He would suppose it was intended to make him better, that he should
leave gaol a better man than when he entered, and he would take the
intention for the deed. Under his own king things were not much better.
It is true that very few men were imprisoned, fine being the usual
punishment, but still, imprisonment there was, and so that would not
seem to him strange; and as to the conduct of his master, he would be
content to leave that unexplained. The Buddhist is content to leave many
things unexplained until he can see the meaning. He is not fond of
theories. If he does not know, he says so. 'It is beyond me,' he will
say; 'I do not understand.' He has no theory of an occidental mind to
explain acts of ours of which he cannot grasp the meaning; he would only
not understand.

But the pity of it--think of the pity of it all! Surely there is
nothing more pathetic than this: that a sinner should not understand the
wherefore of his sentence, that the justice administered to him should
be such as he cannot see the meaning of.

Certain forms of crime are very rife in Burma. The villages are so
scattered, the roads so lonely, the amount of money habitually carried
about so large, the people so habitually careless, the difficulty of
detection so great, that robbery and kindred crimes are very common; and
it is more common in the districts of the delta, long under our rule,
than in the newly-annexed province in the north. Under like conditions
the Burman is probably no more criminal and no less criminal than other
people in the same state of civilization. Crime is a condition caused by
opportunity, not by an inherent state of mind, except with the very,
very few, the exceptional individuals; and in Upper Burma there is, now
that the turmoil of the annexation is past, very little crime
comparatively. There is less money there, and the village system--the
control of the community over the individual--the restraining influence
of public opinion is greater. But even during the years of trouble, the
years from 1885 till 1890, when, in the words of the Burmese proverb,
'the forest was on fire and the wild-cat slapped his arm,' there were
certain peculiarities about the criminals that differentiated them from
those of Europe. You would hear of a terrible crime, a village attacked
at night by brigands, a large robbery of property, one or two villagers
killed, and an old woman tortured for her treasure, and you would
picture the perpet