sorrows, in all of which the silent immortal river
has played its continuous part. One cannot entrap
the glory of that which lives and moves, and is yet in
its entity and suggestiveness eternal.
The peoples of Burma came from the Highlands to
the north of their present home many centuries ago,
at a time of which no memory is preserved in local
legend or tradition ; though nature, less forgetful, has
written upon each man’s face the evidence of his origin.
Following the streams which rise in that elevated
country, they gradually spread southward, reaching, in
the fulness of time, the sea. In primitive ages, when the
clan or tribe was the only political unit, and there was
no more obvious line of separation than the watershed
between the streams that they encountered in their
southern migration, it was natural that each tribe should
separate itself from the rest. It was a separation, however,
which, while it secured to each tribe its immediate
liberty, carried in it the germ of ultimate reunion ; and
read in the light of this physical fact, the racial history
of Burma becomes clear in its wide outline. The
dominant Burmese represent the tribes that wandered
down the tributary sources of the Upper Irrawaddy
finally to coalesce in the valley of the great river.
Their kindred with a lesser heritage are found in the
many tribes on their borders. The Mun or Talaing, the
people of the south, were amongst the first of those who
came. The Burmese drove them before them, as they
would pfobably have been driven themselves in time by
the newer Kachin. But the Kachin has recoiled before