There were a fow honourable exceptions, but all the visitors to the country who Jeff their impressions in welting made it clear that, however Touch they may have liked the Burmese people asa whole and as Individuals, they had not a good word say for the system of Government or the omiais who administered it. 'The result. was constant oppression and poverty with no hope of raising the standard of living. and general drab and dreary" existence in the villages only' varied by periodic outbreaks of dacoity and rebellion. was litle wonder that a. Burmese proverb numbered Government fleials with fire and flood and Pesillence ax one of the major evils 'AS a result of all this thousands of Burmans, in defence of orders Prohibiting emigration, flocked. from Independent Burma to the British districts where they could at any rate fet reasonable security for life and Property and reasonably honest (reat~ ment by" the tax-collector and the Courts. rhe fect that the system was Dureaveratie rather than democratic did not worry them in the least all they compared it with was the corns bination of tyranny and chaos which they hed eft behind them.
AIL this went on til 1880 when Upper Burma was annexed, so there are plenty of old men sill alive who can remember the Burmese regime fud even middle-aged men must have heard enough about "it from. their parents in their youth, and it is only the younger generation, having been Dora and. brought up enurely under the British Government, who have fnod_no chance of comparing it in Practice with anything else.
For the first generation after the annexation of Upper Burma. the people were too busy settling down to the practical advantages of an orderly Government to worry about {heories of democracy. and they took lo interest in the political progress, which was going on In India, 'This was the time when the Congress Party was feeling fis way. and when nationalism was becoming a popular slogan and' dt may be. taken culminating in the Morley-Minto re~ forms of 1908, which immensely increased the powers of the Central and Provincial Legislatures.
There was no protest when they got much less share of the Morley Minto reforms than any other part of India, and the old bureaucratic system went on with only small changes. "It was the ferment of the Wwar-period that rst turned their attention to political theories and the Generation then coming to maturity Which had no. personal experience the Burmese regime began realize that Burma was being lett behhind'in the race towards democracy in which the whole world seemed to bbe taking part.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.