succeeded in beating down the tyranny of their Chiefs? No answer can be given;
but those who know the Malays best will find reason to doubt whether the
energy of the race would ever, under any circumstances, have been sufficient to
grapple with these great questions. The räayat would have been content, I fancy,
to plod on through the centuries 'without hope of change'; and, so far as the past
history of a people can be taken as giving an indication of its future, it would
seem that, in Malay countries, the growing tendencies made rather for an
absolute than for a limited monarchy. The genius of the Malay is in most things
mimetic rather than original, and, where he has no other model at hand to copy,
he falls back upon the past. An observer of Malay political tendencies in an
Independent Native State finds himself placed in the position of Inspector
Bucket—there is no move on the board which would surprise him, provided that
it is in the wrong direction.
Such changes have been wrought in the condition of the Malay on the West
Coast, during the past twenty years of British Protection, that there one can no
longer see him in his natural and unregenerate state. He has become sadly dull,
limp, and civilised. The gossip of the Court, and the tales of ill things done
daringly, which delighted his fathers, can scarcely quicken his slackened pulses.
His wooings have lost their spice of danger, and, with it, more than half their
romance. He is as frankly profligate as his thin blood permits, but the dissipation
in which he indulges only makes him a disreputable member of society, and calls
for none of the manly virtues which make the Malay attractive to those who
know and love him in his truculent untamed state. On the East Coast, things are
different, and the Malay States are still what they profess to be—States in which
the native element predominates, where the people still think boldly from right
to left, and lead much the same lives as those their forbears led before them.
Here are still to be found some of the few remaining places, on this over-handled
Earth, which have as yet been but little disturbed by extraneous influences, and
here the lover of things as they are, and ought not to be, may find a dwelling
among an unregenerate and more or less uncivilised people, whose customs are
still unsullied by European vulgarity, and the surface of whose lives is but little
ruffled by the fever-heated breath of European progress.
As you crush your way out of the crowded roadstead of Singapore, and skirting
the red cliffs of Tânah Mêrah, slip round the heel of the Peninsula, you turn your
back for a space on the seas in which ships jostle one another, and betake
yourself to a corner of the globe where the world is very old, and where
conditions of life have seen but little change during the last thousand years. The