These all stop short of an effectual dealing with the opium question; they will avail nothing so long as the drug is within reach. The real remedy, I submit, is entire prohibition, and many officials of Government, of standing and experience, concur in this view. Let our Indian Government give up entirely, except for medicinal purposes, this iniquitous and disreputable business of manufacturing and supplying opium, and get rid of the guilt of it. “Native opinion,” says Commissioner Aitchison, speaking of Burma, “is unanimously in favour of stopping the supply altogether, and no measures we could adopt would be so popular with all the respectable and law-abiding class of the population.”
Lord Cross has recently said: “It is not practicable to close all opium shops and to stop opium consumption so long as opium is grown in British India and in the native states.” Quite so. No doubt we shall have to take up the accursed thing by the roots to do it effectually.
We are told that the consequences of this course would be very dreadful, but we have been told this in the case of every reform ever yet proposed, and the statement has ceased to frighten us. If we had the cordial support of the whole of the “respectable and law-abiding class of the population,” no great harm could come of it. At any rate, the consequences could not then be worse than they are now.
CHAPTER X.
THE FRONTIER MOUNTAIN RACES OF BURMA.
In Burma there are in all some forty different races and tribes. These may be grouped into two classes. First, there are the Buddhist races, consisting of the more civilised peoples, the Burmans, Talaings and Shans, the inhabitants of the best parts of the country, the rich and fertile plains and valleys of the great rivers, and the great plateau country to the east bordering on China. These races form the bulk of the population, have each a language and literature of their own, and far more of the arts and conveniences of life than their more barbarous neighbours. And secondly, we have the many spirit or demon-worshipping races, who have never yet become Buddhist—the wild, unlettered, uncivilised tribes scattered all along the mountains on Burma’s frontiers, north, east and west. They have never got beyond that primitive form of religion which would appear to have been the earlier worship of all the races of that region; and, far removed from the pathways of commerce, their barbarous condition remains much as it was centuries ago.
These hill-races are very various. Bordering on Lower Burma are the Karens, now well known in the history of missions as a remarkable instance of the rapidly regenerating and uplifting power of the Gospel. Theirs is as cheering and striking a narrative as missionary annals afford. What Fiji has been to the Wesleyan Missionary Society the Karen mission in Burma has been to the American Baptist Mission.
There are some fifteen or twenty tribes of them in all, more or less closely connected, all supposed to be of the Aryan stock. There are different languages among them; their unlettered condition naturally resulting in the multiplication of tongues and dialects, and the isolation of the many tribes contributing to the same result.
The American Baptist Mission has done splendid work amongst the Karens. They found them, like all the other hill-tribes, without a trace of a written language. Into two of the Karen languages, the Pwo Karen and the Sgau Karen, the entire Bible has been translated, and quite a considerable literature has been produced. Degraded and oppressed greatly by the Burmans in the days of Burman rule, the Burmans quite needlessly regarding them and treating them as nothing better than animals, they were peculiarly amenable, as all races under similar circumstances are, to the kindly, beneficent message of the Gospel. Like the rest of the hill-tribes, they were utterly ignorant and addicted to drunkenness. But it has ever been found that the hindrances to the Gospel arising from a low state of civilisation are not formidable in comparison with those which spring from the possession of a powerful, well-defined, ancient system of religion such as Buddhism, which claims to have a philosophy which accounts for everything, and whose rites and observances meet all the wants of which its followers are conscious. It is part of the principle of compensation we find running through life, that “these things”—the mysteries of the Kingdom—are ever hid from “the wise and prudent, and revealed to babes.” It is part of the mercy and wisdom of the Divine appointments, and it tends to give the uncivilised nations their fair chance.