`People's judges' are given a helping hand by the old,
British-trained barristers, and the bureaucracy provides a lot of welcome employment. Even in the countryside the hand of the Party does not appear to lie particularly heavy. The Party may have the decisive voice but it is by no means the only voice.
In reality, leaving aside the troubled areas outside the central plain, the countryside presents an air of harmony and elementary prosperity, studded with pagodas and monasteries, and peopled with cheerful and hospitable peasants, engaged in their tradi- tional tasks and crafts, a picture to delight the eye of Morris or Gill, Chesterton or Belloc. It would be churlish to withhold all credit for this state of affairs from the regime. And it would be arrogant to suggest that there is necessarily available an alter- native way of running Burma which would be an immediate improvement on the system evolved since 1962 but which would not bring with it the seeds of instability and war which have borne such dreadful fruit in neighbouring Indochina.
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