The Burmans often act as children do. Their crimes are the violent, thoughtless crimes of children; they are as little depraved by crime as children are. Who are more criminal than English boys? and yet they grow up decent, law-abiding men. Almost the only confirmed criminals have been made so by punishment, by that punishment which some consider is intended to uplift them, but which never does aught but degrade them. Instead of cleansing the garment, it tears it, and renders it useless for this life.
It is a very difficult question, this of crime and punishment. I have not written all this because I have any suggestion to make to improve it. I have not written it because I think that the laws of Manu, which obtained under the Burmese kings, and their methods of punishment, were any improvement on ours. On the contrary, I think they were much worse. Their laws and their methods of enforcing the law were those of a very young people. But, notwithstanding this, there was a spirit in their laws different from and superior to ours.
I have been trying to see into the soul of this people whom I love so well, and nothing has struck me more than the way they regard crime and punishment; nothing has seemed to me more worthy of note than their ideas of the meaning and end of punishment, of its scope and its limits. It is so very different from ours. As in our religion, so in our laws: we believe in mercy at one time and in vengeance at another. We believe in vicarious punishment and vicarious salvation; they believe in absolute justice--always the same, eternal and unchangeable as the laws of the stars. We purposely make punishment degrading; they think it should be elevating, that in its purifying power lies its sole use and justification. We believe in tearing a soiled garment; they think it ought to be washed.
Surely these are great differences, surely thoughts like these, engraven in the hearts of a young people, will lead, in the great and glorious future that lies before them, to a conception of justice, to a method of dealing with crime, very different from what we know ourselves. They are now very much as we were sixteen centuries ago, when the Romans ruled us. Now we are a greater people, our justice is better, our prisons are better, our morality is inconceivably better than Imperial Rome ever dreamt of. And so with these people, when their time shall come, when they shall have grown out of childhood into manhood, when they shall have the wisdom and strength and experience to put in force the convictions that are in their hearts, it seems to me that they will bring out of these convictions something more wonderful than we to-day have dreamt of.