VOLUNTEER POLICE FOR PROVINCE WELLESLEY. 199 
these settlers are chiefly Hokkien shop-keepers or hawkers, 22d Kwang-Tung 
paddy planters and rice dealers, who have little social connection with the 
Malays, but this does not prevent their getting wives among the needier Malays 
and Samsams. The time is not far distant when the dadas will have more in- 
fluence in many parts of the Province than the Jawi-pakans now have. 
As the Malays themselves form the great mass of the population ef North 
Province Wellesley and considerable errors are to be found in the published 
accounts of the character and habits of the race, including even that by Mr. 
VAUGHAN in the Journal of the Indian Archipelago, which is, im many respects, 
just to them and a great advance on previous delineations of them, I subjoin 
an extract from some notes on the races of the Settlement and the Malay 
Peninsula which, at the request of the Local Government, I furnished, about, 
two years ago, for transmission to the Government of india.* They apply 
more to the fully cultivated and peopled than to the wilder districts of the 
Province :— 
“The Malay is good-natured, courteous, sociable, gregarious and gossiping, 
finding unfailing amusement in very small and often very imdelicate taik, 
jokes, and pleasantries. To domestic and social superiors he is extremely 
deferential, but with no taint of that abject or fawning servility which cha- 
racterises many Asiatics of higher civilisation. 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 cbjects 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 niggardly, and when his interests are involved his promises and profes- 
sions are not to be trusted. 
The Malay treats his children with great affection and with indolent in- 
dulgence. Women are not secluded, and the freedom which they enjoy in 
their paternal home is little abridged in after-life. Early marriage is custe- 
mary and necessary, for if is were long postponed after puberty, it is to be 
feared that their religion would not always restrain them from the license 
which the habits of the non-Mahomedan nations of the same race permit to 
unmarried girls. In the Malay States the law sanctions slavery and subjects 
the person of the female slave to the power of her master. In this Settlement 
the Malay finds compensation for the deprivation of this right in thasof divorce, 
and the extent to which it isavailed of in practice renders marriage litle more 
than the legalisation of temporary concubinage. The independence allowed 
to women and the manner in which their parents and other relutives usually 
take their part in domestic quarrels, enable them to purchase their divorce, 
or worry their husbands into granting it, wnaenever they wish to take new 
ones. 
The habitual courtesy and reticence of ihe Malay and the influence of his 
religion too often mask the sway of interest and passion to which he may 
be secretly yielding, and under which he becomes rapacious, deeeitful, 
treacherous and revengeful. Jt has become customary to protest against 
the dark colours in which the earlier Huropean 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 oniy highways in lands covered with forest and swamp 
* See No.7 of this Journal p. 88.—EpD. 
