ent.
Consequently the usual tenure of office of a governor was a year. Often
there were half a dozen governors in a year; sometimes a man with strong
influence managed to retain his position for some years. From the orders
of the governor there was an appeal to the council. This was in some
matters useful, but in others not so. If a governor sentenced a man to
death--all governors had power of life and death--he would be executed
long before an appeal could reach the council. Practically no check was
possible by the palace over distant governors, and they did as they
liked. Anything more disastrous and fatal to any kind of good government
than this it is impossible to imagine. The governors did what they
considered right in their own eyes, and made as much money as they
could, while they could. They collected the taxes and as much more as
they could get; they administered the laws of Manu in civil and criminal
affairs, except when tempted to deviate therefrom by good reasons; they
carried out orders received from Mandalay, when these orders fell in
with their own desires, or when they considered that disobedience might
be dangerous. It is a Burmese proverb that officials are one of the five
great enemies of mankind, and there was, I think (at all events in the
latter days of the kingdom) good reason to remember it. And yet these
officials were not bad men in themselves; on the contrary, many of them
were men of good purpose, of natural honesty, of right principles. In a
well-organized system they would have done well, but the system was
rotten to the core.

It may be asked why the Burmese people remained quiet under such a rule
as this; why they did not rise and destroy it, raising a new one in its
place; how it was that such a state of corruption lasted for a year, let
alone for many years.

The answer is this: However bad the government may have been, it had
the qualities of its defects. If it did not do much to help the people,
it did little to hinder them. To a great extent it left them alone to
manage their own affairs in their own way. Burma in those days was like
a great untended garden, full of weeds, full of flowers too, each plant
striving after its own way, gradually evolving into higher forms. Now
sometimes it seems to me to be like an old Dutch garden, with the paths
very straight, very clean swept, with the trees clipped into curious
shapes of bird and beast, tortured out of all knowledge, and many of the