The Pleasantville Press

TEACHES BOYS TO
MAKE STEAMERS
Baptist Missionary in Burma De-
velops Unique Industry-Gov-
ernment Helps in Education.

"On the road to Mandalay, where the old flotilla lay," steam launches built by the Burmese boys of a Baptist Mission school are now making frequent trips and the profits from their sale to the natives are helping in the establishment of practical industrial education in that country.

The Rev. Dr. C. A. Nichols is the man that is directly responsible for this industrial development. In far-off Burma, on the actual soil of old England, even though as Kipling says, "there ain't no buses runnin' from the bank to Mandalay," he secured a sawmill.

It was in Bassein, one of the towns grouped about the numerous mouths of the Irrawaddy, that the enterprise was begun. The Irrawaddy is the very river upon which Mandalay is built and up which "the old flotilla" made its way from Rangoon. Rev. Dr. Nichols went to work as a Baptist missionary among the Sgaw Karens, one of the forty races in cosmopolitan Burma, conducting a missionary school along the standard lines.

One day a British commissioner visiting the school asked why the boys were not taught a trade. Dr. Nichols made the time-honored missionary excuse, lack of funds to purchase equipment.

The commissioner, however, was so well impressed with the progress that the boys were making in their studies that he undertook to put a dozen of them in the government railway shops to study as machinists. Here the boys spent five years learning their trade and during that apprenticeship retained their membership in the mission church. This was the first step in the development of the industrial education idea. The next was the purchase of the sawmill.

Incidentally the Northern Baptist Convention has grasped the significance of Dr. Nichols' idea, and in its New World Movement program includes a project "to establish a trade school at Moulmein and introduce education in the industrial arts, for industrial independence will make for the strength of Christian society in India as in America."