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Rh ings with foreigners as the Chinese have been far-seeing and comparatively temperate, refused either apology or indemnity for the injurious treatment of British subjects by its officers. Yet the Burmese war of 1826 ought to have convinced less intelligent rulers that they were at the mercy of a strong maritime power in the Bay of Bengal, which could occupy their whole seaboard, blockade their only outlets, and penetrate inland up the Irawadi River. These steps, in fact, the Governor-General found himself compelled to take, with the result that Pegu, a country inhabited by a race that the Burmese had subdued, easily fell into British hands, and was retained when the Burmese armies had been defeated and driven out, its annexation being officially proclaimed December 20, 1852.

This conquest made the British possessions continuous along the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal, and once more placed the English in a position of the kind which seems to have been peculiarly favourable everywhere to the expansion of dominion. The possession of a flat and fertile deltaic province at the outflow of a great river, whether in Asia or in Africa, enables a maritime power to settle itself securely on the land with a base on the sea; it gives control of a great artery of commerce, and provides an easy waterway inland. With these advantages, especially as the people of such a province are usually industrious and unwarlike, an enterprising intruder is easily carried up-stream by the course of events, and to this general rule British progress in Burma certainly affords no exception. As the