758 Lieut. -General The Hon. Sir Andrew Clarhe [May 27, 



was known in party politics at honip. While tlie East India 

 Company clung to its monopolies, Eaffles, its servant, made every 

 port within its jurisdiction a Free port, and, with the one exception 

 of opium, allowed every article to be exported or imported under 

 all friendly flags at a customs rate of five per cent. Lastly, within 

 the shortest radius, he sought for the finest naval station that 

 Nature had provided in those seas. He thought he had found it 

 in Bauca, or in Billiton. All these hopes, these ambitions if you 

 will, were dashed to the ground by the Congress of Vienna. Of 

 the great fabric of beneficent rule and Imperial power created in 

 the mind of Raffles, and of which his energy and address had 

 laid the corner stone, nothing remained. 



Under the shadow of this great disappointment Raffles came to 

 England in 1816. He returned two years later to the East as 

 Lieutenant-Governor of Fort Marlborough, or Bencoolen, in Sumatra. 

 He was charged with no special mission, nor was he entrusted with 

 the execution of any external policy. He was to confine his attention 

 to the local matters of what was called in those days the West Coast, 

 and he was, if possible, to reduce the heavy expenditure of the 

 establishment. At Bencoolen those who dreaded the active imagina- 

 tion and untiring energy of Stamford Kaffles felt sure that he would 

 have no opportunity of disturbing their tranquility by raising 

 burning questions, by contending for rights that they were well 

 content to see lost or left in abeyance. All they hoped from him 

 was that he v^^ould increase the cultivation of pepper, improve the 

 book-keeping of the ofiices, and perhaps indulge in tlie harmless 

 direction of natural history, that activity of mind which they knew 

 him to possess. Such were the motives of those in power when they 

 sent back to the East the man who had inspired the Governor- 

 General's policy in a great issue, and administered the affairs of a 

 thickly populated island with a skill not inferior to that of Warren 

 Hastings. 



I have now brought you to the turning point in this great man's 

 career. His banishment to Sumatra, for that is what the appoint- 

 ment would have signified to an ordinary Governor, was intended to 

 put an end to his opportunities of agitating the minds of his superiors 

 in India and London. They did not want to be troubled any more 

 about the questions of the Archipelago or the Dutch proceedings 

 therein, and they believed that the deplorable condition of their 

 moribund settlements on the West Coast would effectuaUy prevent 

 his meddling with anything outside them. 



We know how baseless was this expectation. Local affairs, the 

 limited horizon of a Sumatran station, were iu capable of chaining 

 the imagination of a man who had known how to emancipate himself 

 from Penang and to become one of the leading personages in the 

 Anglo-Indian world. He had much to do at Bencoolen. He did it. 

 He restored the prosperity of that station, he established an 

 equilibrium in the finances, and he arrested the decline in the 



