“Protection” and “annexation” constitute a serious bugbear to any scheme of railroad building or canal construction in Siam. If the Siamese and Laos could be convinced that there was no design upon their possessions, they would not be averse to the opening up of their country by railroads. It is difficult to believe that the intellectual and political torpor which has so long characterized Siam is to continue. The conflict between the old and the new is inevitable; the numerical majority is, of course, under the influence of ancestral traditions and inherited beliefs, opposed to all change; but the constant contact with Western ideas must modify this spirit of reverence for what is old simply because it _is_ old. Even “far-off Cheung Mai” is, I confidently believe, soon to awaken out of her long sleep, and, no longer dreaming of the past, to advance into the better future. THE END. [1] The ceremonies at the cremation of the body of the late first king lasted from the 12th of March, 1870, till the 21st of the same month. The king of Cheung Mai came from his distant home among the Laos Mountains to be present on the occasion; and the pomp and expense of the ceremony, for which preparations had been more than a year in progress, surpassed anything that had been known in the history of Siam. [2] This was in 1851. Instruction was _first given in zenanas in India in 1858_ [or 1857]. [3] Carl Bock. [4] This is Yunnan Transcriber’s Note: This book was written in a period when many words had not become standardized in their spelling. Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged. Dialect, obsolete words and misspellings were left unchanged. Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like this_. Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and moved to the end of the book. Missing quotation marks and missing final stops at the end of sentences were added. Duplicate words at line endings or page breaks were removed. Duplicate words at line endings or page breaks were removed. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Siam and Laos, by Various