104 BRITISH BORNEO. 
to attract population and capital to their territory. Java is 
often quoted as an island which, under Dutch rule, has attain- 
ed great prosperity without any large immigration of Chinese 
or other foreigners. ‘This is true, but in Java the Dutch had 
not only a fertile soil and good climate in their favour, but 
found their Colony already thickly populated by native races 
who had, under Hindu and Arab influences, made considera- 
ble advancesin civilization, in trade and in agriculture, and who, 
moreover, had been acccustomed to a strong Government. 
The Dutch, too, were in those days able to introduce a 
Government of a paternal and despotic character which the 
British North Borneo Company are, by the terms of the Royal 
Charter, precluded from imitating. 
It was Sir JAMES BROOKE’S wish to keep Sarawak for the 
natives, but his successor has recognised the impolicy of so 
doing and admits that ‘without the Chinese we can do 
nothing.” Experience in the Straits Settlements, the Malay 
Peninsula and Sarawak has shewn that the people to cause 
rapid financial progress in Malayan countries are the hard- 
working, money-loving Chinese, and these are the people 
whom the Company should lay themselves out to attract to 
Borneo, as I have more than once pointed out in the course 
of these remarks. It matters not what it is that attracts them 
to the country, whether trade, as in Singapore, agriculture, 
as in Johor and Sarawak, or mining as in Perak and other of 
the Protected Native States of the Peninsula—once get them 
to voluntarily immigrate, and govern them with firmness and 
justice, and the financial success of the Company would, in 
my opinion, be assured. The inducements for the Chinese 
to come to North Borneo are trade, agriculture and possibly 
mining. The bulk of those already in the country are traders, 
shop-keepers, artisans and the coolies employed by them, and 
the numbers introduced by the European tobacco planters for 
the cultivation of their estates, under the system already explain- 
ed, is yearly increasing. Very few are as yet engaged in 
agriculture on their own account, and it must be confessed 
that the luxuriant tropical jungle presents considerable diff- 
culties to an agriculturist from China, accustomed to a coun- 
try devoid of forest, and it would be impossible for Chinese 
