THE SEA DYAKS. 471 



a woman. A man may be as " fast " as lie pleases, or, as his means 

 will let liim, so long as be preserves the veneering on his charac- 

 ter. He may be guilty of open harlotry, or ruin an innocent girl 

 every year or two, and he will still be smilingly welcomed in polite 

 society. He goes his way securely, proudly, is highly spoken of by 

 both men and women, and if he is only rich, is fawned upon as 

 much as ever. How is it with the woman in the case? One single 

 step aside from the path of virtue, one little stumble, and no matter 

 what the temptation or the palUating circumstances, no matter how 

 atrocious the betrayal, she goes down. Into the mire she goes, 

 howled at and spat upon by her sisters, forsaken instantly by the 

 whole world, and literally sent to helL What is there on earth 

 to-day more deplorably and hopelessly faulty than the social laws 

 of the " highest civilization the world has ever seen?" Even the 

 unlettered savages of the jungle have a better state of society 

 than we. 



I have already mentioned the sacredness of the rights of prop- 

 erty amongst the Dyaks, but the actual and universal observance 

 of these rights by any class of j)eople in this thievish world is so 

 phenomenal I feel that I have a right to allude to the subject 

 again. In civilized countries, and almost all others except Borneo, 

 eveiy man is not treated precisely as a thief, yet at the same time he 

 who has stealable property is carefvil not to put temptation in the 

 way of a stranger. Generally speaking, I believe that out of every 

 twenty persons there vnU. always be found one who would steal if 

 he had a chance to get something he very much wanted and could 

 take "odthout detection. 



Making debts beyond one's power to pay, is a verv' popular 

 form of stealing by wholesale, for the encouragement of which we 

 have several thousand laws which furnish ample protection to the 

 pei-petrators. Half ovir banknapt merchants are ruined by " bad 

 debts," made by people who prefer that method of getting a man's 

 goods to simple burglary. 



Once more I assert, with the certainty of being disbelieved, 

 that the Dyaks actually do not steal. I have an account of one 

 who did once steal some gutta from a companion, but he is dead 

 now — hanged, "in the usual manner." 



Where else but among the Dvaks will a traveller dare to trust 

 a cari-load of boxes and packages, none of them securely fastened, 

 all filled with scores of trifles, any one of which would be dear to a 

 native's heart, in the centre of a \illage of fifty strange natives with 



