the British flag.
It was not the iniquitous character of the administration which
surprised me, for I had seen the effects of bad colonial administration
in other distant lands--in Mozambique, for example, and in Germany's
former African possessions--but rather that such an administration
should be carried on by Englishmen, by Anglo-Saxons. Were you to read
in your morning paper that an ignorant alien had been arrested for
brutally mistreating one of his children you would not be particularly
surprised, because that is the sort of thing that might be expected
from such a man. But were you to read that a neighbor, a man who went
to the same church and belonged to the same clubs, whom you had known
and respected all your life, had been arrested for mistreating one of
_his_ children, you would be shocked and horrified.

Save on the charge of indifference and neglect, neither the British
people nor the British government can be held responsible for the
conditions existing in North Borneo, for strictly speaking, the country
is not a British colony, but merely a British protectorate, being owned
and administered by a private trading corporation, the British North
Borneo Company, which operates under a royal charter. But the idea of
turning over a great block of territory, with its inhabitants, to a
corporation whose sole aim is to earn dividends for its absentee
stockholders, is in itself abhorrent to most Americans. What would we
say, I ask you, if Porto Rico, which is only one-tenth the size of
North Borneo, were to be handed over, lock, stock and barrel, to the
Standard Oil Company, with full authorization for that company to make
its own laws, establish its own courts, appoint its own officials,
maintain its own army, and to wield the power of life and death over
the natives? And, conceiving such a condition, what would we say if the
Standard Oil Company, in order to swell its revenues, not only
permitted but officially encouraged opium smoking and gambling; if, in
order to obtain labor for its plantations, it imported large numbers of
ignorant blacks from Haiti and permitted the planters to hold those
laborers, through indenture and indebtedness, in a form of servitude
not far removed from slavery; if it authorized the punishment of
recalcitrant laborers by flogging with the cat-o'nine-tails; if it
denied to the natives as well as to the imported laborers a system of
public education or a public health service or trial b