I confess that, personally, I have found even to-day infinitely more superstition and leaning to the miraculous among my own people than among Burmans. There are classes of English people who are almost free from it, there are other Englishmen, and especially Englishwomen, who are steeped in it to a degree that would astound any Oriental. And what was it a few hundred years ago? Have there ever been witch trials in the East, have there ever been ordeals, or casting lots "for God to decide"? Magicians have come to us from the East, truly; they were made for export, the use for them at home being limited. Theosophy was started in the East, truly, but not by Orientals. Madame Blavatsky is believed to have been a Russian; her supporters were English and American. Palmistry and fortune-telling appeal as serious matters to many people in England and Europe generally. To the Burman they are matters of amusement. Do you think "Christian Science" would gain any foothold in the East? or spiritualism or a hundred forms of superstition that cling to the civilised people of the West? The East is the home of religion, of emotion, of asceticism, of the victory of the mind over the body. The West is the home of superstition, of second sight, of miracle, of conjuring tricks of all kinds exalted into the supernatural. You may search all the records of the East and find no superstition--like touching for the King's evil, for instance. Can anyone imagine Joanna Southcote in India or in the further East? I have tried not to hear, I could never repeat, what the East says of the miraculous in Christianity. Superstition there is, of course, legend and miracle; they are the outcomes always of a certain stage of pre-civilisation. But even in India how scarce and faint they are compared to the West. For one thing must be carefully remembered. Ignorance of the power of natural causes must not be put down to attribution of miraculous causes. The peasant in the East will often attribute a property to a herb, a mineral, a ceremony that it has not got. That is their ignorance of natural law, never their attribution of unnatural power. If a Burman peasant sometimes thinks a certain medicine can render his body lighter than water, it is simply that he is unaware of the limited power of drugs, not that he supposes there is anything miraculous in it. The power of phenacetin on a feverish patient seems to him far more astonishing. Indeed, from miracle as miracle he shrinks. To miracle as miracle the average European is greatly attracted. To the one it spells always charlatanism, to the latter supernatural power.