Page:Lord Amherst and the British Advance Eastwards to Burma.djvu/35

 some border troubles, but we bad no notion of extending our political activity to the valley of the Irawadi. Yet as the consequence of that first step taken by Lord Amherst, the British standard has been advanced not only beyond the royal cities of the Burmese, but carried up the Irawadi to the very confines of China, and along the tributaries of the great stream, among wild tribes that hardly owned even a nominal allegiance to the lords of the white elephant. This process of undesigned and undesired absorption has added the Celestial Empire to the list of powers with which the rulers of India have to make their account; while it has brought us into perilous contact with the French possessions in Indo-China, and with adventurous soldiers who would fain recover for the arms of the Republic the Empire in the East of which Dupleix dreamt and for which he plotted.

From another point of view the Burmese war marks a stage in the political relations of creeds Buddhism had its birth in India. From India came the missionaries who won vast populations in Eastern Asia to belief in the teachings of Gautama. But the religion is extinct in the land where its founder was born and where for many centuries after his death it flourished. In the struggle with Bráhmanism the simpler faith of Sakya Muni was worsted, its edifices destroyed, and its votaries exterminated, and so for ages the cults dwelt apart. But when the Hindu Sepoys occupied Rangoon, they found themselves in a Buddhist land. When contemplating the gorgeous pagodas which