My neighbour was indignant; my Superintendent of Police was distressed at me; my Commissioner evidently thought me slack—"no energy." The fact is I was puzzled, and would do nothing till I saw clearly. So six months went on.
What would have happened eventually had nothing more come out I can't say, but something more did come out—the broker came out. He was recognised in Mandalay and immediately arrested—for pretending to be alive when he was really dead, I suppose—and sent to me. I asked him what had occurred, and he confessed that he was deeply in debt to money-lenders and had made up this scheme to defeat them. He had left his pony, gone down to the river, crossed in a canoe, and gone into hiding. While he was "dead" his wife had compounded with his creditors.
I sent him back to my neighbour with the emphatic warning that if his broker ever came up my way again he would certainly be done for in good earnest. The whole district had been turned upside down for him, and he was not popular.
Now the points that I wish all this to illustrate are these: Men at the head-quarters of Government, out of touch with real life, read the Track Law, think it most useful and just, and insist on its being enforced. Officers on the spot, accustomed to accept all law as the epitome of justice, follow the Act without thinking. The responsibility is really on them, as Government tells them to judge each case on its merits, but they fear that if they reported that no case under the Track Law ever had any merits they would be written down as "wanting in energy." As they have not been trained to think for themselves, they do not do so. They fulfil all the requirements of the Act, and are satisfied. Moreover, subsequently, to justify their own action they must praise the Act. Therefore a vicious circle is created. Government says: "District officers praise the Act, therefore have it stringently enforced, for they know its actual value." And district officers say: "Government declares this to be an admirable Act, therefore I must enforce it." No one ever investigates the facts. If a district officer have doubts, he discreetly smothers them as babies, lest they grow.
And this is but one instance. I mention in a later chapter a still more striking case of this sort of action; and even many examples would not expose its whole evil. It is the spirit that renders such things possible that is disastrous. So are officers trained to believe that when anything untoward happens they must do something—they must punish somebody. The idea that if they act without full knowledge the something they do will be wrong and the persons they punish will be innocent is not allowed to intrude. They will, of course, always act by law, but then, "summum jus, summa injuria." In the old days this could not have happened. In the first place, Government trusted its officers, and its trust was not misplaced; now it trusts its laws; yet there is nothing so unintelligent, nothing so fatal as rigid laws—except those who believe in them. In the second place, officers with the personality and knowledge of the men of former days would have insisted on seeing for themselves and judging for themselves. They would have cared nothing that they might be supposed not to have "energy." They would know they had something better than that—they had understanding.
The possibility of making our laws and our government generally endurable to the people depends on the personality of the district officer.
Nowadays he is sent out with his personality crushed, and it gets still more crushed out there. He becomes in time not a living soul but a motor-engine to drive a machine. Whatever knowledge he acquires is of the people's faults and not their virtues. When you hear an official praised as "knowing the Indian" or "the Burman," you know that it means that he knows his faults. He knows the criminal trying to escape, the villager trying to evade revenue. It doesn't mean that he knows more than this. Some do, especially among the police and the forest officers, but then they have no influence.
As showing the difference between the old officer and the new I make the following extract from A City of Sunshine, by Alexander Allardyce. Few books on the East have been written with a clearer understanding.
"Mr. Eversley, the collector, was an official of a type that has almost passed away. He had been brought up in the strictest traditions of the Haileybury school and had adhered all his life to the conservative principles of the 'old civilianism.' When the 'Competition Wallah' came in, Eversley foresaw certain ruin to the English interests in India. 'Competition Wallahs!' he used to exclaim—'as well put the country under a commission of schoolmasters at once. But we'll lose the country with all this Latin and Greek; take my word for it we'll soon lose the country.' Mr. Eversley had never been able to make a hexameter in the whole course of his life, and there is grave reason to doubt that he was ignorant of even the barest elements of the Greek accidence. But he had acquired a marvellous colloquial familiarity with the Eastern vernaculars, and he knew the habits and feelings of the Bengalee better than any other officer in the Lower Provinces. There was no chance of Eversley falling into such a blunder as that which was laid to the charge of Muffington Prigge, the magistrate of the neighbouring district of Lallkor, who once, in taking the deposition of a witness in a criminal case, had expressed his displeasure that evidence of such importance should be given on the authority of a third person, and ordered the police to bring 'Fidwi' before him. The witness gave his evidence in the third person out of respect. Instead of saying 'I saw' he said 'Fidwi (your slave) saw.' Muffington Prigge's judgments had been more than once spoken of with encomiums by Mr. Justice Tremer in the Appeal side of the High Court, but Mr. Eversley's law never came before the High Court except to be reprobated. Lawyers complained that he did not know even the rudiments of the Codes; but there was no magistrate in the Lower Provinces whose decisions were received with more general satisfaction or from whose judgments there were fewer appeals. His rough-and-ready way of settling cases was better relished than the elaborate findings of the Lallkor archon which were generally unintelligible to the suitors till they had fee'd their lawyer to tell them which side had won.
"The people knew that Eversley would do what he saw to be right, independent of Act or Code, and they had more confidence in his sense of justice than in the written law."