140 A STUDY IN HEREDITY 



'British Burmah Missionary Convention.' The elder Hough, 

 Wade, Bennett, and Kincaird were then living on the field. They 

 all affirmed that there was no opium in Burmah before the 

 English came. We laboured with Sir Arthur Phayre, who professed 

 to believe that the Government must introduce opium in order 

 to control and regulate it. As a revenue measure, the intro- 

 duction of opium is an enormous blunder, for it blasts the vital 

 sources of the revenue, it converts honest labourers into idle 

 thieves and vagabonds. If all the cultivators in Burmah were to 

 take to growing opium, in five years there would not be a basket 

 of rice. I have never known a Burman or Karen to use it who 

 did not go to the bad sharp." ^ 



Sir John Strachy said : 



"The only country — I cannot say of India because it is as 

 unlike India as Algeria is unlike France — but the only country 

 under Indian administration in regard to which it appears to me 

 that any evidence has been produced that deserves serious 

 consideration, to show that any considerable section of the 

 people has suffered from the consumption of opium, is Burmah. 

 Now it is indisputable that there has been a great body of 

 opinion as to the injurious effect of opium on the Burmese. 

 Two Chief Commissioners, Sir Charles Aitchison and Sir 

 Alexander Mackenzie, both of them men who are entitled to 

 speak on the subject with the highest authority, have concurred 

 in that opinion, and there is no doubt that the same opinion has 

 been held, very generally held, by the majority of the British 

 officers employed in Burmah. Also it seems to have been an 

 admitted fact, that those views are in accordance with those of 

 the more intelligent classes of the Burmese themselves. ' Native 

 opinion,' Sir Charles Aitchison wrote, ' is unanimous in favour of 

 stopping the supply of opium altogether, and no measure we 

 could adopt would be so popular with all the respectable and 

 law-abiding class of the population. In a matter so intimately 

 affecting the well-being of the community,' he added, ' these 



1 " First Report, Royal Commission on Opium," p. 28. 



