as a man to
gain a step in holiness. I do not mean that they think men are always
better than women, but that the best men are far better than the best
women, and there are many more of them. However all this may be, it is
only an opinion. Neither in their law, nor in their religion, nor--what
is far more important--in their daily life, do they acknowledge any
inferiority in women beyond those patent weaknesses of body that are,
perhaps, more differences than inferiorities.

And so she has always had fair-play, from religion, from law, and from
her fellow man and woman.

She has been bound by no ties, she has had perfect freedom to make for
herself just such a life as she thinks best fitted for her. She has had
no frozen ideals of a long dead past held up to her as eternal copies.
She has been allowed to change as her world changed, and she has lived
in a very real world--a world of stern facts, not fancies. You see, she
has had to fight her own way; for the same laws that made woman lower
than man in Europe compensated her to a certain extent by protection
and guidance. In Burma she has been neither confined nor guided. In
Europe and India for very long the idea was to make woman a hot-house
plant, to see that no rough winds struck her, that no injuries overtook
her. In Burma she has had to look out for herself: she has had freedom
to come to grief as well as to come to strength. You see, all such laws
cut both ways. Freedom to do ill must accompany freedom to do well. You
cannot have one without the other. The Burmese woman has had both.
Ideals act for good as well as for evil; if they cramp all progress,
they nevertheless tend to the sustentation of a certain level of
thought. She has had none. Whatever she is, she has made herself,
finding under the varying circumstances of life what is the best for
her; and as her surroundings change, so will she. What she was a
thousand years ago I do not care, what she may be a thousand years hence
I do not know; it is of what she is to-day that I have tried to know and
write.

Children in Burma have, I think, a very good time when they are young.
Parentage in Burma has never degenerated into a sort of slavery. It has
never been supposed that gaiety and goodness are opposed. And so they
grow up little merry naked things, sprawling in the dust of the gardens,
sleeping in the sun with their arms round the village dogs, very sedate,
very humorous, very rarely crying. Boys and gi