of Borneo's
enormous natural resources is the labor problem. The truth of the
matter is that life in these tropical islands is too easy for the
natives' own good. In a land where a man has no need for clothing,
being, indeed, more comfortable without it; where he can pick his food
from the trees or catch it with small effort in the sea; and where
bamboos and nipa are all the materials required for a perfectly
satisfactory dwelling, there is no incentive for work. It being
impossible, therefore, to depend on native labor, the company has been
forced to import large numbers of coolies from China. These coolies,
whom the labor agents attract with promises of high wages, a delightful
climate, unlimited opium, and other things dear to the Chinese heart,
are employed under an indenture system, the duration of their contracts
being limited by law to three hundred days. That sounds, on the face of
it, like a safeguard against peonage. The trouble is, however, that it
is easily circumvented. Here is the way it works in practise. Shortly
after the laborer reaches the plantation where he is to be employed he
is given an advance on his pay, frequently amounting to thirty
Singapore dollars, which he is encouraged to dissipate in the opium
dens and gambling houses maintained on the plantation. Any one who has
any knowledge of the Chinese coolie will realize how temperamentally
incapable he is of resistance where opium and gambling are concerned.
This pernicious system of advances has the effect, as it is intended to
have, of chaining the laborer to the plantation by debt. For the first
advance is usually followed by a second, and sometimes by a third, and
to this debit column are added the charges made for food, for medical
attendance, for opium, and for purchases made at the plantation store,
so that, upon the expiration of his three-hundred-day contract, the
laborer almost invariably owes his employer a debt which he is quite
unable to pay. As he cannot obtain employment elsewhere in the colony
under these conditions, he is faced with the alternative of being
shipped back to China a pauper or of signing another contract. There is
no breaking of the law by the planter, you see: the laborer is
perfectly free to leave when his contract has expired--as free as any
man can be who is absolutely penniless.

Let me quote from a letter from the former Assistant Protector of Labor
of British North Borneo. From the very nature of his duties h