tand, for we have none of it. And he carries it to an extent that
sometimes surprises us.

Suppose you are walking along a road and there is a broken bridge on the
way, a bridge that you might fall through. No one will try and prevent
you going. Any Burman who saw you go will, if he think at all about it,
give you the credit for knowing what you are about. It will not enter
into his head to go out of his way to give you advice about that
bridge. If you ask him he will help you all he can, but he will not
volunteer; and so if you depend on volunteered advice, you may fall
through the bridge and break your neck, perhaps.

At first this sort of thing seems to us to spring from laziness or from
discourtesy. It is just the reverse of this latter; it is excess of
courtesy that assumes you to be aware of what you are about, and capable
of judging properly.

You may get yourself into all sorts of trouble, and unless you call out
no one will assist you. They will suppose that if you require help you
will soon ask for it. You could drift all the way from Bhamo to Rangoon
on a log, and I am sure no one would try to pick you up unless you
shouted for help. Let anyone try to drift down from Oxford to Richmond,
and he will be forcibly saved every mile of his journey, I am sure. The
Burman boatmen you passed would only laugh and ask how you were getting
on. The English boatman would have you out of that in a jiffy, saving
you despite yourself. You might commit suicide in Burma, and no one
would stop you. 'It is your own look-out,' they would say; 'if you want
to die why should we prevent you? What business is it of ours?'

Never believe for a moment that this is cold-heartedness. Nowhere is
there any man so kind-hearted as a Burman, so ready to help you, so
hospitable, so charitable both in act and thought.

It is only that he has another way of seeing these things to what we
have. He would resent as the worst discourtesy that which we call having
a friendly interest in each other's doings. Volunteered advice comes, so
he thinks, from pure self-conceit, and is intolerable; help that he has
not asked for conveys the assumption that he is a fool, and the helper
ever so much wiser than he. It is in his eyes simply a form of
self-assertion, an attempt at governing other people, an infringement of
good manners not to be borne.

Each man is responsible for himself, each man is the maker of himself.
Only he can do himself good by good