BRITISH BORNEO. 25 
respectively. In the early days of Sarawak, it was a very 
serious problem to find the money to pay the expenses of a 
most economical Government. Sir JAMES BROOKE sunk all 
his own fortune—30,000—in the country, and took so gloomy 
a view of the. financial prospects of his kingdom that, on the 
refusal of England to annex it, he offered it first to France 
and then to Holland. Fortunately these offers were never 
carried into effect, and, with the assistance of the Borneo Com- 
pany (not to be confused with the British North Borneo Com- 
pany), who acquired the concession of the right to work the 
minerals in Sarawak, bad times were tided over, and, by patient 
perseverance, the finances of the State have been brought to 
their present satisfactory condition. What the amount of the 
national public debt is, I am not in a position to say, but, like 
all other countries aspiring to be civilized, it possesses a small 
one. The improvement in the financial position was undoubt- 
edly chiefly due to the influx of Chinese, especially of gam- 
bier and pepper planters, who were attracted by liberal con- 
cessions of land and monetary assistance in the first instance 
from the Government. The present Raja has himself said 
that ‘‘ without the Chinese we can do nothing,” and we have 
only to turn to the British possession in the far East—the 
Straits Settlements, the Malay Peninsula, and Hongkong—to 
see that this is the case. For instance, the revenue of the 
Straits Settlements in 1887 was $3,847,475, of which the 
opium farm alone—that is a tax practically speaking borne 
by the Chinese population—contributed $1,779,600, or not 
very short of one half of the whole, and they of course con- 
tribute in many other ways as well. The frugal, patient, in- 
dustrious, go-ahead, money-making Chinaman is undoubtedly 
the colonist for the sparsely inhabited islands of the Malay 
archipelago. Where, as in Java, there is a large native popu- 
lation and the struggle for existence has compelled the natives 
to adopt habits of industry, the presence of the Chinaman is 
not a necessity, but in a country like Borneo, where the inha- 
bitants, from time immemorial, except during unusual periods 
of drought or epidemic sickness, have never found the problem 
of existence bear hard upon them, it is impossible to impress 
upon the natives that they ought to have ‘ wants,” whether 
