een
Sumatra and New Guinea, east and west, and the Philippines and Timor,
north and south.

They are at least a wholly new region; for though peopled for
hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years, and visited in the old times
of European commerce with more frequency than even in our active day,
their actual condition remains nearly unknown: their fertility is
comparatively neglected; their spontaneous products are left to waste;
their singular beauty is disregarded, and their mineral wealth is
unwrought. Their people are content with savage existence, and the
bounty of Heaven is thrown away in the loveliest portion of the globe.
Piracy at sea, war on land, tyranny, vice, and ignorance, are the
habits and characteristics of a zone which could sustain a population
as numerous as that of Europe, and supply the wants and even the
luxuries of half the world. Celebes, New Guinea, Timor, Java, Borneo,
that most magnificent of all islands, if it should not rather be
called a continent: the vast group of the Philippines, only await the
industry and intelligence of Europe. They will yet be brilliant
kingdoms and mighty empires.

Why such noble realms should have been long given over to barbarism is
among the most curious questions of the philosopher, and of the
Christian. May they not have been kept back from European possession
and utility on the providential principle, which we discover so often
in the general order of the divine government; namely, to be reserved
as a reward and a stimulant to the growing progress of mankind? They
may have been suffered to remain in a state of savage life as a
penalty for the profligacy of their people, or they may have been
condemned to their mysterious obscurity until the impress of British
power on India and China should have been deeply made, and England
should be led, by the possession of India and the opening of the
Chinese coasts, to follow the new course of wealth prepared for her in
the commerce of the Indian Ocean.

Whatever may be the truth of those suggestions, nothing can be more
evident, than that British discovery and British interests are now
involuntarily taking that direction. The settlement on Borneo by the
enterprise and intelligence of Mr Brookes has given our commerce, a
sudden and most unexpected footing in this queen of the Indian Ocean.
The English colonisation of Australia will inevitably sustain that
intercourse. The flourishing settlement of Singapore, and the gro