The Shan States were in a very troubled state, but a good beginning had been made, and Mr. Hildebrand had nearly succeeded in breaking up the Limbin Confederacy (vide Chapter XV.). But throughout the plateau dacoities were rife and petty wars were raging. Wide tracts were laid waste, and the peasantry, deserting their fields, had joined in the fights or gone across the Salween. Great scarcity, perhaps in some cases actual famine, resulted, not from failure of rain, but from strife and anarchy. And this reacted on Burma proper, for some of the Shan States on the border gave the dacoits encouragement and shelter.
The whole of Upper Burma at this time was in military occupation. There were one hundred and forty-one posts held by troops, and yet in wide stretches of country, in the greater part of the Chindwin Valley, in the Mogaung country and elsewhere, there was not a soldier. The tide, however, was on the turn. The officers in command of parties and posts were beginning to know the country and the game, while the dacoits and their leaders were losing heart. The soldiers had in fact completed their task, and they had done it well. What remained to be done was work for the civil administrator.
The first and essential step was to enable the civil officers to get a firm grip of their districts. For this purpose a civil police force, recruited from the natives of the country, was necessary. Without it, detection and intelligence were impossible. Commissioners and generals were alike unanimous on this point.
The next thing was to provide an armed force at the disposal of the district officer, so that he should be able to get an escort immediately—for there was no district where an Englishman could yet travel safely without an armed escort—and should be able also to quell risings and disperse ordinary bands of insurgents or brigands without having to ask assistance from the army. The military police had been designed and raised for these purposes, and the men were being distributed as fast as they arrived from India.
The relations of the district officers to the commandants of military police and of the latter to the civil police officers, and the duties and spheres of each, had to be defined. I had drafted regulations for these purposes, and was waiting for the appointment of an Inspector-General to carry them out. It had been decided before I left Calcutta that a soldier should be selected for this post. The military police force was in fact an army of occupation sixteen thousand strong. Many of them were old soldiers who had volunteered from the Indian regiments, the rest were recruited mainly from the fighting races of Northern India. And they were commanded by young officers, some of whom had come with somewhat exalted ideas of their independence. It was imperative, therefore, to get an able soldier who could look at matters from all points of view, and who could manage men as well as command them. For it required a delicate touch to avoid friction between the military and civil members of the district staff. Some of the civil officers were young, some were quite without experience, and some were inferior to the military commandants in force and ability.
In April, 1887, Colonel E. Stedman, commanding the 3rd Gurkhas, who had accompanied Mr. Hildebrand to the Shan States, was appointed to be Inspector-General of Police in Upper Burma, with the military rank of Brigadier-General. Among the many able officers of the Indian Army it would have been hard to find another man equally adapted to the work. I had reason to be grateful to General Stedman (now Sir Edward Stedman, G.C.B., K.C.I.E.) and to the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts (then Sir Frederick), who selected him.
On the 21st of March, 1887, I wrote to Lord Dufferin regarding the relations of the district and police officers as follows: "The relations between Deputy Commissioners, District Superintendents (Civil Police) and Commandants (Military Police) are ill-defined and work badly, unless all are really good fellows. I have decided to keep the Commandant to his military work, and the District Superintendent of Police to the real civil police duty—intelligence, detection, and investigation. The Deputy Commissioner has by law supreme control and must exercise it.... The Deputy Commissioners have no hold on their districts, and through the absence of a civil police they get no intelligence and no touch with the people. Hence our military parties sometimes go wandering about blindly, unable to get any information. There must be a completely separate trained body of Burman Civil Police, trained not to arms but to their police duties.... I have got orders under issue about the location of posts and everything connected with them and the constitution of the police in them. We must have some Burmans and some Civil Police Burmans in every police post, and I think in every military post also."
The details of these matters could not be settled until General Stedman came to take up the work. Meanwhile I must return to affairs at Mandalay.