BRITISH BORNEO. 27 
more than 12,000 or 15,000 natives, and about eighty Chinese 
and a few Kling shop-keepers, as natives of India are here 
styled. Writing in 1845, Sir JAMES BROOKE, then the Queen’s 
first Commissioner to Brunai, says with reference to this Sul- 
tanate :—‘ Here the experiment may be fairly tried, on the 
smallest possible scale of expense, whether a beneficial Eu- 
ropean influence may not re-animate a falling State and at 
the same time extend ourcommerce. * * * If this tendency 
to decay and extinction be inevitable, if this approximation of 
European policy to native Government should be unable to 
arrest the fall of the Bornean dynasty, yet we shall retrieve a 
people already habituated to European habits and manners, 
industrious interior races; and if it become necessary, a Colo- 
ny gradually formed and ready to our hand in a rich and fer- 
tile country,’ and elsewhere he admits that the regeneration 
of the Borneo Malays through themselves was a hobby of his. 
The experiment has been tried and, so far as concerns the 
re-animation of the Malay Government of Brunai, the verdict 
must be “a complete failure.’ The English are a practical 
race, and self-interest is the guide of nations in their inter- 
course with one another; it was not to be supposed that they 
would go out of their way to teach the degenerate Brunai 
aristocracy how to govern in accordance with modern ideas; 
indeed, the Treaty we made with them, by prohibiting, for 
instance, their levying customs duties, or royalties, on the 
export of such jungle products as gutta percha and India — 
rubber, in the collection of which the trees yielding them are 
entirely destroyed, and by practically suggesting to them the 
policy, or rather the impolicy, of imposing the heavy due of 
$1 per registered ton on all European Shipping entering their 
ports, whether in cargo or in ballast, scarcely tended to stave 
off their collapse, and the Borneans must have formed their 
own conclusions from the fact that when they gave up portions 
of their territory to the BROOKES and to the British North 
Borneo Company, the British Government no longer called 
for the observance of these provisions of the Treaty in the 
ceded districts. The English have got all they wanted from 
Brunai, but I think it can scarcely be said that they have 
