to those who have wealth and leisure, were wanting
to these ministers of the king. Natural capacity many of them had, but
that is not of much value until it is cultivated. You cannot learn in
the narrow precincts of a village the knowledge necessary to the
management of great affairs; and therefore in affairs of state this want
of any noble or leisured class was a very serious loss to the government
of Burma. It had great and countervailing advantages, of which I will
speak when I come to local government, but that it was a heavy loss as
far as the central government goes no one can doubt. There was none of
that check upon the power of the king which a powerful nobility will
give; there was no trained talent at his disposal. The king remained
absolutely supreme, with no one near his throne, and the ministers were
mere puppets, here to-day and gone to-morrow. They lived by the breath
of the king and court, and when they lost favour there was none to help
them. They had no faction behind them to uphold them against the king.
It can easily be understood how disastrous all this was to any form of
good government. All these ministers and governors were corrupt; there
was corruption to the core.

When it is understood that hardly any official was paid, and that those
who were paid were insufficiently paid, and had unlimited power, there
will be no difficulty in seeing the reason. In circumstances like this
all people would be corrupt. The only securities against bribery and
abuse of power are adequate pay, restricted authority, and great
publicity. None of these obtained in Burma any more than in the Europe
of five hundred years ago, and the result was the same in both. The
central government consisted of the king, who had no limit at all to his
power, and the council of ministers, whose only check was the king. The
executive and judicial were all the same: there was no appeal from one
to the other. The only appeal from the ministers was to the king, and as
the king shut himself up in his palace, and was practically inaccessible
to all but high officials, the worthlessness of this appeal is evident.
Outside Mandalay the country was governed by _wuns_ or governors. These
were appointed by the king, or by the council, or by both, and they
obtained their position by bribery. Their tenure was exceedingly
insecure, as any man who came and gave a bigger bribe was likely to
obtain the former governor's dismissal and his own appointm