Several princes—in Burma princes are fairly plentiful, notwithstanding that so many were massacred by order of King Theebaw—have tried their hands at it, with vague ideas of getting the mastery of the country in due time. One, known by the title of the Sekkya Prince, established himself in the hill country about Kyaukse, only thirty miles from Mandalay, and as late as 1889 gave an immense amount of trouble, setting the military police at defiance for months, and committing many murders and depredations. He had an armed following of several hundreds, and several fights took place between them and the police. Though the dacoits were each time defeated and scattered, the ground was so difficult for pursuit, that they could never catch the leader. At length he was taken in the Shan States, brought to Kyaukse, tried, convicted and hanged. This is a specimen of the kind of guerilla warfare going on in every district all over the country at that time. Another matter, which still further complicated the situation and gave strength to the forces of disorder, was the sanction which dacoity had received through the corruption of those high in office in the Burman Government before we took it over. A British civil officer of high rank, the commissioner of a division, writes as follows, as late as the middle of 1889, more than three years after the annexation:— “The task of reducing my own division to order I find a gigantic one. The Burman nature is simply saturated with lawlessness, and it takes the form of dacoity. Since King Mindohn’s death [_i.e._, from the accession of King Theebaw in 1878] it is a fact that most of the official classes in Upper Burma made large incomes by dacoity. Men high in office in Mandalay actually kept dacoit _bohs_, and shared with them loot, or the subsidies which were paid by the villagers for protection from other dacoits. The dacoit _bohs_ were actually the governors, and paid some of the mingyees [ministers of state] in Mandalay regular sums, on condition of being let alone! Each _boh_ had a large immediate gang or body of men around him, and a militia at any time available from the villages. We have had to break up this system of _boh_ government all over Upper Burma, a system which had been running for the last ten years. The villagers themselves have become so accustomed to the government by dacoit chiefs, that they are actually afraid and even unwilling to help in getting rid of them. It will be admitted that difficulties like these are enormous; sometimes they seem to be insuperable, and one is often inclined to despair. We have not only to deal with the thousands of lawless ones who think we are encroaching upon their rights, but we have to try and educate the people to believe that these dacoits are not their rulers, and are not to be so. The villagers do not yet realise this, and it is this process of education, slow and painful, that impedes us so terribly in the work of subjugation and pacification.