THE BRITISH COLONIES IN THE STRAITS OF MALACCA. 607 
The Malays individually are of an independent character, but 
in the mass they bow submissively to the mandates of their chief. 
Their passiveness arises from a clannish feeling, and that treatment, 
which if by a chief they would cheerfully or contentedly bear, would 
rouse them to rebellion or to flight, were it to be inflicted on them 
by a foreign power. Even at the present day, and after all the 
experience they have had of the advantages of European civiliva- 
tion, numbers of Malays still vacillate betwixt the freedom they 
enjoy under British rule—and the unrestained life, however chec- 
quered by warfare or by the oppression of their Rajahs, which they 
may lead in the Malayan states. The application too of the civil, 
and to some extent, of the criminal law, of England, to the Straits 
colonies has doubtless tended in some degree to check the influx 
of Malays into them, for although the British legislature has by 
charter, bent the civil law so as to reasonably accommodate it to 
the customs, habits, and prejudices of the people, it can hardly be 
expected that where these characteristics have not been previously 
well studied, by those who have to administer the Law, 
(and how are they to be studied or a knowledge gained of them 
unless by a long residence amongst the people themselves) they 
well be much attended to in the courts of justice. 
Viewing the non-British Malays, and the Indo-chinese races 
ethnologically, it would appear that although all of them are more 
or less wincing under the rod of native misrule and oppression, 
they exhibit degrees of national pride and feeling, which it would 
be in vain to seek for amongst the more advanced yet subdued and 
more politico-cosmopolitic people of India. 
The decline of the Malayan race has arisen from three promi¬ 
nent causes, the loss of dominion, and the gradual disintegration 
of their empire, followed by misrule, oppression, wars and 
ignorance. To distinctly pourtray the real character and social 
position of these races to the eastward, would demand a research 
which few have the opportunity, and still fewer have the wish to 
undertake. 
It would be no easy task to analyse and reconstruct the broken 
fragments of the laws and institutions, traditionally extant, of 
byegone ages—the secret motives of actions resting on or springing 
from long cherished feelings, habits and customs—the nationalities 
fostered by a contempt of other nations—or by that national 
pride, ever, strongest where ignorance is deepest—the anomalous 
democratic equality which despotism gives birth to amongst the 
whole mass of the people downwards from the ruler or ridel's, thus 
Dependent on Siam :— 
Patani.... 50,000 
Keddah . .. 25,000 
