Tell some of our friends who have sons with
practical good sense, but more muscle than brains, that there are
openings in the jungles of Perak! Good sense, perseverance,
steadiness, and a degree of knowledge of planting, are, however,
preliminary requisites.
The two "prospectors" look as if they had heard couleur de rose
reports, and had not "struck ile." Possibly they expected to find
hotels and macadamized roads. Roads must precede planting, I think,
unless there are available lands near the rivers.
I have mentioned slavery and debt-slavery more than once. The latter
is a great curse in Perak, and being a part of "Malay custom" which our
treaties bind us to respect, it is very difficult to deal with. In the
little States of Sungei Ujong and Selangor, with their handful of
Malays, it has been abolished with comparative ease. In Perak, with its
comparatively large Malay population, about four thousand are slaves,
and the case seems full of complications.
Undoubtedly the existence of slavery has been one cause of the decay of
the native States, and of the exodus of Malays into the British
settlements. Some people palliate the system, and speak of it as "a
mild form of domestic servitude;" but Mr. Birch, the late murdered
Resident, wrote of it in these strong terms: "I believe that the system
as practiced in Perak at the present time involves evils and cruelties
which are unknown to any but those who have actually lived in these
States."
From the moment a man or woman becomes a debtor, he or she, if unable
to pay, may be taken up by the creditor, and may be treated as a slave,
being made to work in any way that the creditor chooses, the debtor's
earnings belonging to the creditor, who allows no credit toward the
reduction of the debt. To make the hardship greater, if a relative or
friend comes forward to pay the debt, the creditor has the right to
refuse payment, and to keep his slave, whose only hope of bettering
himself is in getting his owner to accept payment for him from a third
party, so that he may become the slave of the person who has ransomed
him.
But there are worse evils still, for in cases where a married man
contracts a debt, his wife and existing children, those who may
hereafter be born, and their descendants, pass into slavery; and all,
male and female, are compelled as slaves to work for their master, who
in very many cases compels the women and girls to live a life of
degradation for his benefit, and even the wives of a creditor are well
satisfied to receive the earnings of these poor creatures. If a debt be
contracted by an unmarried man or woman, and he or she marry
afterwards, the person so taken in marriage and all the offspring
become slave debtors.
