A THIRD BURMESE WAR.
thire is a war which the Indian Government, and the
Imperial Government, and the natives of India, and the taxpayers at home do not seek or desire, it is a third war with Burmah ; but unless better news arrives very quickly, that war may become inevitable. It is of course conceivable that the King of Burmah—a capricious though haughty despot— may yield at the eleventh hour, or that he may be de- throned by a Palace revolution, or that his subjects may compel him to submit to terms ; but it would seem from the evidence more probable that he has made up his mind to fight, and just possible that he has what appears to him very good reason for fighting. The facts, as we under- stand them, are in this wise. For the last twenty years the Court of Burmah has had in its foreign politics but two objects, —to regain Pegu, the rich Delta-land of the Irrawaddy, which it has never ceded by treaty, which it regards as indefeasibly its own by natural right, and which it sees advancing yearly in wealth, population, and attractiveness ; and to cement its own authority over the tributary clans, Shans, Karens, and so on, who enclose Burmah Proper as with a scanty fringe. Mad with pride as the King is—and the dynasty of Alompra, parvenu though it be, stands almost alone even in Asia in the magnificence of its pretensions—he is nevertheless aware that with a settled territory no bigger than England—though he has a vague authority over twice as much more—and less than 1,500,000 semi-civilised subjects, for the wild tribes do not count, he cannot hope to expel the masters of India, who have twice defeated him on his own ground, though, unfortunately for themselves, they have never entered his capital. He thinks it impossible to move until he has other support, or has extended his empire in some way, and has contented himself, therefore, with efforts to find an ally, and to bring the clans around more directly under his own authority, hoping always, as the end of his efforts, to secure power sufficient to expel the British from Pegu. There is, we fear, reason to believe that within the last few months events have occurred which have convinced the King that he has secured both objects, and that the hour has arrived when he may safely defy any British representations. He has by some means or other, either by Chinese assistance or by employing the wealth he obtains from his monopoly of the foreign trade, or by expending a small force drilled by Europeans, or by working on the fears of the French and the Siamese entertained by some of the wild tribes, so strengthened his hold upon them that they have sent him recruits, and he has been induced to claim allegiance from some Karennee clans who, dwelling on ground claimed by the British, thought themselves inde- pendent. Victories like these, trifling as they are, make him seem in his own eyes a triumphant conqueror. Moreover, he has formed some sort of alliance or relation with China which induces him to think that in the lad resort he could rely on Chinese assistance, if not on Chinese armed protection. It is said that he has recently resubmitted to the dependent rela- tion in which his kingdom once stood to Pekin, has paid his tribute to the Emperor, with ample apologies for neglect, and has received in return assurances from the Foreign Office that he is numbered upon the long list of Chinese vassal Princes. The extraordinary honours which he has paid to the Chinese General Lesetahi, who attacked Colonel Browne's expedition, seem to confirm this story, and if it is true, there is no need to seek for further explanation of the conduct of the King. Holland has Germany at its back, and is not to be held or driven. We are accustomed to think of China as a vast, but decrepit empire, powerless for foreign war, and overtaxed by internal insurrection, but that is not at all the light in which it appears to the Court of Mandalay. There the Government of Pekin appears to be a mighty power, which has existed in unbroken solidity for ages, which only a century ago was paramount over both Nepaul and Barmah, which can set in
motion a limitless multitude of troops, and which less than twelve months ago extirpated a great Mohammedan kingdom on the Burmese frontier, a kingdom with which the Burmese were as familiar as Englishmen are with Belgium or Holland. This very General who is being welcomed has slain more men than are included in the Indian Army. The aid of Pekin seems to Mandalay what the aid of Germany would seem to Bucharest, and of this aid, as we fear, the King thinks he has made sure. Is he not a vassal of Pekin, and intent in recover- ing Pegu to extend the dominion of the Paramount Power ? What kind of assurances he has received from Pekin, Western men of course will never know, for the Chinese Court, never very open-minded, covers up its policy in the West with a veil of impenetrable secrecy ; but it seems certain that a great General has been sent to Mandalay on a special mission, that the Chinese in Pegu believe that a Chinese army is coming, and that the Court of Pekin would like very much to re-establish a firm supremacy over all its ancient vassals. To use Burmah as a cat's-paw to annoy the intruding Europeans would seem to Pekin the very height of statesmanship. The King may have been made to think his hour has arrived, and if so, his rapid levies, his purchases of stores and arms, his menace to the Karens, and his smooth im- pertinencies to Captain Strover all mean war, and war with the object of recovering Pegu. He will make no apology—except, perhaps, in words—to Sir Douglas Forsyth for his broken promise to open our road to China, will give no guarantee for his treatment of the Karens, and will offer no trustworthy explanation of his relations with the Chinese assailants of Mr. Margary.
Of course, if he means war, we must accept war, and in spite of the experience of our first campaign —experience which for a moment completely deceived Lord Dalhousie and General Godwin, both of whom believed that a land march up the left bank of the Irrawaddy would ultimately be required—the campaign ought not to be either long or indecisive. The King of Burmah is unluckily situated. He is a King with a great kingdom as far as area is concerned, but he is not half so safe as a petty Afreedee sheik protected by his mountains, or a little chief of the Nagas whose village in the jungles can be reached only by a liberal sacrifice of axemen, for there is not a city in Burmah beyond the reach of bombardment from an easily navigable river. The European soldiers em- barking in Calcutta need never be transhipped or landed till they are cantoned in Mandalay. The half-drilled irregulars whom the King calls soldiers will no more stand against shells than they did in 1852, when, with their confidence still un- broken, they declared that the shells followed them all about, and fled from a position, the great Pagoda of Rangoon, which a hundred English artillerymen would have held against an army. Even if the Chinese should avowedly take sides with their tributary, an event we do not anticipate, more especially now that we could find a formidable ally in Japan, their forces could not arrive in time, and Burmah ought, within a month of the outbreak of hostilities, to lie helplessly at our feet.
It is not, we conceive, in the campaign, but after it, that difficulties will arise. What are we to do with Burmah when it haa fallen into our hands ? We clearly cannot retire and leave it to its fate, for apart from the immorality of that con- clusion. the dynasty would reseat itself, or be reseated with the assistance of the Chinese, and would on the very first oppor- tunity renew its claim to recover Pegu, a province which, rich as it is, will soon be poor if it has to live under perpetual menace of war. We cannot make a treaty with the King, for he would never sign one, or signing one, would break it on the one point of importance, the right of way for our traders to the frontier of Western China,—a right he dreads because it would interfere with his only private fisc. We can, no doubt, annex, but annexation will add most cruelly to the sum of responsibilities on the shoulders of the Viceroys, already almost too great to manage. If we accept the Govern- ment of Burmah, we must accept the control of its dependent tribes ; and Burmah, with its tribes, covers an area of 144,000 square miles, has a civilised population of less than 1,500,000 and an uncivilised one of 2,500,000, and could not yield under our fiscal system £500,000 a year. Our frontier would be marched for five hundred miles with that of Western China, and what with the order we should establish, and the mines that we should open, and the equal justice that we should mete out to everybody, we should, within ten years, be over- whelmed with a deluge of Chinese immigrants, whom we could neither neglect, nor govern, nor expel. Chinese immi- grants are trouble enough to a Government like ours any-
where—even in Singapore they would expel us, if it were not for the ships—but Chinese immigrants by the million, all bound together in secret Hoeys, and all ready to appeal to the three hundred millions just over the border, would be a charge from which even Lord Dalhousie's dauntless spirit shrunk. We have reason to know that one of the strongest of the many reasons which induced him in 1852 to stop short of Ummerapoora, and remain content without a treaty, was his dread -of this very contingency of having to govern a Chinese population which, as he said, "cannot be controlled by judges who want proof before they execute," and to watch a frontier which might be entered by a hundred thousand men at once. We do not, we need not say, accept the modern policy which shrinks from every duty because per- forming it may involve an addition to the Empire, but we certainly hold it most unwise to bring the border of the Indian Empire straight up to that of China. Chinese wars are trouble enough, without our having to despatch 10,000 Europeans into the Burmese jungles whenever a Chinese Regent thinks fit to seize a chest of opium, or refuse to make reparation for the murder of a trader. And yet if we do not annex, what are we -to do ? The only alternative is to upset the dynasty of Alom- pra, which is modern, the founder having built up his throne by the conquest of Pegu only four years before Plessey, and set up some vassal prince who will reign subject to the orders of a British Ambassador, and who will desire to regain Pegu just as much as if he belonged to the dynasty which had lost it,— that is, in other words, to annex without obtaining any of the advantages to the people or ourselves which follow on annexa- tion. These semi-dependent Princes, from Cashmere down- wards, are nuisances, which, but that the India House keeps its secrets better than any Government in the world, would not be endured by British opinion for a week. The enterprise cannot, we fear, be avoided, and we have no fear for the immediate result of the campaign, but we confess it is with no kind of enthusiasm that we note the imminent probability of a third Burmese War.
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