BURMESE "LAZINESS"
The question of laziness and want of energy is a very interesting one, and is not so simple as it appears at first sight. Because the Burman is glad to leave the rough labour of coolies and the dreary duties of cooking foreign food and performing the routine work of house-servant to the Madrasi, and because he is seen smoking big cheroots and wearing silk clothes much too good to work in while his active wife carries on the business of the bazaar, the strenuous Englishman, who knows so well what incessant hard work has done in building up the greatness of his own nation, is at first inclined to regard him with scorn and impatience. Perhaps because I am conscious of a secret sympathy with a life of what I may call intelligent indolence, I am not disposed to execrate the Burman for a fault in which I am prone to share. But, as a matter of fact, the Burman is not so idle as he is believed to be. "Do not suppose," says the eloquent writer from whom I have quoted, "that the Burmese are idle. Such a nation of workers was never known. Every man works, every woman works, every child works. Life is not an easy thing, but a hard, and there is a great deal of work to be done. There is not an idle man or woman in all Burma."[378] In the face of a statement so emphatic as this, how is it that the vice of laziness is so often attributed to the Burman? The reason is not far to seek. The Burman lives in a rich country where the actual necessaries of life come easily. He may have to work hard at times, but he does not and need not labour from morning to night and day after day without intermission. He is content with little, for he is a frugal eater and, more often than not, a vegetarian. Money is of little value to him except to buy some of the novelties that are poured into Burma from English factories. No doubt the more he craves to possess these novelties, the harder he will have to work to get the money to pay for them: and this is a fact that is already having a marked effect on the national habits. The Burman who has not become half-occidentalised does not aim at wealth for its own sake: he does not bow down and worship people who have money: Mammon has not yet secured a niche in his pantheon. He only wants enough to feed his relations and himself, to bring up his children in health and strength, and to clothe them with garments that are not only comfortable to wear but pleasant to the eye. If his fields produce more food than he needs, he sells the surplus, and spends the money in works of charity and religion and in graceful hospitalities. The consequence is that at certain seasons of the year—when harvests are over, for instance—he has many hours of what we might call idleness. He wants to live, as well as to be a mere machine for the manufacture of wealth.
WESTERN CIVILISATION
The Burmese theory is one which many a robust and healthy-minded Englishman will absolutely reject, and perhaps it is as well that the Englishman should do so. There can be no progress, he will say, if men are only going to do sufficient work to bring them their daily food. To be strenuous and active, to be ready to face difficulties and strong enough to overcome them—these are the only ways to keep ourselves in the vanguard of progress and civilisation. But, after all, is there not a good deal to be said for the Burman's point of view, too? Are we quite sure that we always know what we mean when we speak of progress and civilisation? That there is a terribly sad and ugly side to the development of civilisation in Western countries—a sadness and ugliness chiefly noticeable in the great industrial centres—is a dreary fact which no Englishman is so likely to realise to the full as he who revisits his native country after a prolonged absence in the East. Even in the most squalid quarters of the most densely-populated cities in China I have never come across anything more painful and depressing than comes daily within the experience of those who, like East End missionaries, live in close proximity to the slums and poorer quarters of our great English cities. Unfortunately, the ugliness, if not the squalor, extends itself beyond the slums, though it assumes different forms among the middle and upper classes of our people. At the risk of having one's words stigmatised as cant and humbug, it is difficult to refrain from giving utterance to a feeling of wonder that so much of the energy and activity of the imperial British race should be devoted to social and political rivalries and the accumulation of material wealth, and that modern English life should be so strongly tainted with the vulgarity and brutality that come of sordid ideals. Make a Burman a millionaire: he will build pagodas, he will support monasteries, he will entertain his friends lavishly, he will exercise a graceful charity unheard of in the West,—and all these things he will go on doing until his money-bags are so empty that he can carry them on his back with a light heart. The process will not be a long one. Transport a hundred Burmans to work in an English workshop or factory: they will probably be all dead or mad in five years; or, what perhaps is worse, all the joy and buoyancy will have been crushed out of their souls for ever. This will not be on account of the hard work—they could work harder if necessary—but because of the mechanical nature of the labour, the long hours of sunless confinement, the deadly monotony, the wearisome routine. Englishmen consider themselves the apostles of liberty throughout the world. The Burman, if asked to give his candid opinion after a year's experience of English life, would probably say that the position of the vast majority of Englishmen was not much better than that of chained slaves.
CIVILISATION AND WEALTH
The evils of our civilisation are perhaps less apparent to him who dwells in its midst than to him who observes it from afar, yet in England, too, there have been some sad-voiced prophets. The warnings of Ruskin, Carlyle and Froude, to mention few out of the many who have uttered oracles since the days when Sir Thomas More in his Utopia satirised the love of gold, seem to have fallen on ears that are deaf to every sound but the clink of coin upon coin. Even psychologists and metaphysicians[379] have condescended to come into the arena of practical life to tell us plain truths about the falseness of our aims and the barbarities that we have masked with the forms of civilisation.
"The world is too much with us; late and soon
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers."
It is not commercialism and industrialism in themselves that are harmful: it is only too obvious that our national, or at least our imperial existence is dependent on our wealth, and that wealth can come only from flourishing industries and a worldwide commerce. The harm lies, as Wordsworth saw, in making wealth our deity instead of our servant, and "laying waste" the powers and faculties which are fit for nobler and higher functions by forcing them to act as the apostles and missionaries of a false god. We are apt to speak contemptuously of pagan religions. Take down the most grotesque idol that grins upon his shelf in India, China or Central Africa, and put in its place the new god worshipped by Englishmen and Americans to-day, and who shall choose between them as fit objects for adoration?
It is frequently taken for granted—naturally enough in commercial England—that the creation of new wants is one of the finest results of civilisation; that by artificially creating new desires among the people of a "backward" race, we not only enrich ourselves by finding new markets for our trade, but we elevate and ennoble such a people by compelling them to lay greater store on the accumulation of wealth in order that they may gratify those new desires. That it is unwise to accept any such theory as axiomatic may be at least tentatively suggested. "It is popularly supposed" said Ruskin "that it benefits a nation to invent a want. Rut the fact is that the true benefit is in extinguishing a want—in living with as few wants as possible."[380] To see the whole Burmese nation clad in Lancashire cottons, labouring with set teeth from morning till night, year after year, their pagodas deserted and ungilded, their gleaming blue sky polluted with the smoke of factory chimneys, their beautiful country turned into a vast hive of ceaseless and untiring industry, simply in order that wealth might grow and British trade prosper, would no doubt be a consummation most devoutly to be wished by the working classes of the ruling race, and also by the alien Government which would congratulate itself on "the unexampled prosperity of the country and the gratifying elasticity of the revenue." But, meanwhile, what of the happiness of the Burmese people? It is a poor answer to say that if they do not want European luxuries they are not compelled to buy them, and that if they despise money no one is going to force them to accumulate it.
BURMESE IDEALS