rd" races are vigorously attempting to
stamp out, should be not only permitted but encouraged in a country
over which flies the flag of England. Its effects on the population are
summed up in this sentence from a letter written me by a former high
official of the chartered company: "Fifty per cent of the thefts and
robberies committed during the period that I was magistrate in that
territory can be directly traced to opium and gambling."

There is held each year, at one of the great London hotels, the North
Borneo Dinner. It is one of the most brilliant affairs of the season.
At the head of the long table, banked with flowers and gleaming with
glass and silver, sits the chairman of the chartered company, flanked
by cabinet ministers, archbishops, ambassadors, admirals, field
marshals. The speakers work the audience into a fervor of patriotic
pride by their sonorous word-pictures of England's services to humanity
in bearing the white man's burden, and of the spread of enlightenment
and progress under the Union Jack. But the heartiest applause
invariably greets the announcement that the North Borneo Company has
declared a dividend. Whence the money to pay the dividend was derived
is tactfully left unsaid. The dinner always concludes with the singing
of the anthem _Land of Hope and Glory_. Yet they say that the English
have no sense of humor!

CHAPTER IV

THE EMERALDS OF WILHELMINA

In Singapore stands one of the most significant statues in the world.
From the centre of its sun-scorched Esplanade rises the bronze figure
of a youthful, slender, clean-cut, keen-eyed man, clad in the
high-collared coat and knee-breeches of a century ago, who, from his
lofty pedestal, peers southward, beyond the shipping in the busy
harbor, beyond the palm-fringed straits, toward those mysterious,
alluring islands which ring the Java Sea. Though his name, Thomas
Stamford Raffles, doubtless holds for you but scanty meaning, and
though he died when only forty-five, his last years shadowed by the
ingratitude of the country whose commercial supremacy in the East he
had secured and to which he had offered a vast, new field for colonial
expansion, he was one of the greatest architects of empire that ever
lived. He combined the vision and administrative genius of Clive and
Hastings with the audacity and energy of Hawkins and Drake. It was his
dream, to use his own words, "to make Java the center of an Eastern
insular empire" ruled "not o