88 TRIBES INHABITING PENANG AND PROVINCE WELLESLEY. 



nose palder, and the eye brighter, straight and more liquid. The 

 Malay is good-natured, courteous, sociable, gregarious and gossip- 

 ing, finding unfailing amusement in very small talk, jokes and 

 pleasantries. To superiors, he is extremely deferential, but with no 

 taint of the abject or fawning Asiatics of higher civilization. His 

 intellect has little power of abstraction, and delights in a minute 

 acquaintance with the common things around him, a character that 

 reflects itself in his language, which is as rich in distinctions and 

 details in the nomenclature of material objects and actions as it is 

 poor in all that relates to the operations of the mind. He is slow 

 and sluggish, and impatient of continuous labour of mind or body, 

 He is greedy, and, when his interests are involved, his promises and 

 professions are not to be trusted. His habitual courtesy and reti- 

 cence and the influence of his religion mask the sway of passions 

 to which he may be secretly yielding and under which he some- 

 times becomes rapacious, treacherous and revengeful. It has 

 become customary to protest against the dark colours in which the 

 earlier European voyagers painted him, but their error was less in 

 what they wrote than in what they left unwritten. Under bad 

 native Governments, leading a wandering life at sea, or on thinly 

 peopled borders of rivers — the only highways in land covered with 

 forest and swamp — trusting to his kris and spear for self-defence, 

 holding in traditional respect the powers of the pirate and robber, 

 and putting little value on life, the Malay became proverbial for 

 feline treachery and bloodthirstiness. Under the Government to 

 which Malays have been subjected in Province Wellesley, and which 

 has certainly not erred on the side of paternal interference, for it 

 has left them as free as English yeomen, they now form a com- 

 munity as settled, contented, peaceable and free from serious crime 

 as any to be found in British India — a result due to the clearing of 

 forests, the formation "[of roads, the establishment of a regular 

 Police, and the honest administration of the law. 



The Malay treats his children with great affection and an indo- 

 lent indulgence. Women are not secluded, and the freedom which 

 they enjoy in their paternal homes is little abridged in after-life. 

 Early marriage is customary and necessary, for if it were long post- 

 poned after puberty, they would not be restrained by their religion 

 from the license which the habits of the non-Mahomedan nations 



