the West is matter of fact, material and reasonable, and easily understood. And yet I think the very first thing a man learns when he goes to the people of the East, certainly to the Burmese people, and tries to see with their eyes and understand with their hearts, that all this is the very reverse of the facts. Will anyone who wishes to see how very far they are from the cult of the mysterious, of dreams, of miracles, of visions, how very _little_ such things appeal to them, turn to my chapters on the Buddhist monkhood in "The Soul of a People," and read them? I do not wish to repeat what I said there, only that a monk who saw visions or performed miracles would be ejected from his monastery as unworthy of his faith. I do not say that there are no superstitions among the people. Their stage of civilisation is as yet low, as low perhaps as ours five hundred years ago. They have their strange fancies here and there; I have heard many of them. They are amusing sometimes and curious. I very much doubt, however, if the Burman of to-day is as superstitious as an ordinary countryman in England. I have heard English soldiers tell tales of old women changing into hares, _that they themselves had seen_, quite as seriously as any Burman could. And if you compare the Burman of to-day with the European peasant of even two hundred years ago, there is no comparison at all. The West simply reeks with superstition and all that is allied to it compared to the East. (I exclude the belief in ghosts, which is, I think, a separate matter.) The delusion has, I think, arisen in many ways. To begin with, we are always looking out in the East for the mysterious. It is the East, and therefore mysterious. We very seldom try to understand the people, to see them from their standpoint. We prefer generally to assume that they have no standpoint and to talk of the incomprehensible Oriental mind, because it is easier to do so and it sounds superior. And again, we are apt to make absurd comparisons and reason without remembrance. An English officer will come across a Burman from the back country of the hills who has a charm against bullet wounds, and he will sit down and indite a letter to the paper on the "incredibly foolish superstition of these people," oblivious of the fact that he will find even now amongst his own countrymen quite as many people who believe in charms as among the Burmese, that Dr. Johnson touched various articles as charms, and that he himself throws salt over his shoulder. Yet he is of the better class of a people five hundred years older in civilisation than the Burman.