84 BRITISH BORNEO. 
of the country, who, in afar more practical sense than the 
Christians of Europe, are ready to say “sufficient for the day 
is the evil thereof,” and who do not look forward and provide 
for the future, or heap up riches to leave to their posterity. 
Some years ago, a correspondent of an English paper dis- 
played his ignorance on the matter by maintaining that the 
Company coerced the natives and forced them to buy Man- 
chester goods at extortionate prices. An Oxford Don, when 
I first received my appointment as Governor, imagined that I 
was going out as asort of slave-driver, to compel the poor 
natives to work, without wages, on the Company’s planta- 
tions. But, asa matter of fact, though entitled to do so by 
the Royal Charter, the Company has elected to engage nei- 
ther in trade nor in planting, deeming that their desire to 
attract capital and population to their territory will be best 
advanced by their leaving the field entirely open to others, 
for otherwise there would always have been a suspicion that 
rival traders and planters were handicapped in the race with 
a Company which had the making and the administration of 
laws and the imposition of taxation in its hands. 
It will be asked, then, if the Company do not make a profit 
out of trading, or planting, or mining, what could have in- 
duced them to undertake the Government of a tropical coun- 
try, some 10,000 miles or more distant from London, for Eng- 
lishmen, as a rule, do not invest hundreds of thousands of 
pounds with the philanthropic desire only of benefitting an 
Eastern race ? 
The answer to this question is not very plainly put in the 
Company’s prospectus, which states that its object “is the 
carrying on of the work begun by the Provisional Association” 
(said in the previous paragraphs of the prospectus to have 
been the successful accomplishment of the completion of the 
pioneer work) ‘‘and the further improvement and full utiliza- 
tion of the vast natural resources of the country, by the intro- 
duction of new capital and labour, which they intend shall be 
stimulated, aided and protected by a just, humane and en- 
lightened Government. The benefits likely to flow from the 
accomplishment of this object, in the opening up of new fields 
of tropical agriculture, new channels of enterprise, and new 
