The Forum

APRIL, 1902.

THE EXAMPLE OF THE MALAY STATES.

THE friends of America abroad are watching with a good deal of interest the course of her apprenticeship in the government of subject aliens. In England, where the interest is naturally keenest, there is, to be quite candid, a shade of anxiety mingling with it. After reading and studying the reports of the Philippine Commissions, Englishmen are not yet wholly convinced that Americans are altogether on the right tack, or that their prevision of what lies ahead of them in the archipelago is in all respects complete. Is it necessary to add, considering the difficulty Englishmen find in distinguishing between British practices and the universal laws of nature, that the right tack in this business of empire-building is, for them, the English tack? Their claim to be the model imperialists of the age is one, perhaps, that might at certain points be disputed. It is not, for instance, by any means certain that the Russians have not a sounder perception of the lines along which the government of inferior, and especially Asiatic, peoples should run. It may quite conceivably happen that the Russian Empire, when time brings it the administrative perfection of British rule in India, will, by virtue of its strong instinct for autocracy and its freedom from a distorted sentimentality—its readiness, in a word, to govern the Orient according to Oriental ideas — really surpass in beneficence and grandeur its British rival.

Still, whatever their shortcomings, the claim of Englishmen to speak with some authority on the constructive matters of empire is one that can hardly be gainsaid, nor will an American be likely to dispute it. It

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happens that in the Malay Peninsula, Englishmen have met and solved problems of striking resemblance to those that now confront the Americans in the Philippines; and while, of course, any one who speaks English must have a constitutional preference for his own mistakes over other people's successes, still it may possibly be of some service to point the moral of British rule in Malaya. Englishmen, of course, have no sort of doubt that in the long run American rule in the Philippines will be all that Americans desire. Their confidence in the final capacity of any section of the race for that sort of work is not to be shaken. But they realize that Americans have some special difficulties to contend with; that many blunders are inevitable; and that much time and labor will be wasted unless the accumulated experience of other nations is made use of to guide or warn. Already they see reason for anxiety in the excessive spirit of altruism with which Americans appear to be setting about the business. They suspect American sentimentality and that passion for political proselytizing which is the note of modern democracy as it was of the old absolutism. They suspect, too, the American political system, and note with surprise and almost consternation that, though more than three years have gone by since the close of the war with Spain, nothing in the nature of a stable civil service for the administration of the new possessions is yet apparent. They are not absolutely confident that Congress, when it has got the control of things fairly into its hands, may not repeat some of the mistakes that marked the Reconstruction Period in the Southern States and the not wholly creditable tale of American dealings with the Indians; and they find it hard to believe that the senatorial privilege of passing upon appointments to all Federal offices will prove compatible with an efficient and non-political government of the American Empire.

It is not yet thirty years since England began to concern herself at all actively with the internal affairs of the Malay Peninsula. This is the more remarkable inasmuch as her holdings on the coast date. back over a hundred and twenty years. It was in 1786 that Captain Light, an officer in the employ of the East India Company, procured the cession of the island of Penang, off the northwestern coast of the Peninsula. Nine years later the town and territory of Malacca, situated half-way down the western coast, were wrested from the Dutch; and in 1819 Sir Stamford Raffles, perhaps the most strenuous and prescient empire-builder that England has ever produced and forgotten, acquired the island of Singapore. These three holdings were administered by the East India Company from Calcutta as trading stations and ports

of call for Indian commerce with China. The Company, already sufficiently preoccupied with India proper, made no effort to carry its authority into the interior. Treaties of trade were from time to time made with the native sultans and rajahs; but, except for a strip of territory eight miles wide and forty-five long opposite the island of Penang, there was no attempt, either private or official, to add to the Company's dominions. So careful was the directorate to limit its responsibilities that even piracy went on unchecked, while to the state of affairs in the hinterland of its three possessions the Company paid no heed.

This, too, was the policy of the British Government when it took over the Company's undertaking after the Indian Mutiny and gave to its holdings on and around the Malay Peninsula the cumbrous title of the Straits Settlements. The Downing Street of 1867 had no touch of land-hunger in its composition, and the modern sense of imperialism was not then born. It announced at once that any British subject who ventured into the interior of the Malay Peninsula, for trade or exploration or sport, did so at his own risk and with the foreknowledge that no appeal to the home Government for protection would be listened to; and to this attitude it steadfastly adhered for the next seven years.

In 1874 events proved too strong for official immobility, and showed, as Africa has shown time and again, that a nation which has once begun to expand cannot automatically stop. The British settlements on the coast bordered on native states that were always more or less in process of eruption. The year 1874 proved a particularly explosive one. In Perak, in the northwest of the Peninsula, three Malay chiefs were fighting for the sultanate; and the Chinese immigrants, who worked the tin mines, had got completely out of hand and were plunged into a war of secret societies over the possession of certain mining areas. To any one who has seen or read or can imagine the Asiatic completeness with which such disputes are settled, the condition of Perak needs no further description. The entire state was reduced not only to anarchy but almost to starvation. Many of the Chinese took to piracy, and in an encounter two British naval officers were wounded. Lastly, the legitimate ruler of Perak appealed to the Governor of the Straits Settlements at Singapore not only for assistance to assert his position, but for the advice of a British administrator in the future government of his state. The Governor was new and fresh at his work; and, without troubling to refer the matter home, he promptly called a meeting of the chiefs, recognized the legitimate ruler, and appointed a British Resident to his court, "whose advice," it was agreed by treaty, "must be asked and

acted upon in all questions other than those touching Malay religion. and customs."

So the British came to Perak. In Selangor, another native state on the west coast a little lower down, the same conditions prevailed, but in a milder form. Here, too, a British Resident was despatched and received in 1874. In the following year came the turn of Sungei Ujong, a small state to the south of Selangor. In 1883 similar relations were established with a number of diminutive native states that clustered round the borders of Malacca. These states were in 1889 confederated under the name of Negri Sembilan the Nine States-and six years

later Sungei Ujong was added to them. In 1888 Pahang, on the east coast, was placed in charge of a Resident; and in 1895 all territories in the Peninsula acknowledging British protection that is to say, Perak, Selangor, Negri Sembilan, and Pahang -were amalgamated for administrative purposes under the title of the Federated Malay States. The Sultan of Johor is now the only independent native ruler in the Peninsula south of Perak; and even his independence is of a qualified kind, the foreign relations of the state having since 1887 been placed in British hands. It is worth noting that though the English have thus a practically complete control of the Peninsula, the Federated Malay States are not an organic part of the Empire. They are not British, but only "under British protection."

It is necessary to reconstruct the states as they were under native rule before we can appreciate the fulness of the change which a handful of Englishmen have brought about. The Peninsula, when they first entered it, was, to begin with, an all but trackless jungle. "Villages which did not lie upon the banks of the same river, though separated from one another by only few miles of jungle, were so remote that it was a journey of several days' duration to pass from one to the other. Vast tracts of stanniferous land were rendered inaccessible through lack of facilities for transport. The natural wealth of the country was thus hermetically sealed." The states were administered on a system of Oriental feudalism. The hereditary Sultan owned all the territory over which his rule extended. He was not only the richest man, the greatest trader, banker, and capitalist of the state, but the supreme judge and the source of all honors. His education was a training in cruelty and sensuality; his power over life and death was absolute and unquestioned. Under him were the Orang Besar, the great barons who held districts in fief. Then came a Council of Eight in charge of a subdistrict, and on a still lower grade were the village headmen.

The basis of the pyramid was the peasant. He was free to hold land, to redeem and cultivate any portion of the jungle that took his fancy; but he was granted no title to his clearing, and an envious chief might at any moment dispossess him. He paid no rent, but was obliged to pay taxes, to follow his chieftain to battle, to work for him without payment, and to attend in his train when he went to Court. The greatest misfortune that could befall him was a piece of good luck. A plentiful crop, a comely wife or daughter, the finding of a nugget in the river bed such things marked him out as a man worth spoiling, and spoiled he invariably was. At any moment he was liable for service in the field; for the Sultan, professionally jealous of the great barons, took infinite pains and pleasure in stirring up strife among them. Justice, of course, went to the highest bidder; the prisons and the tortures were entirely Asiatic; and the Sultan's bodyguard, composed of youths drawn from the families of the higher chiefs, took upon themselves all the privileges of an army in a conquered territory. The regular taxes were a polltax of two dollars (Mexican) for every adult male, and import and export duties of ten per cent, either in money or kind, on everything that came in or went out of the state. In addition there were what were known as Sultan's "gifts" silks and cloths sent from the Palace to the great barons with a price fixed upon each article. No sooner was a chieftain in receipt of one of these dubious presents than he at once fell upon the villagers for the price of it. Many of the necessaries of life, such as salt, tobacco, and oil, were royal monopolies. Outside of these official exactions the local nobility and the Sultan's police plundered with microscopic zeal.

This is the mere outline of a picture which any one familiar with the inner workings of a Mohammedan state can fill in for himself. To Western eyes it seems gruesome enough; but it would be rash to infer from it that the Malays were unhappy or felt themselves abused. They were hardly civilized enough to have such thoughts. The system, for one thing, was of immemorial antiquity, and the Malay is a Tory of the Tories. He had known nothing else; he could conceive of nothing else. His fatalism, his utter faith in the thing that was simply because it was the thing that had been, and his climatic inertia kept him quiescent. His needs were of the simplest, and he could always refer to Allah some more than usually wanton act of pillage by the Sultan or his chiefs. Moreover, he was doubtless yet further reconciled to his lot by reflecting that he was not the lowest of the low. He had the privilege of racial contempt for the Chinese immigrants and for the aborigines of the