y jury; and
finally, if, in the event of insurrection, it permitted its soldiery,
largely recruited from savage tribes, to decapitate their prisoners and
to bring their ghastly trophies into the capital and pile them in a
pyramid in the principal plaza? Yet that would be a fairly close
parallel to what the chartered company is doing in British North
Borneo. As I have already remarked, North Borneo is a British
protectorate. And it is in more urgent need of protection from those
who are exploiting it than any country I know. But the voices of the
natives are very weak and Westminster is far away.

With the exception of Rhodesia, and of certain territories in
Portuguese Africa, North Borneo is the sole remaining region in the
world which is owned and administered by that political anachronism, a
chartered company. It was in the age of Elizabeth that the chartered
company, in the modern sense of the term, had its rise. The discovery
of the New World and the opening out of fresh trading routes to the
Indies gave a tremendous impetus to shipping, commercial and industrial
enterprises throughout western Europe and it was in order to encourage
these enterprises that the British, Dutch and French governments
granted charters to various trading associations. It was the Russia
Company, for example, which received its first charter in 1554, which
first brought England into intercourse with an empire then unknown. The
Turkey Company--later known as the Levant Company--long maintained
British prestige in the Ottoman Empire and even paid the expenses of
the embassies sent out by the British Government to the Sublime Porte.
The Hudson's Bay Company, which still exists as a purely commercial
concern, was for nearly two centuries the undisputed ruler of western
Canada. The extraordinary and picturesque career of the East India
Company is too well known to require comment here. In fact, most of the
thirteen British colonies in North America were in their inception
chartered companies very much in the modern acceptation of the term.
But, though these companies contributed in no small degree to the
commercial progress of the states from which they held their charters,
though they gave colonies to the mother countries and an impetus to the
development of their fleets, they were all too often characterized by
misgovernment, incompetence, injustice and cruelty in their dealings
with the natives. Moreover, they were monopolies, and therefore,