makes him so beloved of the Colonial
Chancellors of the Exchequer. At the same time he is, if strict justice
and firmness are shewn him, wonderfully law-abiding and orderly. Faction
fights, and serious ones no doubt, do occur between rival classes and
rival secret societies, but to nothing like the extent that would be the
case were they white men. It is not, I think, sufficiently borne in
mind, that a very large proportion of the Chinese there are of the
lower, I may say of the lowest, orders, many of them of the criminal
class and the scourings of some of the large cities of China, who arrive
at their destination in possession of nothing but a pair of trowsers and
a jacket and, may be, an opium pipe; in addition to this they come from
different provinces, between the inhabitants of which there has always
been rivalry, and the languages of which are so entirely different that
it is a usual thing to find Chinese of different provinces compelled to
carry on their conversation in Malay or "pidgeon" English, and finally,
as though the elements of danger were not already sufficient, they are
pressed on their arrival to join rival secret societies, between which
the utmost enmity and hatred exists. Taking all these things into
consideration, I maintain that the Chinaman is a good and orderly
citizen and that his good qualities, especially as a revenue-payer in
the Far East, much more than counterbalance his bad ones. The secret
societies, whose organization permeates Chinese society from the top to
the bottom, are the worst feature in the social condition of the Chinese
colonists, and in Sarawak a summary method of suppressing them has been
adopted. The penalty for belonging to one of these societies is death.
When Sir JAMES BROOKE took over Sarawak, there was a considerable
Chinese population, settled for generations in the country and recruited
from Dutch territory, where they had been subject to no supervision by
the Government, whose hold over the country was merely nominal. They
were principally gold diggers, and being accustomed to manage their own
affairs and settle their disputes amongst themselves, they resented any
interference from the new rulers, and, in 1857, a misunderstanding
concerning the opium revenue having occurred, they suddenly rose in arms
and seized the capital. It was some time before the Raja's forces could
be collected and let loose upon them, when large numbers were killed and
the majority of the s