200 VOLUNTEER POLICE FOR PROVINCE WELLESLEY. 
—trusting to the kris and spear for self-defence and holding in traditional 
respect the prowess of the pirate and robber, the Malays became proverbial for 
feline treachery and bloodthirstiness. Under the Government to which they 
have been subjected in Province Wellesley, and which has certainly not erred on 
the side of paternal interference, for it has given them as much liberty as the 
English yeoman possesses, they now form a community, on the whole, as set- 
tled, contented, peaceable and free from serious crime as any to be found in 
British India—a result due to the disappearance of forests, the formation of 
roads, the establishment of a reguiar Police and the administration of justice 
by Hnglish lawyers.” 
To complete this brief Note on the various classes entering into the popula- 
tion of North Province Wellesley, a reference must be made to the Samsams, 
the descendants of rude inland Siamese of Kédah who, some generations back, 
were converted to Mahomedanism, a religion which still sits loosely on them. 
They form the majority of the inhabitants of many of the North-eastern vil- 
lages, in which Siamese is still the current language, although, with few ex- 
ceptions, they speak Malay also. Many of them are more stupid and 
ignorant even than the Malays in the same condition of life, and many are 
knavish, thievish, and addicted to gambling and opium-smoking. Of both 
races, indeed, it may be said that while the mass are ruder and simpler than 
any other class of our composite population, there are amoung them many men 
habitually predatory, and dangerous from their treachery or ferocity. 
Their cunning, however, is without the intelligent fore-thought and subtlety 
of the more advanced races, and they set about crimes not of blood only but 
of fraud, such as forgery and false personation, in a careless, bold and straight- 
forward manner, in apparent unconsciousness of the risk of detection to which 
they lay themselves open, and often, in the latter class of crimes, on the 
instigation of others and without any clear knowledge of the real character 
and consequences of their acts. 
Note to Para: 12. 
As a religion Mahomedanism is infinitely superior to the native religions of 
the Archipelago. Its most objectionable feature, in a political point of view, 
is not the universality and closeness of the brotherhood which it establishes 
among its professors, but its arrugant exclusiveness. It tolerates other creeds 
but places their holders under a social ban. Friendly association with unbelievers 
is a deadly sin and makes the sinner liable to excommunication, Since the riots 
of August one of the wlimah bas put in force this doctrine to deteah the Malays 
from the Chinese Societies, but it is equally applicable to friendly association with 
Huropeans, and might, in ceitain contingencies, be used to excite hatred to this 
class and opposition to Government. Hence the impolicy of allowing any of these 
ulimah, or any so called Kali, to assume jurisdiction, or social or spiritual gov- 
ernment, over the Mahomedans generally, or large sections of them. ‘Their 
recognised ass ciations should be confined to the jumuhus or congregations attached 
to each mosque; and the persecutions every now and then made by the leaders, 
to which those are exposed who will not submit to the aitempts at establishing 
by coercion a fanatically rigorous interference with private liberty, should be dis- 
countenanced, and, when they overstep the limits of discipline allowed to other 
religious societies, punished. The more the influence of the gurus or religious 
teachers in the Province extends, the more arrogant they become.. They entirely 
lose the courteous and deferential manner of the ordinary Malay, and mark their 
sense of their superiority to the European infidel by either ignoring his presence 
