A Burman walks in front of his wife because in the very recent past, everywhere in Burma, and in most places even now, the advance was the place of difficulty. There were no roads, only paths through jungle or across the fields. There were thorny creepers to be cut back, streams and mud puddles to be forded, cattle and buffaloes to be driven away, snakes to be killed, and the nasty, snapping pariah dogs to be kept at a distance. No woman could or would go in front. The man goes in front from courtesy and carries a chopper, the woman follows with the bundle. It is their courtesy. If this habit continues when the necessity has passed, that is simply because a custom once established is, East or West, hard to break. See what Yoshio Markino says about this same custom in Japan. Polyandry was due to restriction of the means of subsistence, limiting the population and so necessitating the exposure of girl children; occasional polygamy--for it is always only occasional, exceptional--is an imperfection of humanity, universal East or West. In the East they try to make the best of it by acknowledging it; the West hides it and pretends it does not exist. That is a difference of treatment, not of fact. If you want to know the true instinctive feeling of men to women in the East you will find it not in laws, customs, or religions, but in the literature. Read their folk-tales, their love-stories, those which warm the hearts of boys and girls, of men and women, aye even of the old, those that rising from the heart appeal unto the heart. Their ideals are our ideals--one woman and one man; and I think sometimes they come nearer their realisation than we do. We pretend more, but pretence is not reality. If this be true of love, the mother of all emotions, it is true of all the others. Their circumstances being different they must find different ways of reaching towards their ideals, but the ideals are the same. Therefore all the Indian peoples have a common humanity; and more, they have a great many circumstances in common. They are all, for instance, mainly agricultural; they are all in a very similar stage of evolution--the village community stage; they are all poor, they are all natural and simple; they are all under our rule. These are more potent influences than religion or race if they are allowed to have their sway. Then as to races, I do not think, for instance, that races in India are much more mixed than in Italy. Think of the races there are all grouped under the name Italian: there are Roman, Etruscan, Greek, Saracen, Norman, Goth--who shall say how many more? And in Great Britain I cannot count them.