Show THE DACOITS BUTOIAH Civilization Has Compelled These Outlaws to Alter Their Habits Burmah is one of the countries that are changing very fast and one of the things that has changed in Burmah is the dacoit The sportive gentleman described byRudyard Kipling and others oth-ers who crucified villagers wholesale and filled old ladies with kerosene were flourishing in full vigor less than ten years ago but they already belong as completely to the past as Dick Turpin and his colleagues in England No doubt a fresh war or any great event seriously shaking the British power or reputation might produce a recrudescence of the old disease but in the meantime the dacoits have entirely I en-tirely changed their habits Instead of living in the jungle they are scattered scat-tered through separate villages in the guise of peaceful cultivators During the day each man attends to his paddy fields just like his neighbors and it is only at night that they meet together to-gether for the dispatch of their more important and lucrative business Da I coity as described by law is simply robbery committed by a band of five men or more and it is important only because of the Burmans strong natural nat-ural propensity toward it and the great difficulties which his national character char-acter places in the way of its detection detec-tion It must always be remembered that Burmah being in a transition stage and much less settled than India and the government being extremely shorthanded short-handed an immense amount of various kinds of work falls upon each single English official Hence it is wholly impossible im-possible for him to exercise any close or detailed supervision over any particular par-ticular part of his district This of itself renders the detection of criminals crimi-nals a difficult matter When the dacoits da-coits were in the woods it was simply a case of turning out occasionally to hunt them down At present the matter must necessarily necessar-ily be jeft chiefly to the natives Now the natives are for the most part honest hon-est and tolerably lawabiding and they have no sympathy whatever with a man who goes dacoiting but the dacoit goes armed and the supineness and cowardice of the Burman in the presence of arms and particularly of firearms are something almost incomprehensible incom-prehensible to the western mind It is quite sufficient for a party of half a dozen men to have a gun among them effective or useless loaded or empty and they may go fearlessly to work in the midst of a crowd no one will interfere with them In more than one instance bold robbers have made successful suc-cessful attacks when armed merely with their dahs the dagger which every ev-ery Burman carriesand with a pretended pre-tended rifle made of a stick with which they frighten off all opposition But perhaps the strange workings of the native character are best exhibited in the following case which occurred quite recently The facts are vouched for by an English officer There was a band of five men who were in the habit of practicing dacoity occasionally Three of them came from the same villagenot a common thing as it makes detection easier the fourth from another village and as for the fifth no man knows where he came from for many reasons that will appear One night these five men armed with nothing beyond their daggers dag-gers and spears which are used for fishing in lower Burmah entered a house tied up the owner and began plundering Now this house was in a large village containing not only a population of some 1400 but ai police post with fifteen native policemen armed with Sniders The alarm was given and the house surroundedthen there was a pause The robbers continued their work undisturbed un-disturbed within The villagerssome 200 or 300 ablebodied men all more or less armedsat around on the dam which surrounds and protects every house on the delta looked down on the house and discussed the question the police stood rather nearer the house I and fired shots into it through the i bamboo walls hurting no one One solitary policeman after a time volunteered I volun-teered to advance He crept up quite close to the house and fired through an opening in the wall then he went I further and actually put his head and part of his body through the hole apparently ap-parently to see what execution he had done u L One ot tne roooers prumpuy pumeu him to the ground with a fish spear and killed him By this time they had completed their preparations so they sallied forth each man with his pack of plunder on his back Though the house was surrounded they appear to have had no difficulty in making their way through only the police fired f after them with buckshot and hit three of them in the back not seriously wounding them But one of the band had the misfortune to stumble and fall Instantly the crowd rushed upon him and before he could rise literally hacked him to pieces and so effectively that not the slightest clew to his identity iden-tity remained He was absolutely destroyed I de-stroyed no one knows even what his nationality was The other four got clear away Now comes the sequel which is if possible still more extraordinary Some days after a man in a neighboring village informed the thugyi or headman head-man that two of the villagers whom he named had been concerned in the late dacoity The thugyi had them arrested ar-rested promptly and they were taken L to headquarters for identification |