The Indian mail brings no Intelligence of any decisive opera-
tions in the war with Burmah. Run:tours had reached Madras, of an action between an English man of war and the Burmese, in which a grist number of the latter were killed, with the loss of only three Englishmen ; of the assembling of an army of twenty thousand men by the King of Burmah ; and of the despatch of a Queen's -steamer up the Irawadi. The preparations of the author- ities at Calcutta look as if they contemplated a tedious war; and the army and military journals rejoice in prospect at the "absorp- tion of the choicer parts of the Burmese territory." It is to be hoped that if any such idea has entered the imaginations of the Indian Government, it will be at once put down : every extension of our Indian possessions is simply an increase of expense and embarrassment; and the Burmese, a weak enemy, surrounded on three sides by the British territories, are not the most inconvenient of frontier neighbours.
