“Unlike the generality of the Asiatics, they are not a fawning race. They are cheerful, and singularly alive to the ridiculous; buoyant, elastic, soon recovering from personal or domestic disaster. With little feeling of patriotism, they are still attached to their homes, greatly so to their families. Free from prejudices of caste or creed, they readily fraternize with strangers, and at all times frankly yield to the superiority of a European. Though ignorant, they are, when no mental exertion is required, inquisitive, and to a certain extent eager for information; indifferent to the shedding of blood on the part of their rulers, yet not individually cruel; temperate, abstemious, and hardy, but idle, with neither fixedness of purpose nor perseverance. Discipline or any continued employment becomes most irksome to them, yet they are not devoid of a certain degree of enterprise. Great dabblers in small mercantile ventures, they may be called (the women especially) a race of hucksters; not treacherous or habitual perverters of the truth, yet credulous and given to monstrous exaggerations; when vested with authority, arrogant and boastful; if unchecked, corrupt, oppressive, and arbitrary; yet distinguished for bravery, whilst their chiefs are notorious for cowardice; indifferent shots, and though living in a country abounding in forest, not bold followers of field sports.” But what is the _industrial life_ of the Burmans? The soil of Burmah is richly productive of all that is needed for food or clothing or shelter or ornament. The chief crops are rice, maize or Indian corn, wheat, tobacco, cotton, and indigo. It is computed that 80 per cent. of all the rice brought from the East to Europe is produced in the rich paddy-fields of British Burmah. There is an abundance of delicious fruits—the jack-fruit, the bread-fruit, oranges, bananas, guavas, pine-apples, and the cocoa-nut. After the annual inundation, the subsiding rivers leave behind them, in the depressions of the ground, ponds well stocked with fish. Beef and mutton the Burman learns to forego, as his religion does not allow him to eat cattle or sheep unless they die a natural death. His meal of rice and curry is sometimes enriched by the addition of poultry. The bamboo yields building material for his houses, and the teak forest timber for his ships. The mineral resources are large. The earth yields iron, tin, silver, gold, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, amber, sulphur, arsenic, antimony, coal (both anthracite and bituminous), and petroleum oil, which is used by all classes in little clay lamps.