第131章 LETTER XXIII(4)

In April I was in Ulu Selangor, and the headmen there complained that a chief from Slim had a fortnight before caught 14 Jakuns and one Malay in Ulu Selangor, had chained them and driven off to Slim. Arrived there, the Malay was liberated and he returned.

Letters were written to Slim and Perak, but though we ascertained the party had reached Slim, they did not remain there, and they have not yet been discovered.

I have already stated that the Rajah looks to the number of his following as the gauge of his power, and other Rajahs will respect and fear him accordingly. Thus he tries to get men into his service in this way, and is rather inclined to refuse payment should the debtor be so fortunate as to raise the requisite amount of his debt.

Almost the only chance the debtor has of raising this amount is by successful gambling. Of course it hardly ever happens that he is successful; but, like all gamblers, he always thinks he will be, and thus gambling becomes a mania with him, which he will gratify at all costs, caring little by what means he gets money for play so long as he does obtain it.

These are the general facts relating to the position of the slave-debtor, and these things which I have described, seemingly so difficult of belief, are done almost daily; looked upon by those who do them as a right divine; by the victims as a fate from which there is no reprieve.

To compel his followers to obey him implicitly, the Rajah treats them with a severity which sometimes makes death the punishment of the slightest offence to him. These followers he thus holds to do whatever he bids them, even to the commission of the gravest crimes.

They again, having to provide themselves with food and clothes, and yet having to work for him, are led to prey on the defenceless population, from whom, in the name of their Rajah-master, they extort whatever there is to get, and on whom they sometimes visit those cruelties which they have themselves already experienced.

This system of debtor bondage influences, then, the whole population, not slightly but deeply, in ways it is hardly possible to credit except when seen in a constant intercourse with all classes of Malay society.

The question at issue seems to be; how to deprive the Rajah of this great power--an unscrupulous instrument in unscrupulous hands--how to free the debtors from their bondage, the women from lives of forced prostitution, the unoffending population from the robberies and murderous freaks of Rajahs and their bondsmen.*

[*Some of these remarks apply specially to Selangor, in which State slavery is now abolished. I. L. B.]

In Perak it is different; the debtor-bondage is one of the chief customs--one of the "pillars of the State"--an abuse jealously guarded by the Perak Rajahs and Chiefs, and especially by those who make the worst uses of it.

I have often discussed this question of debt-slavery with the Malays themselves, but they say they see no way under the rule of their Rajahs to put down this curse of their country, with all the evils that follow in its train. I have, etc.

(Signed) Frank A. Swettenham, (Now Asst. Colonial Secretary at Singapore.)

The Honorable the Secretary for Native States, Singapore, Straits Settlements.

APPENDIX C

No. I

From H.B.M.'s Resident, Perak, to Colonial Secretary, Straits Settlements Residency, Kwala Kansa, December 14, 1878.

Sir--In reference to your letter of the 28th June last, directing, by command of His Excellency the Governor, my particular attention to the plan adopted in Selangor for the extinction of the claims against slave-debtors, by a valuation of their services to their creditors according to a fixed scale, and directing me to consider to His Excellency with a view to its being afterward submitted for the consideration of the Council of State:

1. I have the honor to state in reply that a copy of that letter and its inclosure was supplied to the Assistant Resident of Perak, and its contents communicated to the other magistrates, with instructions on all occasions in which such cases should be brought before them, to endeavor, with the consent of the creditors, to come to a settlement on such a basis.

2. The Toh Puan Halimah, daughter of the exiled Laxamana of Perak, and chief wife of the banished Mentri of the State, had invested most of her private money in advances of this description, which, up to the time of British interference, was the favorite form of security, and she is now the largest claimant in the country for the repayment of her money. Another, Wan Teh Sapiah, has also claims of a like nature on several families, and both these ladies willingly undertook to accept of liquidation by such an arrangement.

3. In the former case it has, I am sorry to say, fallen through, from the impossibility of inducing the debtors to work regularly, and from very many of them, who are living in entire freedom in different parts of the country, declining to come into the arrangement, though acknowledging their debts.

4. In many other cases the creditors from the first put forward the certainty of the failure of such a system from the above-mentioned cause; others have objected that they had no regular employment in which to place their debtors; others, that they are utterly ruined by the events of recent years, and that they would accede to the proposal if fairly carried out on the other part, provided the Government would advance money as the native Rajahs did to enable them to open mines or gardens in which they could employ their debtors; nearly all have declared themselves willing, and even anxious, to accept a just amount in payment of their debts, several suggesting that the State might conveniently undertake to do this, employing the labor in public works until the debtor should be free.