tPHE BIKUA OP JOHOREj 
293 
in the forest, Malayan corruption, which would long ago have re¬ 
duced them to its own dye if it could have operated on them in vil¬ 
lage masses, has found no assailable point. The absoluteness of the 
influence of the family, and of simple and solitary pursuits, has also 
prevented the internal growth of vices. There is no outward influ¬ 
ence to counteract it. Society in its turn contains no institution or 
principle that can interrupt its harmony. Their character and habits 
afford no room for any disturbance of the equality that reigns through¬ 
out the whole community. Hence there is no appreciable social 
strife, or ambition. 
The Battas and Dyaks have long outgrown the close pressure of 
nature, and agglomerated into social masses in which the passions 
have fermented, and the intellect and imagination been quickened. 
But these social masses have been small; nature has not been driven 
back on all sides as in the plains and slopes of Menangkabau. Hence 
both the Batta and most of the Dyak still preserve the Binud charac¬ 
ter at bottom ; but, unlike the Binud, they have elaborated their super- 
stions and their social habits, and have acquired some vicious propensi¬ 
ties, such as gambling, which the Bdttas carry to a mad excess, and 
the unnatural customs of head hunting and man eating, which are only 
more startling illustrations of the universal truth, that, without a reli¬ 
gion like Christianity, which does not stop at precepts and doctrines 
but spiritualizes the very springs of action and fills the soul with the 
divine idea of the world, virtues and vices, and particularly those which 
are national, may dwell together in harmony. It is undeniable that the 
Bdttas as a people have a greater prevalence of social virtues than 
most European nations. Truth, honesty, hospitality, benevolence, 
chastity, absence of private crimes, co-exist with cannibalism. 
The BinucL nature, as we have already had occasion to notice, is al¬ 
so very recognizable in the Malays, although the pride and pretension 
engrafted upon it by Islamism, the bold and active part which they 
have played in the modern history of the Archipelago, and the influ¬ 
ence of courts formed on the Mahomedan model, have obliterated 
much of its simplicity and all its artlessness. 
