It is a custom when a young civilian joins to send him to a district head-quarters for six months first, to learn his way about before posting him to any specified work. One such was sent to me ten years ago, and if I give an account of him it will do for all. For nowadays they are all turned out of the same mill, have all the same habits of mind and thought, and their personalities are submerged. If anything, he of whom I speak was above the average in all ways.
He was a very nice young fellow, with charming manners, and I greatly liked him.
He became an officer of great promise, and would have risen high, but he is dead now, and therefore what I say now cannot offend anyone. Besides, I have nothing to say that would offend. He was, I think, twenty-three years of age, of good people, educated at a public school and Oxford, and was as nice a boy as could be found. He had passed high in the examinations. He was said to be clever, and as regards assimilating paper knowledge, he was able, but his mind was an old curiosity shop. He had fixed ideas in nearly everything. He was full of prejudices he called principles, of "facts" that were not true. He had learnt a great deal, he knew nothing; and worse—he did not know how to obtain knowledge. He wanted his opinions ready-made and absolute first, and only sought for such facts as would support those principles. He had no notion how to make knowledge by himself. He wanted authority before he would think. Give him "authority," and he would disregard or deny fact in order to cling to it. I will take a concrete instance.
There is amongst Englishmen in Burma a superstition that the Burmese do not and cannot work. They are "lazy." The men never work if they can help it, and all the work that is done is done by women. How this idea arose is an interesting study in the psychology of ignorance, but I need not enter into that now. The idea obtains universally, and is an acknowledged shibboleth. My young assistant was not with me many days before he brought it up.
"Oh," he said, "the Burman is so lazy."
"You are sure of that?" I asked.
He stared at me. "Why, everyone says so."
"Everyone said four hundred years ago that the sun went round the earth," I answered; "were they right?"
"You don't mean to tell me," he said, "that the Burmese can work."
"I don't mean to tell you anything," I answered. "Here are a quarter of a million Burmese in this district. Find out the facts for yourself."