kingdom about the size of ten ordinary counties, and with a population
of about 350,000. The soil and climate along the route are well suited
to the cultivation of rubber trees, and considerable areas have
recently been cleared of the dense jungle growth and set to young
rubber plants. One of my friends who has a rubber plantation north of
Singapore says that while rubber is selling now at only $1.50 a pound
as compared with $3 a pound a few months ago, there are still enormous
profits in the business, as the rubber should not cost over 25 cents a
pound to produce. Some of the older plantations paid dividends of 150
per cent, last year, and probably set aside something for a rainy day
in addition.
Yet not even these facts would have justified the wild speculation in
rubber, the unreasoning inflation in values, which proved a veritable
"Mississippi Bubble" for so many investors in Europe and Asia last
year. Shares worth $5 or $10 were grabbed by eager buyers at $100
each. I know of a specific instance where a plantation bought for
$16,000 was capitalized at $230,000, or 20 for 1, and the stock
floated. When the madness had finally spent itself and people began to
see things as they were, not only individuals, but whole communities,
found themselves prostrated. Shanghai will not recover for years, and
some of its citizens--the young fellow with a $1500 income who
incurred a $30,000 debt in the scramble, for example--are left in
practical bondage for life as a result. The men who have gone into the
rubber-growing industry on a strictly business basis, however, are
likely to find it profitable for a long time to come.
The cocoanut industry is also a profitable one, although the modest
average of 10 per cent., year in and year out, has {189} not appealed
to those who have been indulging in pipe dreams about rubber. Where
transportation facilities are good, the profits from cocoanuts
probably average considerably in excess of 10 per cent., for the trees
require little care, and it is easy for the owners to sell the product
without going to any trouble themselves. In one section of the
Philippines, I know, the Chinese pay one peso (50 cents gold) a tree
for the nuts and pick them themselves. And when we consider the great
number of the slim-bodied trees that may grow upon an acre, it is not
surprising to hear that many owners of cocoanut groves or plantations
live in Europe on the income from the groves, going to no trouble
whatever except to have the trees counted once a year.
Penang, where we spent only a day, is almost literally in the midst of
an immense cocoanut plantation, and I was much interested in seeing
the half-naked Hindus gathering the unhusked fruit for shipment. The
tall, limbless trunks of the trees, surmounted only by a top-knot of
fruit and foliage, are in nearly every case gapped and notched at
intervals of about three feet to furnish toe-hold for the natives in
climbing.
After tiffin on this winter day, instead of putting on gloves and
overcoats, we went out on a grassy lawn, clad in linen and pongee as
we were, and luxuriated in the cool shade of the palm trees. The dense
foliage of the tropical jungle was in sight from our place by the
seaside, and in the garden not far away were cinnamon trees, cloves,
orchids, rubber trees, the poisonous upas, and palms of all varieties
known.
Penang is a rather important commercial centre, and exports more tin
than any other place on earth. The metal is shipped in molten bars
like lead or pig iron, and to one who has associated tin only with
light buckets, cups, and dippers, it is surprising how much strength
it takes to move a bar of the solid metal the size of a small
watermelon.
The imports of Penang are also not inconsiderable, and in walking
through the warehouses along the wharves I was {190} struck by the
number of boxes, crates, bales, and bundles bearing the legend, "Made
in Germany." The Germans are today the most aggressive commercial
nation on earth, and I find that their government and their business
houses are searching every nook and corner of the globe for trade
openings. Unlike our American manufacturers, it may be observed just
here, they are quick to change the style of their goods to meet even
what they may regard as the whims of their customers, and this is an
advantage of no small importance. If a manufacturer wishes to sell
plows in the Philippines, for example, it would not be worth while for
him to try to sell the thoroughly modern two-handled American kind to
begin with. He should manufacture an improved one-handled sort at
first and try gradually to make the natives see the advantages of
using two handles. At present, as an American said to me in Manila, if
you should seek to sell a Filipino a two-handled plow he would
probably say that two handles may be all right for Americans who are
not expert at plowing, but that the Filipino has passed that stage!
I mention this only by way of illustrating the necessity of respecting
the _custombre_, or custom, of the country. The Germans realize this,
and we do not.
One day by steamer from Penang brought us to Rangoon, the capital and
most important city in Burma, and (next to Bombay and Calcutta) the
most important in British India. We had heard much of the place,
situated thirty miles up the river "on the road to Mandalay," but
found that even then the half had not been told. If there were nothing
else to see but the people on the streets, a visit to Rangoon would be
memorable, for nowhere else on earth perhaps is there such
butterfly-like gorgeousness and gaudiness of raiment. At a little
distance you might mistake a crowd for an enormous flower-bed. All
around you are men and women wearing robes that rival in brilliancy
Joseph's coat of many colors.
The varieties in form of clothing are as great as the varieties {191}
in hue. The Burmese babies toddle about in beauty unadorned, and for
the grown-ups there is every conceivable sort of apparel--or the lack
of it. Most of the laborers on the streets wear only a loin-cloth and
a turban (with the addition of a caste-mark on the forehead in case
they are Hindus), but others have loose-fitting red, green, yellow,
blue, striped, ring-streaked or rainbow-hued wraps, robes, shirts or
trousers: and the women, of course, affect an equal variety of colors.
"The whackin' white cheroot" that the girl smoked in Kipling's "Road
to Mandalay" is also much in evidence here; or perhaps instead of the
white cheroot it is an enormous black cigar. In either case it is as
large as a medium-sized corncob, that the newly landed tourist is
moved to stare thereat in open-eyed amazement. How do Kipling's verses
go?
"'Er petticoat was yaller, an' 'er little cap was green.
An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat--jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen,
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot.
An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on a 'eathen idol's foot."
They are all there in Rangoon yet--the gorgeous coloring of the lady's
raiment, her cheroots, and the heathen idols--
"Bloomin' idol made o' mud.
Wot they called the Great Gawd Bud."
How many images of Buddha there are in the city it would be impossible
to estimate--I saw them not only in the pagodas, but newly carved in
the shops which supply the Buddhist temples in the interior--and the
gilded dome of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, "the most celebrated shrine of
the entire Buddhist world," glitters like a beacon for miles before
you reach the city. Nearly two thirds the height of the Washington
Monument, it is gilded from top to bottom--with actual gold leaf,
Rangoon citizens claim--and around it are innumerable smaller pagodas
and shrines glittering with mosaics of colored glass in imitation of
all the gems known to mortals. {192} Studied closely, they appear
unduly gaudy, of course, but your first impression is that you have
found a real Aladdin's palace, a dazzling, glittering dream of
Oriental splendor and magnificence. To these shrines there come
to-day, as there have been coming for more than twenty centuries,
pilgrims from all lands where Buddha's memory is worshipped, pilgrims
not only from Burma, but from Siam, Ceylon, China, and Korea. I shall
not soon forget the feeble looks of the old white-haired pilgrim whom
two women were helping up the steep ascent as I left the Pagoda after
my second visit there. I am glad for his sake, and for the sake of all
the millions to whom Buddha's doctrine is "the Light of Asia," that it
is a religion at least without the degrading, blighting tendencies of
Hinduism, and that the smiling faces of the images about the Shwe
Dagon present at least some faint idea of a God who tempers justice
with mercy and made human life good rather than a God of cruelty who
made life a curse and a mockery. Every traveller who sees Buddhist
Burma after having seen Hindu India comments on the greater
cheerfulness and hopefulness of the Burman people, and especially the
happier lives of the women--all a result, in the main, of the
difference in religion.
And yet Burman Buddhism, in all conscience, is pitiable enough--its
temples infested by fortune-tellers, witches, and fakirs, its faith
mingled with gross superstitions and charms to propitiate the "nats"
or spirits which are supposed to inhabit streams, forests, villages,
houses, etc., and to have infinite power over the lives and fortunes
of the people. A common sight on the morning streets is a group of
yellow-robed priests with their begging bowls, into which pious
Buddhists put food and other offerings; without these voluntary
offerings the priest must go hungry. A curious custom in Burma, as in
Siam, requires every youth to don the priestly robe for a few days and
get his living in this way.
The ordinary beast of burden in Rangoon is the Indian {193} bullock.
Often pure white, usually with a well-kept appearance and with a
clean, glossy coat of short hair, he looks as if he should be on the
way to a Roman sacrifice with garlands about his head. Teams of black
Hindus, three quarters naked, are also seen pulling heavy carts and
drays; and it may be that the small boys utilize the long-eared goats
(they have heavy, drooping ears like a foxhound's) to pull their small
carts, but this I do not know. The work-beast of the city that
interested me most was the elephant, and henceforth the elephants of
Rangoon shall have a place alongside the camels of Peking in my memory
and affection. Of course, the elephants of Rangoon are not so numerous
as are the camels in China's capital, but those that one sees display
an intelligence and certain human-like qualities that make them
fascinating.
One morning I got up early and went to McGregor & Co.'s lumber yard at
Ahloon on the Irrawaddy to see the trained elephants there handle the
heavy saw-logs which it is necessary to move from place to place. It
was better than a circus.
"Elephants a-pilin' teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek."
It is very clear that my lord the Elephant, like most other beings in
the Tropics, doesn't entirely approve of work. What he did at Ahloon
on the morning of my visit he did with infinite deliberation, and he
stopped much to rest between tugs. Also when some enormous log, thirty
or forty feet long and two or three feet thick, was given him to pull
through the mire, he would roar mightily at each hard place, getting
down on his knees sometimes to use his strength to better advantage,
and one could hardly escape the conclusion that at times he "cussed"
in violent Elephantese. The king of the group, a magnificent tusker,
pushed the logs with his snout and tusks, while the others pulled them
with chains. But the most marvellous thing is how the barefooted,
half-naked driver, or mahout, astride the great giant's shoulders,
makes him {194} understand what to do in each case by merely kicking
his neck or prodding his ears.
At one time while I watched, a tuskless elephant or mutna got his log
stuck in the mud and was tugging and roaring profanely about his
trials, when the tusker's mahout bid that royal beast go help his
troubled brother. Straightway, therefore, went the tusker, leaving
great holes in the mud at each footprint as if a tree had been
uprooted there, gave a mighty shove to the recalcitrant log, and there
was peace again in the camp.
For stacking lumber the elephant is especially useful. Any ordinary
sized log, tree or piece of lumber he will pick up as if it were a
piece of stovewood and tote with his snout, and in piling heavy plank
he is remarkably careful about matching. Eying the pile at a distance,
he looks to see if it is uneven or any single piece out of place, in
which case he is quick to make it right. The young lady in our party
was also much amused when the mahout called out, "Salaam to memsahib"
("Salute the lady"), and his lordship bowed and made his salutation as
gracefully as his enormous head and forelegs would permit.
One of my fellow-passengers, a rubber planter from the Straits
Settlements, has worked elephants, has used them on the plantation and
as help in building bridges, and has told me some interesting stories
concerning them. He had two--one a tusker worth 2500 rupees, or
$833-1/3, and the other a mutna (without tusks) worth 2250 rupees, or
$750. On one occasion the mutna heard "the call of the wild," and went
back to the jungle. Evidently, though, his wild brethren didn't like
the civilized ways he brought back with him, for when he returned home
later two thirds of his tail had been pulled off, and he bore other
marks of struggle on his body. The tusker on one occasion ran mad (as
they will do now and then) and killed one of his keepers.
I was also interested to hear how a wild elephant is caught. Driven
into a stockade, the tamed elephants close in {195} on him, and the
mahouts get him well chained before he knows what has happened. For a
day or two he remains in enforced bondage, then two or three of the
great tamed creatures take him out for a walk or down to the river
where he may drink and bathe himself. Moreover, the other mahouts set
about taming him--talk to him in the affectionate, soothing, half
hypnotizing way which Kipling has made famous in his stories, and
stroke his trunk from discreet but gradually lessening distances. In a
couple of months "my lord the Elephant" is fully civilized, responds
promptly to the suggestions of his mahout, and a little later adopts
some useful occupation.
In Siam the elephants are much used in managing the immense rafts of
teak trees that are floated down the rivers for export. My friend the
rubber planter has also had one or two good travelling elephants on
which he used to travel through the jungle from one plantation to the
other, a distance of twenty-five miles. On more than one occasion he
has run into a herd of wild elephants in making this trip. On good
roads, elephants kept only for riding purposes will easily make seven
miles an hour, moving with a long, easy stride, which, however, they
are likely to lose if set to heavy work.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty about the elephant is the great
quantity of food required to keep him going. Eight hundred pounds a
day will barely "jestify his stummuck," as Uncle Remus would say, and
when he gets hungry "he wants what he wants when he wants it," and
trumpets thunderously till he gets it. The skipper on a
Singapore-Rangoon steamer told of having had a dozen or more on board
a few months ago, and their feed supply becoming exhausted, they waxed
mutinous and wrathy, evincing a disposition to tear the whole vessel
to pieces, when the ship fortunately came near enough to land to
enable the officers to signal for a few tons of feed to be brought
aboard for the elephants' breakfast.
I haven't seen a white elephant yet, but in the Shwe Dagon {196}
Temple I found a lively eight-months-old youngster, an orphan from
Mandalay, that could eat bananas twice as fast as my Burmese boy-guide
and I could peel them, and the boy-guide in question assured me that
he will turn white by the time he is two or three years old. Which
would be very interesting if true, but I fear it isn't.
I am now hurrying on to India proper and must conclude my impression
of Burma with this letter. In Rangoon the lighter-skinned and
lighter-hearted Burmese contrast rather notably with the dark and
serious Hindus. Many of the Hindus are in Burma only temporarily. One
ship that I saw coming into Rangoon from the Coromandel Coast, India,
was literally spilling over with 3000 brown Hindu coolies. They will
work through the Burman rice harvest--rice is the one great crop of
the country--at eight to twelve annas (16 to 24 cents) a day, and
after three or four months of this will return home. Because they are
so poor at home the steamship charges only ten rupees ($3) for
bringing them to Rangoon, but requires fifteen rupees for carrying
them back.
Nor should I fail to mention another thing that impressed me very much
in Rangoon: the graves of the English officers who were killed in the
war with the Burmans many years ago, and are now buried within the
walls of the picturesque old Buddhist Temple. True it is that the sun
never sets on the English flag; and one finds much to remind him, too,
that the sun never sets on the graves of that flag's defenders.
Scattered through every zone and clime are they: countless thousands
of them far, far from the land that gave them birth. Nearby the place
where those of the Shwe Dagon sleep I stood on the temple walls and
looked out on the fading beauty of the tropic sunset, the silvery
outline of the Irrawaddy River breaking into the darkening green of
the jungle growth. And then came up the cool night breeze of the
Torrid Zone--more refreshing and delightful than our Temperate climate
ever knows. As gentle and caressing as a mother's lullaby, how {197}
it crooned among the foliage of the cocoanut palms, whispered among
the papaya leaves, and how joyously the great blades of the bananas
welcomed it!
With that fair view before our eyes, with the breezes as if of Araby
the Blest making mere existence a joy, we take our leave of Burma.
Rangoon, Bunna.
{198}
XX
HINDUISM--AND THE HIMALAYAS
If it were any other country but India, I might write last of the
religion the people profess, but, since it is India, it is the first
thing to be considered. Religion is the supreme fact of Indian life--
if we may call religion what has been more properly defined as "a
sacred disease."
Certainly nowhere else on earth is there a country where the entire
life of the people is so molded by their spiritual beliefs. Two
children are born the same day. The one, of high-caste parentage,
Brahminism has irrevocably decreed shall be all his life, no matter
how stupid or vicious, a privileged and "superior" being, to whom all
lower orders must make obeisance. The other, born of a Dom father and
mother, Brahminism has decreed shall be all his life, no matter how
great his virtue or brilliant his mind, an outcast whose mere touch
works pollution worse than crime. And through the lifetime of each,
Brahminism, or Hinduism, as the supreme religion of India is called,
will exercise over him an influence more potent and incessant than any
civil government has ever exercised over its subjects.
About theoretical or philosophical Hinduism there is admittedly a
certain measure of moral beauty, but to get even this from Hindu
literature one must wade through cesspools of filth and obscenity and
must shut his eyes to pitiably low ideals of Deity, while in its
practical manifestations modern Hinduism is the most sickening
combination of superstition, idolatry, and {199} vice that now
disgraces the name of religion in any considerable portion of the
earth. The idea of the transmigration of souls, "Samsara," the belief
that you have had millions of births (as men and animals) and may have
millions more (unless you earlier merit the favor of the gods and win
release from life), and that what you are in your present life is the
result of actions in previous existence, and what you do in this
present existence will influence all your future rebirths--this is a
doctrine that might be a tremendous moral force if it were linked with
such ideals as distinguish the Christian religion. In practical
Hinduism, however, the emphasis is not on worthy living, not on
exalted moral conduct, as the thing essential to divine favor, but on
rites and ceremonies, regard for the priests, rigid observance of
caste, sacred bathing, and the offering of proper sacrifices to fickle
or bloodthirsty gods and goddesses. In their religion no Isaiah makes
terrible and effective protest against the uselessness of form; no
Christ teaches that God can be worshipped only in spirit.
Another doctrine, that Self, that a man's own soul is an Emanation of
God, a part of the Divine Essence, and the purpose of man's existence
to hasten a final absorption into God--this also (although destructive
of the idea of individuality, the sacredness of personality, so
fundamental in Christian thought) would seem to be a tremendous moral
force, but it is vitiated in much the same way as is the idea of
Samsara, while it is further weakened by the fact that the Hindu gods
themselves are often represented as immoral, bloodthirsty, obscene and
criminal.
Enmeshed in vicious traditions and false doctrine, its philosophy and
purer teachings known only to a cultured few, the Higher Hinduism
"powerless to be born," is only the illusion which it would teach that
all else is, while practical Hinduism hangs like a blight over a land
whose people are as the sands of the sea for multitude. If all the
human race alive to-day were to pass in review before you, every
eighth person in the {200} ranks would be a Hindu. And to realize in
what manner Hinduism guides its 200,000,000 followers it is only
necessary to visit some of their most celebrated temples.
It is an extreme illustration, no doubt, but since it was the first
Hindu shrine I visited, we may begin with the Kalighat in Calcutta.
This temple is dedicated to Kali, or "Mother Kali," as the
English-speaking temple priest who conducted me always said, the
bloody goddess of destruction. That terrible society of criminals and
assassins, the Thugs (its founder is worshipped as a saint), had Kali
as their patron goddess and whetted their knives and planned their
murderous crimes before her image: all this in a "temple" of
"religion."
The representations of Kali befit her character. Fury is in her
countenance and in her three red eyes. Her tongue lolls from her
mouth. In one of her four hands is the dripping, bloody head of a
slaughtered enemy. Her necklace is of the heads of her slain. Her
girdle is the severed hands of the dead men. Tradition says that she
constantly drinks blood; and each man who comes to worship her brings
a little wet, trembling kid: the warm blood that flows after the
priestly ax has done its work is supposed to please the terrible
goddess. The morning of my visit there were sacrifices every few
minutes, and on the great day of Kali-worship, in October, the place
runs ankle-deep in blood.
In the old days--and not so long ago at that--there were human
sacrifices at Kalighat, and when I asked the priest concerning them,
his significant answer was that the British Government would no longer
allow them. He made no claim that Hinduism itself has changed! Their
Kaliki Purana says that one human sacrifice delights Kali for a
thousand years, and in spite of British alertness a bloody human head
bedecked with flowers was found in a Kali temple near Calcutta not
many years ago, and at Akrha, also near Calcutta, human sacrifice has
been attempted within a decade.