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various industries. Where are the Indian muslins now? Back in the ’forties or thereabouts they were
building sea-going ships in India, and manning them as well. Now you couldn’t build a seaworthy
fishing boat there. In the eighteenth century the Indians cast guns that were at any rate up to the
European standard. Now, after we’ve been in India a hundred and fifty years, you can’t make so much
as a brass cartridge case in the whole continent. The only Eastern races that have developed at all
quickly are the independent ones. I won’t instance Japan, but take the case of Siam–’
The doctor waved his hand excitedly. He always interrupted the argument at this point (for as a rule
it followed the same course, almost word for word), finding that the case of Siam hampered him.
‘My friend, my friend, you are forgetting the Oriental character. How iss it possible to have
developed us, with our apathy and superstition? At least you have brought to us law and order. The
unswerving British Justice and the Pax Britannica.’
‘Pox Britannica, doctor, Pox Britannica is its proper name. And in any case, whom is it pax for?
The moneylender and the lawyer. Of course we keep the peace in India, in our own interest, but what
does all this law and order business boil down to? More banks and more prisons–that’s all it means.’
‘What monstrous misrepresentations!’ cried the doctor. ‘Are not prissons necessary? And have you
brought us nothing but prissons? Consider Burma in the days of Thibaw, with dirt and torture and
ignorance, and then look around you. Look merely out of this veranda–look at that hospital, and over
to the right at that school and that police station. Look at the whole uprush of modern progress!’
‘Of course I don’t deny,’ Flory said, ‘that we modernise this country in certain ways. We can’t help
doing so. In fact, before we’ve finished we’ll have wrecked the whole Burmese national culture. But
we’re not civilising them, we’re only rubbing our dirt onto them. Where’s it going to lead, this uprush
of modern progress, as you call it? Just to our own dear old swinery of gramophones and billycock
hats. Sometimes I think that in two hundred years all this–’ he waved a foot towards the horizon–‘all
this will be gone–forests, villages, monasteries, pagodas all vanished. And instead, pink villas fifty
yards apart; all over those hills, as far as you can see, villa after villa, with all the gramophones
playing the same tune. And all the forests shaved flat–chewed into wood-pulp for the News of the
World, or sawn up into gramophone cases. But the trees avenge themselves, as the old chap says in
The Wild Duck. You’ve read Ibsen, of course?’
‘Ah, no, Mr Flory, alas! That mighty master-mind, your inspired Bernard Shaw hass called him. It
iss a pleasure to come. But, my friend, what you do not see iss that your civilisation at its very worst
iss for us an advance. Gramophones, billycock hats, the News of the World–all iss better than the
horrible sloth of the Oriental. I see the British, even the least inspired of them, ass——ass——’ the
doctor searched for a phrase, and found one that probably came from Stevenson–‘ass torchbearers
upon the path of progress.’
I don’t. I see them as a kind of up-to-date, hygienic, self-satisfied louse. Creeping round the world
building prisons. They build a prison and call it progress,’ he added rather regretfully–for the doctor
would not recognise the allusion.
‘My friend, positively you are harping upon the subject of prissons! Consider that there are also
other achievements of your countrymen. They construct roads, they irrigate deserts, they conquer