Note 461 — Chapter VI
Reading edition
How very dark some of these corners can be may be seen from the sad picture of maladministration, vice, and corruption still prevalent so late as 1890, given by Hallett in A Thousand Miles on an Elephant, Ch. xxxv.; and even still later by H. Warington Smyth in Five Years in Siam, from 1891 to 1896 (1898). This observer credits the Siamese with an undeveloped sense of right and wrong, so that they are good only by accident. "To do a thing because it is right is beyond them; to abstain from a thing because it is against their good name, or involves serious consequences, is possibly within the power of a few; the question of right and wrong does not enter the calculation." But he thinks they may possess a high degree of intelligence, and mentions the case of a peasant, who from an atlas had taught himself geography and politics. P. A. Thompson, Lotus Land, 1906, gives an account of the country and people of Southern Siam.