge again through the ditch. So from end to end they rush till the coals are dragged out of the ditch clinging to their feet and legs, or are kicked out on the surrounding ground. Then the fanatics disappear, and the multitude of curious onlookers disperse.

This cruel practice is carried out every year among these Mohammedan immigrants to the province of Burma. The idea seems to be a frenzied appeal to God that their contention, settled by the sword in the defeat of their party twelve centuries ago, was right. This particular revolting exhibition may be a modern development; but if so, it is but another evidence of the growth of fanatical extravagance of an imperfect faith. But viewed in any light, it is a sad commentary on the Christless Mohammedan world in this twentieth century of the Christian era. It is a fact to be lamented that Christian missions are not generally directed to the adherents of the Mohammedan faith.

Lest it be thought that such fanaticism is only representative of the lower class of people, let this circumstance be noted. On one occasion my wife saw this “fire-running.” Just before the expected approach of the company designated to run through the fire, a finely-dressed Mohammedan merchant came within the ropes, with the air of a man who intended to act as a self-appointed master of ceremonies over these fanatics, lest they act too outrageously. But when the excitement of the occasion was on, and these common people were rushing through the fire, he began to show every indication of rising excitement. He sat down, rose up, sat down again. He took off one shoe, jumped up, and sat down again; then off came both stockings, and he plunged into the fire like any other of these frenzied people. This shows the terrible power of such enormities over even the self-poised Mohammedan merchant.

Another scene we witnessed among the Hindus, even more revolting than this annual exhibition among the Mohammedans. It was on a Sabbath-day, and Bishop Thoburn was with us on his biennial visit to Burma. The early morning service at the English Church had been concluded, and we were going to the mission-house in the cantonments. The day was growing almost intolerably hot, especially under the direct rays of the sun, as it was in the latter part of April, the hottest time of the year. As we rode along under the protection of our covered tum-tum, we saw just ahead of us in the middle of the Signal Pagoda Road, the main street between the city and the suburbs, an excited company of Hindu pilgrims and their attendants. It is a striking fact, too, that the scene we beheld was very near a Christian church located on that road—a Christian church dedicated to the worship of Him who died for all men—and here by the side of that edifice on that Lord’s-day, nearly twenty centuries after the gospel was proclaimed to a sin-darkened world, was enacted one of the most distressing cruelties of heathenism, and it is doubtful if the devotees, or their attendants, even dreamed of the salvation which every Christian temple should suggest! That Church does nothing for missions, being content to preach only to those who bear the Christian name.

There was a company of about twenty men, eight of whom were devotees, while the others urged them on their terrible way. Around each devotee’s neck was an iron ring supporting twenty-four small chains about two feet in length. On the end of each chain was a large hook made of wire, and these two dozen hooks were buried deep in the chest, sides, and back of each poor man. The flesh was raised in great welts over the buried hooks! But to add to the horrors of this torture, each man had an iron rod about the size of a slate-pencil thrust through both cheeks, passing through the mouth, of course. Another rod of equal size pierced the tongue, which was drawn out of the mouth as far as could be done without plucking it from its roots, the rod holding it in that drawn condition, as it was held against the face by the strained muscles. These hooks and iron rods piercing the flesh of body and face must have produced all the agony that the human frame could endure. Yet the cruelties of the heathen could add to even this. Most of the poorer natives of India go barefooted. But these devotees wore wooden sandals, not to protect the feet, but to torture them. Through these sandals from below nails were driven and sharpened above, so that every step each poor man took the weight of his body pressed upon the upturned nails, and must have produced a refinement of agony. To the natural weight of the body was added a wooden arch often used among this class of Hindus in Rangoon as a symbol, this arch being carried on the shoulder and adding possibly twenty pounds to press down his tortured body upon those upturned nails! These poor deluded sons of our unhappy race, these devotees of a Christless faith, were agonizing along this highway under a pitiless tropical sun, making their way to a Hindu shrine eight miles away! Their condition was indescribable. Their attendants were urging them forward with shouts, and were dashing water on their protruding tongues, seemingly untouched with pity at their agony.

The very sight of this torture made the heart sick. I doubt if any Christian man could have endured the sight for any length of time. An indescribable faintness began to sweep over me; and the bishop, who has a heart of great tenderness, could hardly speak; but as he turned to me I noted an expression of anguish on his face, as he said in broken tones: “That is the worst sight I have witnessed in thirty-five years in India; but that is the ripened fruit of idolatry.”

Let the reader again recall that this occurred in the closing years of the nineteenth century of our gospel era. Let him also be informed that among all these thousands of Hindu immigrants to India there is not one missionary giving his time to preaching Christ. The only reason there is not such a missionary is because there is no money in any mission treasury to send him. There is plenty of money in Christian hands. If the Christian men and women of those lands that are the heirs of all temporal blessings, and of the Christian joys of the gospel centuries, could realize the blackness of the night that has settled down on the Christless nations, who are heirs of thousands of years of increasing idolatry, they would hasten the messengers of life and light to these poor people.

If we turn to Buddhism and ask for correspondingly desperate conditions, we are at once assured that they are not found. Its friends would assure us of its elevated character as a religion. But I am sure we find a sad enough condition among some of the most faithful Buddhists, and a refinement of cruelty in all classes of the adherents of the teachings of Gautama. The building of a pagoda is regarded as the most meritorious deed, and even its repair or partial regilding gives a man honor and merit. But the serving of a pagoda renders a man an outcast. The only real outcast ever recognized in Burmese Buddhism, which is free from the Indian caste system, is the “pagoda slave.” Perhaps we ought to speak of this in the past tense, as the English rule has made it possible for these slaves to find their freedom, which was impossible under Burmese rule, though even this legal liberty is not recognized by the Buddhists.

Under Buddhist, or Burmese, order, whole families were set apart for the pagoda service. Once in that service they were despised by their self-respecting co-religionists, and their children after them forever suffered their disabilities. Sometimes a certain number of families in a village were arbitrarily picked up and set down at the pagoda for this purpose, henceforth to be banished from the circle of respectability. Never could any man get out of this degraded service. The heaviest penalties were laid upon any who tried to aid him or his family to escape to any other calling.

Why this strange degradation of men and women who serve the pagoda, when the building of a pagoda exalts its builder here and hereafter, does not seem to be explained. Personally, I think it one of the stony-hearted cruelties natural to this faith. The priests were fed daily out of the household’s store; but the pagoda caretaker had to fight with the ownerless dogs, with which Burma abounds, for some of the food offered to the images of Gautama! When the slave died he could not have respectable burial. Sometimes his body was thrown out with the refuse for the dogs to eat. This settled policy of Buddhism may be truly said to be one of its perfected fruits, not mentioned by the friends of the faith from Western lands.

Under British rule these people were allowed to become sellers of supplies for the pagoda service, or to go away where, unknown and carefully disguising their former life, they might work into some respectable occupation, but never with the consent of Buddhist priests or self-respecting laymen, who had always despised the servant of the temple. But the sight which always met the observers when visiting the great Sway Dagon Pagoda in Rangoon until recent years, was the line of lepers always piteously begging along its ascending steps. They were classed with the pagoda slave, and were despised. It can not be said that they were really pitied, even though some corn or rice and an occasional copper coin were thrown them by the Buddhist climbing the stair to Gautama’s shrine. These lepers were born on these steps, diseased, rotted, and died there! A more pitiable sight was never witnessed than these poor, suffering creatures, practically expelled outside the bounds of Buddhist sympathy for no fault of character or conduct. Of course, the Buddhist would say that the leper’s foul disease was the demerit of some past existence, and therefore he suffers justly in his loathsome condition, and his ostracism from human sympathy! But this is only another heartless invention of a much overrated religion.

The reader will have made the contrast. Centuries of labor and millions in gifts to raise and perfect the great pagoda and to gild it and to bejewel its tinkling bells, all in honor of eight human hairs; while its own faithful adherents suffer and die without so much as a shed being built to shelter them! Millions for gilding brick and mortar, and not the least coin to build a hospital for suffering and despairing men! This is Buddhism’s fruitage of the centuries. Let him praise the tender sympathies of this faith who will. To me it is one of the most heartless systems taught among men. The leper was an outcast here, and taught to believe millions of years of existence in hell were awaiting him hereafter. This was his portion in Buddhism.

Turn now and witness what Christianity has done for him. Within the decade of my writing, the Christian missions of Burma became strong enough to put their sympathies underneath the long suffering lepers. A Scotch leper mission is aiding the Wesleyans at Mandalay. Later the Baptists in Moulmein, and the Catholics on their own account in Rangoon, built leper asylums, the Government aiding also in their support; and the lepers in every municipality in Burma have been gathered into these Christian institutions, their sores bound up, medicines to alleviate their sufferings given, abundant food and suitable clothing provided, the first time to most of them during their agonized lives. Best of all, the gospel, with its help, love, and hope, is preached to them who had been bound to suffering for ages to come by their own religious system! If to the question, “Do missions to the Burmese Buddhists pay?” there could be offered only these three leper asylums, they would warrant the answer, “Yes.”

One very hot afternoon I went with an assistant of the Wesleyan Leper Asylum, and took twenty-five of those lepers off the steps of the Sway Dagon Pagoda, and securing their passage money from the Rangoon municipality, I sent them off to Mandalay. Later I visited that city and the asylum, and there beheld one hundred and forty of the lepers gathered from many places in Burma. They were so well cared for as to seem almost content in spite of their physical suffering. They were fed, clothed, and had the gospel preached to them in the true Christian spirit. Some of them were filled with peace and joy by conscious communion with Him who is so mightily preached by this institution of mercy. There was one leper, with hands and feet fallen off, an eye gone, and the tongue nearly eaten away; still on the piece of a face that remained there shone a light seen only on the face of the man who communes with God. In this glad vision I had my reward in having aided in a small way to send so many afflicted ones to this Christian haven. A thousand times since I have been made glad with the memory of what seemed that hot afternoon a very commonplace piece of work. But as it retreats into the past, and I know every poor sufferer will have had Christian care all his days, it came to be recognized as one of my greatest privileges as a missionary to have had some part in this work.