This, however, is not too well understood by the masses in Thailand. And, so, most of them put up with life the best way they can, but the less light-hearted among them resign themselves to the fate of having to continue in the cycle of sorrow and suffering until their hearts and minds are sufficiently purified to reach Nirvana, the Immortal End, where cause and effect are no more. Perhaps now you may understand why the Thais, as Buddhists, may seem to you a little strange in their ideas of life. It takes a divine realism to acknowledge that life is sorrow, instead of joy, as generally accepted elsewhere. The only danger is that realism may easily degenerate into opportunism. It is one thing to face facts and adapt oneself to them accordingly, but quite another to shape the course of one's life in disregard of ideals and principles. I only hope that other saving qualities in the Thais will prevent them from going downhill towards unwholesome opportunism.

TOLERANCE AND ADAPTABILITY

One of those saving qualities is tolerance, for Buddism advises against excess in everything, even in faith and conviction. So we have never had a religious war in our country. Christian churches and Mohammedan mosques stand side by side with Buddhist temples and there is no such word as heathen in the Buddhist vocabulary. Foreigners have noticed that the Thais completely lack complex-inferior or superior.

Much can be expected of this characteristic tolerance of the Thai people. In the past, it helped them to survive by adapting themselves to new ideas and changed circumstances. In the nineteenth century under the able leadership of King Chulalongkorn it enabled them to transform their country from a semifeudalistic state into a modern state within a short interval of 50 or 60 years. The same tolerance brought about a bloodless revolution in 1932, which substituted a modern democratic government for absolute monarchy. With their characteristic tolerance and adaptability, the Thais readily took to modern technology and flew aeroplanes a few years after the French pilots crossed the English Channel. The railroads which they built are acknowledged to be among the best and most comfortable in the Far East, and their airport at Bangkok ranked as one of the best equipped in the 15 leading airports of the world before the war. With this characteristic tolerance, but with their own preserved sense of value and direction, the Thais may make great progress yet.

LOVE OF FREEDOM

The people call their country Muang Thai, the Land of the Free. This single word Thai imparts to the people a sense of dignity bordering on pride.

By nature, the Thais are as free as their name signifies. Sometimes they become unreasonably free, a trait which accounted for disunion and internecine wars in the past. Thai tribes living outside Thailand have been found to possess a strong spirit of independence. Not only as tribes but as smaller groups, they are inclined to be individualistic.

Several factors account for the freedom-loving trait in the Thais. As Buddhists, they are taught that man is his own salvation. There is no heaven or hell, nor an extraneous and divine power to forgive sins. There is only a chain of cause and effect. The only way to avoid unhappiness is to forbear from committing evil acts beforehand. Then the daily life of the Thais is essentially free as more than 80 percent of the Thais are farmers. Their destiny as well as that of their families lies entirely in their own hands.

Although ruled by an absolute monarchy until 1932, the Thais knew no theory of the divine right of kingship. Whenever tyranny was practiced by kings or nobles, the people disposed of them in a manner quite incompatible with any theory of divine origin. Only the immediate descendants of Kings are entitled to royal rank and, at the fifth generation, they become commoners. It is significant that in the title of Thai kings is the phrase "by common appointment of the realm." Furthermore, the most outstanding figure in the long line of Thailand's kings, Prince Ram Khamhaeng, who founded the first Thai kingdom in the IndoChinese peninsula in the thirteenth century, was the author of a celebrated inscription preserved to this day, now considered as Thailand's charter and first written constitution.

It is thus characteristic of the Thai people that their first absolute monarch should have been the very person to proclaim their freedom in a Charter of Liberty. It is still more characteristic of the race that Prajatipok, the last of their absolute monarchs, should advocate the abrogation of his own royal privileges in favor of democracy. This was announced in an interview while he was on a visit to this country in 1931. The Thais, however, have yet many things to learn from democracy, especially that democracy involves responsibilities as well as rights, and that at best it is a system of checks and balances, a system which can only function properly if it is operated by a sufficiently large body of citizens fully educated to and conscious of their duties and obligations.

Looking back on their past, the Thais have good reason to be proud of themselves. Their race has not only managed to survive as a free and self-governing people since the early dawn of history,

It has

but has been able to hold its own against all comers. become an expression of national faith that "Krung Sri Ayuthya mei sin khon de," meaning "There shall always be good men to redeem Thailand." And so it has been until Thailand went down in infamy at the hands of traitors and the Japanese armed forces. On September 11, 1941, when a Japanese attack on their country seemed imminent, a law was passed to the effect that all Thais must resist aggression by every means and with every resource at hand, on pain of death or life imprisonment. When the Japanese attacked, the armed forces and the people as a whole resisted. But after a few hours they were betrayed by the quislings in power, who ordered the armed forces to stop firing; thus putting an end to organized resistance in Thailand.

Undoubtedly, this is one side of Thai realism which among a few unworthy ones has degenerated into disreputable opportunism. The capitulation came as a shock to all Thais both at home and abroad. On December 8, 1941, when Japanese troops were already marching into Bangkok, the radio was still assuring the people that the government would continue the policy of resistance as required by law. When the capitulation was actually announced, therefore, the population of Bangkok was overwhelmed with grief and sorrow, as foreign observers have since testified. And so it has come to pass that the very word Thai has suddenly become a mockery instead of being vested with the dignity it has held for ages. But long centuries of independence do not foster meekness and ready submission to foreign domination. When the history of Thai resistance comes to be written, the Thai people will not be found lacking in courage and sacrifice worthy of their independence.

DR. RAYMOND KENNEDY *

* Dr. Raymond Kennedy is associate professor of sociology, Yale University. In 1928-29 he was a teacher at Brent School, Baguio, Luzon, P. I., and during the following 3 years was engaged in business in the Netherlands East Indies. His main fields of interest are sociology, anthropology, ethnol ogy, and administration of the Netherlands East Indies. He is the author of a number of publications on Indonesia, including “The Ageless Indies" and "Islands and Peoples of the Indies," and he is able to work directly from Dutch and Malay sources, since he both reads and speaks these languages.

THE INDONESIANS, who are the people of the East Indies,

number over 70 million, more than half the population of the United States. They inhabit one of the richest regions of the world, where the soil is extremely fertile, the mineral wealth great, and the commercial possibilities tremendous. They are an emerging nation, one of which our children and grandchildren will hear far more than we ever have.

The Indies are a chain of islands that cluster along the equator, between Asia and Australia. They stretch more than 3,000 miles from west to east, and more than 1,000 miles from north to south. Among them are some of the largest islands in the world: New Guinea, largest of all next to Greenland; Borneo, a great land mass of almost 300,000 square miles; and Sumatra, an island about the size of California. The islands of the entire archipelago may be divided into four groups: The Greater Sunda Islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and Celebes; the lesser Sunda Islands, a chain of smaller ones extending from Bali to Timor; the Moluccas, a vast array of small and intermediate-sized islands in the sea between Celebes and New Guinea; and finally New Guinea itself.

Located on the equator, the islands have a very warm climate throughout the year. The only seasonal change is that between the wet and dry seasons. During the wet season, it rains just about all the time, a 6-month constant drenching. The dry season hardly lives up to its name since in most parts of the Indies, even during this period, rainfall is considerable. Heat and moisture, then, are the dominant characteristics of the climate. People for several months after their arrival in the Indies suffer greatly from the heat, but the body then adjusts to the temperature, and most foreigners, after the first 4 or 5 months, get acclimated to the warmth and it bothers them very little.

More spectacular than heat and rain are the volcanic activity and earthquakes. This is one of the greatest volcanic zones in the world. Java and Sumatra have scores of smoking mountains which occasionally break out in eruption, but there have been

relatively few dangerous ones. Earthquakes occur quite frequently, but are almost never dangerous.

The people who live in this great island world of the southwest Pacific belong mostly to the Malay race, a brown-skinned division of the widespread Mongoloid stock. They are closely related to, and look much like, Filipinos, Burmese, and southern Chinese. They are small-indeed, very small-for the men average only 5 feet 2 or 3 inches in height, the women 2 or 3 inches shorter. They are beautifully built, on a miniature scale, with round and well-turned bodies and delicately shaped limbs. Their hair is black and usually straight or slightly wavy, their faces broad and flat, their noses predominantly wide and low; and their eyes often have the slanting, folded shape of the true Mongoloid. They have a remarkably dignified bearing, standing erect and moving gracefully. Almost never does one encounter a fat, skinny, or clumsy Indonesian.

When one passes east of Bali, on to Timor, the Moluccas, and New Guinea, a different racial type appears, with darker skin, taller stature, frizzy hair, and features that verge on the Negroid. Here one is passing into the great Negroid or Melanesian zone of the Pacific, which extends all the way from New Guinea to Fiji, and down into Australia. Whereas the Malays of the western islands are serene and calm—almost stoical in temperament—the Papuans of the eastern Indies are boisterous and excitable. Thus the racial zones coincide, as it were, with zones of temperamental difference.

The great majority of the Indonesians are peasant farmers, mainly rice growers. Very few of them work for wages. Very few of them live in cities. They support themselves on their own land, and buy little from the outside world. They live in small villages of simple thatched huts of wood and bamboo which they build themselves. They wear simple clothing-a sarong and blouse for women, and a sarong or trousers and shirt for men. Formerly they even wove their own cloth for garments, but the one main commodity they now secure from the outside world is cotton textiles for clothing.

What I have just said applies to nearly all the Javanese and to the coastal populations of most of the other islands. But in the interior regions of Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes, and the remaining outer islands, one still finds so-called "primitive" customs among the isolated tribes. Here hunting is still an important means of livelihood. Here the people still weave their own clothes, or, in some cases, beat out bark-cloth from the inner bast of tree trunks. Here tattooing, various forms of mutilation of the ears and genital