so far as the past history of a people
can be taken as giving an indication of its future, it would seem that,
in Malay countries, the growing tendencies made rather for an absolute
than for a limited monarchy. The genius of the Malay is in most things
mimetic rather than original, and, where he has no other model at hand
to copy, he falls back upon the past. An observer of Malay political
tendencies in an Independent Native State finds himself placed in the
position of Inspector Bucket--there is no move on the board which would
surprise him, provided that it is in the wrong direction.

Such changes have been wrought in the condition of the Malay on the West
Coast, during the past twenty years of British Protection, that there
one can no longer see him in his natural and unregenerate state. He has
become sadly dull, limp, and civilised. The gossip of the Court, and
the tales of ill things done daringly, which delighted his fathers, can
scarcely quicken his slackened pulses. His wooings have lost their spice
of danger, and, with it, more than half their romance. He is as frankly
profligate as his thin blood permits, but the dissipation in which he
indulges only makes him a disreputable member of society, and calls for
none of the manly virtues which make the Malay attractive to those who
know and love him in his truculent untamed state. On the East Coast,
things are different, and the Malay States are still what they profess
to be--States in which the native element predominates, where the people
still think boldly from right to left, and lead much the same lives as
those their forbears led before them. Here are still to be found some of
the few remaining places, on this over-handled Earth, which have as yet
been but little disturbed by extraneous influences, and here the lover
of things as they are, and ought not to be, may find a dwelling among an
unregenerate and more or less uncivilised people, whose customs are
still unsullied by European vulgarity, and the surface of whose lives is
but little ruffled by the fever-heated breath of European progress.

As you crush your way out of the crowded roadstead of Singapore, and
skirting the red cliffs of Tanah Merah, slip round the heel of the
Peninsula, you turn your back for a space on the seas in which ships
jostle one another, and betake yourself to a corner of the globe where
the world is very old, and where conditions of life have seen but little
change during the last