Ten years in Burma

by Julius Smith

The Government has also devised a great school system to aid in popular education. The schools of Southern Asia have been almost entirely in the hands of the various religions of the land. The Government has undertaken to work out a plan by which a very large part of this education can be put under popular control, and yet be allowed to remain under the direction of the various religious communities that conduct schools. Of course, under the old order there was but a small part of the community allowed to go to school, and the teaching was of an inferior kind. Government would promote education and give a fixed standard. To do this they had to put the secular instruction of all schools under the Government, and allow the religious instruction to be carried out according to the ideas of every society concerned. So that we witness Mohammedan, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist schools, all drawing aid from Government, and all passing the same Government examinations in secular subjects, but each imparting its own religious instructions. To aid in this educational scheme, the Government will give grants in putting up buildings, in paying accredited teachers, and in giving grants to current expenses on passes secured in Government examinations. In addition, the Government has built up certain schools entirely under its control, where no religion is taught.

In all this it will be seen that the Government, in keeping with its declared purpose and position, is neutral in the matter of religion. It ought to be clear to all who will see it, that the Christian Church should avail itself of all this educational plan that is possible, so as to mold the minds of all the young in Christian principles. Nearly all mission schools are identified with this educational system, but there is opportunity for much more of the same kind of work.

There is another great and merciful arm of Government to be mentioned. In every municipality, and even in large villages, there is hospital treatment for all who need medical or surgical aid. All this is freely given to every applicant.

All cities and large towns have great hospitals where medicines and food and shelter in bad cases are given freely to men of all races and creeds. No disease is turned away, and no sick man denied attention. This charitable effort of Government is far-reaching in its beneficence. It is not so valuable as it might be, because it has a prejudice of the populace to deal with. But the amount of suffering that is relieved by Government in all the empire is enormous.

In cases of epidemics there is a Government order to fight the disease in an organized way. If it is smallpox, which is very prevalent, public vaccination is enforced. Cholera epidemics are taken in hand vigorously, water purified, and quarantine established, until the pestilence is put under control.

The last four years has called out all the agencies of a great Government to battle with the Bubonic plague and the famine. It is now more than four years since the plague began its ravages in India, and a little over three years since the famine began its course of devastation. Both of these dire visitations were grappled with from the start, and the battle is still being waged.

A competent board of physicians and a large force of skilled nurses were quickly organized, and they have been unremitting in their efforts, and many of these have fallen victims to their difficult and dangerous duty. A system of inspection was at once established on all railroads and steamship lines throughout India and along its coasts. Every traveler, irrespective of race or rank, has been examined by medical experts. Yet in spite of this precaution the deadly scourge has insidiously worked its way almost throughout the empire. But still the Government grapples with the pestilence. One can feel something of its terrors when it is noted that ninety-four per cent of all who are seized by the plague die. Six hundred thousand have died of the plague in five years. The greatest hostility has been shown at times by the native population, in opposing the most necessary plague regulations.

With plague almost all over the empire, the Government had at the same time to undertake a most extensive plan for relieving a famine that was ever undertaken by any Government in human history. The famine had only one immediate cause—the lack of rain. The greater rains over almost all India occur between June and September. For years on overlapping territory the rains failed, or were deficient. The world knows the story. One-fourth of the nearly three hundred millions of this population of the empire were in the terrors of famine, with its slow starvation of man and beast, with its attendant cholera, plague, and other diseases. It is worthy of cordial recognition and perpetual memory that this gigantic specter was met by a Christian Government. It was not a Mohammedan or Hindu people which fought back this monster calamity, but a Government and a people whose sympathies were Christian. The Christians hurried to the relief of those of non-Christian belief and alien people, and hardly thought of their race or religion. They only knew they were starving communities of fellow-beings, and they put forth supreme efforts to relieve their hunger and other ills due to the famine. Yes, this was done by a Christian Government, aided by private Christian beneficence of distant lands, while their own co-religionists, having money in many cases, owning nearly all the grain in the empire, enough to have fed all the hungry at every stage of the famine, gave practically nothing for famine relief! They held their feasts, organized their tiger hunts, looked on the dance of the impure nautch-girl, and reveled while their people starved and died, or owed their life to a foreign race of the Christian faith.

The Government of India spent $92,650,000 on famine relief during 1899 and 1900. The relief works were open nearly two years before that, and help on a large scale continues still. This is the most gigantic effort of all human history to meet a great national calamity. Strange that these noble and statesman-like efforts should have been belittled by any, much less by some who should have known better.

The census of 1901 has been gathered, and these columns of figures tell their sad story of suffering and death in the famine districts. Of India’s two hundred and eighty-six millions of ten years ago, sixty-six millions were residents in native-protected States. The census of 1901 shows that British India increased its population by ten millions, while the peoples of the native States decreased three millions. British territory increased its population by four and one-half per cent, and the-native States decreased by four and one-half per cent.