Thus this legislative expedient we pretend to have adopted for keeping the Burman from opium completely breaks down, and is a mere dead letter. Nominally we are carrying out prohibition as we undertook to do, but really we are tempting the Burmans to their ruin by means of the licensed shops. Time was when Chinese opium vendors in Upper Burma, when caught, were disgraced in every possible way, and even flogged and imprisoned. Recently Mr. Justice Grantham, at the Durham assizes, was trying the case of one miner who had caused the death of another, while the two were drunk together in the Colliery Tavern. The prisoner was found guilty. Upon this his lordship directed the landlord of the Colliery Tavern to take his place beside the prisoner in the dock, and the landlord having done so, the judge proceeded to tell him in plain terms that he (the judge) would have felt more satisfied if the jury, instead of finding the prisoner guilty, had found the publican guilty of causing the death of the deceased. He had served the deceased with liquor when he was drunk already, and had undoubtedly thus caused the man’s death. The Burman king’s way of looking upon opium vendors was the right way, and the judge’s rebuke of the publican was well merited; the misfortune is that so few can see it yet. The Chinese wealthy opium vendors in Burma now ride in first-class railway carriages, and are put forward into the honorary rank of municipal commissioners; whilst in England we go further than this, and admit to the peerage the heads of the great brewing firms! We have carried the exceptional, “grandmotherly” method of legislation to a very absurd length in Burma, prompted on the one hand by our usual policy of regulating by licensing these vicious indulgences, and yet restrained by a natural horror for the mischief they do to the Burmese race, and by a well-grounded fear, founded on painful experience, that if we do not somehow keep the nation from liquor and opium, these vices will destroy multitudes of them. Liquor can be lawfully sold in Upper Burma to Europeans, Eurasians, natives of India and Chinese, but not to Burmans. Opium to Chinese only. Both liquor and opium may be sold to Burmans in Lower Burma. Gunja, a product of hemp, very intoxicating, and used largely by natives of India in their own country, is absolutely forbidden to everybody in Burma.