Similarly, but in a less marked degree, intoxicating drinks are avoided by good Buddhists. I was many years in Burma before I saw a drunken Burman. I am afraid that the habit of drinking is on the increase. The most popular liquor is what is vulgarly called “toddy,” no relation to the concoction dear to Britons. It is not a spirit, but a juice extracted from the tari palm, and should rightly be called tan-ye, or tari. Unfermented, freshly drawn from the tree in the cool of the morning, it is a pleasant and refreshing drink, if somewhat oversweet. It ferments rapidly of its own accord. Fermented, it is a heady liquor, stealing away men’s brains. In dry tracts, where the tari palm abounds, the consumption of tari is very common, though still, I think, not among the better classes. The Burman has no head, and succumbs at once to a comparatively small quantity of liquor. In his cups he is a quarrelsome, truculent savage, one of the most dangerous of created beings. Hence, in districts where palm-groves decorate the landscape, violent crimes, murders, cuttings, stabbings, are lamentably frequent. It has been suggested that if all tari and kindred palms were destroyed, the golden age would come again. Besides tari, country-made spirits are consumed in large quantities, and illicit distillation is commonly practised, a lucrative trade which fine or imprisonment fails to suppress. For European liquors, except, perhaps, bottled beer, as yet little taste has been acquired. I should like to say that the habit of drinking is confined to labourers and peasants; but it cannot be denied that many people of position, who should set an example, indulge in it. Yet, on the whole, to drink is the exception; to abstain is the rule.