Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/438

388 for power among princes of the reigning house, and among powerful ministers who aspired to rule absolutely in the name of one Assamese prince or another, with the inevitable result that the defeated party called in the Burmese from across the mountains eastward. Fresh troubles soon followed, for the king who had been reinstated by the Burmese troops soon quarrelled with them, finding, as usual, that a foreign army of occupation is an exceedingly dangerous remedy for civil war; and the Burmese, after putting several puppets up and down, brought matters to the ordinary conclusion by placing Assam under a governor of their own.

That a feeble and distracted semi-Hindu state on the Anglo-Indian frontier should thus be converted into a province of a warlike and aggressive Indo-Chinese kingdom was by no means to the advantage of the English, with whom it is always a first principle of politics to shut out all strange intruders into India from beyond the mountains or the sea. The Burmese now held the upper waters of that great navigable river, the Brahmaputra, and of other streams flowing from the Assam hills into the sea through Eastern Bengal; they were on the crests of the mountain passes leading into the lowlands, and they were subduing or intimidating all the petty chiefs along our frontier.

It has always been the practice of the English in India, as of other civilized empires in contact with barbarism, to maintain a zone of tribal lands and chiefships as a barrier or quickset hedge against