LIFE IN SARAWAK.*
SARAWAK, the north-western portion of Borneo, has Lad the rare good fortune of being governed for seventy years by two Englishmen who have held the right view of a ruler's duty to his subjects. The natives of India under British rule have enjoyed similar advantages, but with the inevitable drawbacks of a system under which the same principles are necessarily applied by different hands. In 1841 Sir James Brooke was proclaimed Rajah of Sarawak by the very people whose rebellion against their former ruler he had helped to suppress; and before his death, in 1868, he appointed his nephew, Sir Charles Brooke, his successor. In this way the State has been administered for two generations with an unusual unity not only of purpose but of methods. The volume in which Lady • 3fy IAA in amuck. By the Ranee of &e.554, London: Methuen awl Co. [12A. 6d. net.) Brooke gives an account of her long residence in Sarawak, and of her efforts to extend the benefits of her husband's rale to the Malay women, is introduced to the reader by Sir Frank Swettenham, who writes with an exceptional knowledge of the country and its inhabitants. The Malays have, apparently, the faculty, rare in coloured races, of understanding that it is the white man, not the native, who has the art of governing. They are content, therefore, to leave the final control in European bands. How far this is due to a racial distinction, and bow far to the very special characteristics of the European control under which they have lived in Sarawak ever since 1811, there is no means of determining, though the latter seems the more probable explanation. "It has been," says Sir Frank Swettenham, "the admirable and unusual 'stamp' of Brooke rule to live with the people, to make their happiness the first consideration, and to refuse wealth at their expense." In all other cases the incidents of promotion or of new appointments from home necessitate frequent changes in the holders of offices. The principles remain, but the application of them varies. Sarawak, on the other hand, has had for its milers an uncle and a nephew, and we may hope that the present Rajah will make such arrangements for the succes- sion as will secure a continuance of the same principles of government for another generation. But the possibility of a different issue may well incline us to set the benefits of a system with a secured continuity above those of even the best personal rule.
Shortly after her arrival at Kuching the Ranee gave her first tea party, the wives and daughters of the Ministers and the native chiefs being her guests. The Rajah was away in the interior, but his butler was ready to instruct her in the mysteries of Malayan etiquette. The visitors began to arrive at two o'clock, but the Ranee was not permitted to join them till half-past five. Even this was a concession, for the butler explained that her subjects should await her pleasure, and he would have liked to keep them in that attitude till nine o'clock. They all rose on her entrance, and the wives of the two principal chiefs led her to a seat of many cushions placed against the wall. She then made a little speech of welcome in English, which was translated by the butler, and replied to by the wife of the Prime Minister. After that the Ranee armed herself with a dictionary and made her first attempt at speaking Malayan. An occasional mistake went some way towards breaking the ice, and that day she felt that she had found her friends. A little later she was taught how to wear the native dress. The chief difficulty to be got over was that, as the Ranee is supposed never to walk about, her clothes were so slightly secured that they would fall off at the least movement Upon this last point a compromise was ultimately arranged which allowed the wearer to move a yard or two. The intimacy thus began went on growing till the end of the Ranee's residence in Sarawak. "I cannot help," she writes, " remembering with pleasure the way in which the people took my children to their hearts; the funny little jingling toys they made to amuse them when they were quite babies; the solicitude they showed for their health; the many times they invited them to their houses, where I felt that they were even safer in their keeping than in my own." Possibly the remarkable cleanliness of the people did much to strengthen this confidence. Most of their lives are spent on the water or in it. They manage boats with great skill, and "every man, woman, and child swims about the streams near their homes in the same way as we take walks in our gardens." The Rajah's house at Kuching stood on the bank of the river— there as broad as the Thames at Westminster—in full view of the opposite town, with its Bazaar inhabited almost entirely by Chinese traders, and behind this a succession of hills dotted over with European bungalows surrounded by trees and gardens. The Chinese houses are decorated with coloured figures of gods and dragons, and the sky-line is broken by churches and temples of all religions, and by every variety of native boats and foreign vessels. The drawbacks are those incidental to the climate--the malaria-carrying mosquito, cock- roaches, which fly or spring on to their victims from great distances,-and rats, which at times migrate through the houses in companies many thousand strong. But to the Ranee, at all events, the charms of the country and its people out- vieigha all these inconveniences, and when She was at last famed. to-zome to England it was with a keen, desire to revisit Sarawak.
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