but to administer, and, as invariably happens, the violation of a sound economic principle of this sort is certain sooner or later to carry its own punishment with it.  In the second place, the Forest Department, which is of very special importance in Burma, is a good deal crippled by the “want of energy and want of industry which are unfortunately common in the subordinate grades.  The reason for this state of things is to be found in the fact that the pay and prospects are not good enough to attract really capable men.”  In many quarters, notably in Central Africa, British Treasury officials have yet to learn that, from every point of view, it is quite as great a mistake to employ underpaid administrative agents as it would be for an employer of labour to proceed on the principle that low wages necessarily connote cheap production.

Sir George Scott in his introduction strikes a very different note from that sounded by M. Dautremer.  He alleges that the wealthy province of Burma, which M. Dautremer tells us is not unseldom called “the milch-cow of India,” is starved, that its financial policy has been directed by “cautious, nothing-venture, mole-horizon people,” who have hid their talent in a napkin; that “everything seems expressly designed to drive out the capital” of which the country stands so much in need; that not nearly enough has been done in the way of expenditure on public works, notably on roads and railways, and that when these latter have been constructed, they have sometimes been in the wrong directions.  He cavils at M. Dautremer’s description of Burma as “a model possession,” and holds that “as a matter of bitter fact, the administrative view is that of the parish beadle, and the enterprise that of the country-carrier with a light cart instead of a motor-van.”

It would require greater local knowledge than any possessed by the writer of the present article either to endorse or to reject these formidable accusations, although it may be said that the violence of Sir George Scott’s invective is not very convincing, but rather raises a strong suspicion that he has overstated his case.  Nothing is more difficult, either for a private individual or for a State financier, than to decide the question of when to be bold and when cautious in the matter of capital outlay.  It is quite possible to push to an extreme the commonplace, albeit attractive, argument that large expenditure will be amply remunerative, or even if not directly remunerative, highly beneficial “in the long run.”  Although this plea is often—­indeed, perhaps generally—­valid, it is none the less true that the run which is foreshadowed is at times so long as to make the taxpayer, who has to bear the present cost, gasp for breath before the promised goal is reached.  Pericles, by laying out huge sums on the public buildings of Athens, earned the undying gratitude of artistic posterity.  Whether his action was in the true interests of his Athenian contemporaries is perhaps rather more doubtful.