"WHERE THERE AIN'T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS"
Until I went to British North Borneo I had considered the British the
best colonial administrators in the world. And, generally speaking, I
hold to that opinion. But what I saw and heard in that remote and
neglected corner of the Empire disclosed a state of affairs which I had
not dreamed could exist in any land over which flies the British flag.
It was not the iniquitous character of the administration which
surprised me, for I had seen the effects of bad colonial administration
in other distant lands--in Mozambique, for example, and in Germany's
former African possessions--but rather that such an administration
should be carried on by Englishmen, by Anglo-Saxons. Were you to read
in your morning paper that an ignorant alien had been arrested for
brutally mistreating one of his children you would not be particularly
surprised, because that is the sort of thing that might be expected
from such a man. But were you to read that a neighbor, a man who went
to the same church and belonged to the same clubs, whom you had known
and respected all your life, had been arrested for mistreating one of
_his_ children, you would be shocked and horrified.
Save on the charge of indifference and neglect, neither the British
people nor the British government can be held responsible for the
conditions existing in North Borneo, for strictly speaking, the country
is not a British colony, but merely a British protectorate, being owned
and administered by a private trading corporation, the British North
Borneo Company, which operates under a royal charter. But the idea of
turning over a great block of territory, with its inhabitants, to a
corporation whose sole aim is to earn dividends for its absentee
stockholders, is in itself abhorrent to most Americans. What would we
say, I ask you, if Porto Rico, which is only one-tenth the size of
North Borneo, were to be handed over, lock, stock and barrel, to the
Standard Oil Company, with full authorization for that company to make
its own laws, establish its own courts, appoint its own officials,
maintain its own army, and to wield the power of life and death over
the natives? And, conceiving such a condition, what would we say if the
Standard Oil Company, in order to swell its revenues, not only
permitted but officially encouraged opium smoking and gambling; if, in
order to obtain labor for its plantations, it imported large numbers of
ignorant blacks from Haiti and permitted the planters to hold those
laborers, through indenture and indebtedness, in a form of servitude
not far removed from slavery; if it authorized the punishment of
recalcitrant laborers by flogging with the cat-o'nine-tails; if it
denied to the natives as well as to the imported laborers a system of
public education or a public health service or trial by jury; and
finally, if, in the event of insurrection, it permitted its soldiery,
largely recruited from savage tribes, to decapitate their prisoners and
to bring their ghastly trophies into the capital and pile them in a
pyramid in the principal plaza? Yet that would be a fairly close
parallel to what the chartered company is doing in British North
Borneo. As I have already remarked, North Borneo is a British
protectorate. And it is in more urgent need of protection from those
who are exploiting it than any country I know. But the voices of the
natives are very weak and Westminster is far away.
With the exception of Rhodesia, and of certain territories in
Portuguese Africa, North Borneo is the sole remaining region in the
world which is owned and administered by that political anachronism, a
chartered company. It was in the age of Elizabeth that the chartered
company, in the modern sense of the term, had its rise. The discovery
of the New World and the opening out of fresh trading routes to the
Indies gave a tremendous impetus to shipping, commercial and industrial
enterprises throughout western Europe and it was in order to encourage
these enterprises that the British, Dutch and French governments
granted charters to various trading associations. It was the Russia
Company, for example, which received its first charter in 1554, which
first brought England into intercourse with an empire then unknown. The
Turkey Company--later known as the Levant Company--long maintained
British prestige in the Ottoman Empire and even paid the expenses of
the embassies sent out by the British Government to the Sublime Porte.
The Hudson's Bay Company, which still exists as a purely commercial
concern, was for nearly two centuries the undisputed ruler of western
Canada. The extraordinary and picturesque career of the East India
Company is too well known to require comment here. In fact, most of the
thirteen British colonies in North America were in their inception
chartered companies very much in the modern acceptation of the term.
But, though these companies contributed in no small degree to the
commercial progress of the states from which they held their charters,
though they gave colonies to the mother countries and an impetus to the
development of their fleets, they were all too often characterized by
misgovernment, incompetence, injustice and cruelty in their dealings
with the natives. Moreover, they were monopolies, and therefore,
obnoxious, and almost without exception the colonies they founded
became prosperous and well-governed only when they had escaped from
their yoke. The existence of such companies today is justified--if at
all--only by certain political and economic reasons. It may be
desirable for a government to occupy a certain territory, but political
exigencies at home may not permit it to incur the expense, or
international relations may make such an adventure inexpedient at the
time. In such circumstances, the formation of a chartered company to
take over the desired territory may be the easiest way out of the
difficulty. But it has been demonstrated again and again that a
chartered company can never be anything but a transition stage of
colonization and that sooner or later the home government must take
over its powers and privileges.
The story of the rise of the British North Borneo Company provides an
illuminating insight into the methods by which that Empire On Which the
Sun Never Sets has acquired many of its far-flung possessions. Though
the British had established trading posts in northern Borneo as early
as 1759, and had obtained the cession of the whole northeastern
promontory from the Sultan of Sulu, who was its suzerain, the hostility
of the natives, who resented their transfer to alien rule, was so
pronounced that the treaty soon became virtually a dead letter and by
the end of the century British influence in Borneo was to all intents
and purposes at an end. Nor was it resumed until 1838, when an
adventurous Englishman, James Brooke, landed at Kuching and eventually
made himself the "White Rajah" of Sarawak. In 1848 the island of
Labuan, off the northwestern coast of Borneo, was occupied by the
British as a crown colony and some years later the Labuan Trading
Company established a trading post at Sandakan. In an attempt to open
up the country and to start plantations the company imported a
considerable number of Chinese laborers, but it did not prosper and its
financial affairs steadily went from bad to worse. As long as the
company kept its representative in Sandakan supplied with funds he
managed to maintain a certain authority among the natives. But one day
he received a letter bearing the London postmark from the company's
chairman. It read:
"Sir: We are sorry to inform you that we cannot send you further
funds, but you should not let this prevent you from keeping up
your dignity."
To which the agent replied:
"Sir: I have on a pair of trousers and a flannel shirt--all I
possess in the world. I think my dignity is about played out."
Another syndicate for the exploitation of North Borneo was formed in
England in 1878, however, to which the Sultan of Sulu was induced to
transfer all his rights in that region, of which he had been from time
immemorial the overlord. Four years later this syndicate, now known as
the British North Borneo Company, took over all the sovereign and
diplomatic rights ceded by the original grants and proceeded to
organize and administer the territory. In 1886 North Borneo was made a
British protectorate, but its administration remained entirely in the
hands of the company, the Crown reserving only control of its foreign
relations, though it was also agreed that governors appointed by the
company should receive the formal sanction of the British Colonial
Secretary. To quote the chairman of the board of directors: "We are not
a trading company. We are a government, an administration. The
Colonial Office leaves us alone as long as we behave ourselves."
The government is vested primarily in a board of directors who sit in
London and few of whom have ever set foot in the country which they
rule. The supreme authority in Borneo is the governor, under whom are
the residents of the three chief districts, who occupy positions
analogous to that of collector or magistrate. The six less important
districts are administered by district magistrates, who also collect
the taxes. Though there is a council, upon which the principal heads of
departments and one unofficial member have seats, it meets irregularly
and its functions are largely ornamental, the governor exercising
virtually autocratic power. Unfortunately, there is no imperial
official, as in Rhodesia, to supervise the company's activities. As was
the case with the East India Company, the minor posts in the North
Borneo service are filled by cadets nominated by the board of
directors, a system which provides a considerable number of positions
for younger sons, poor relations and titled ne'er-do-wells. Most of the
officials go out to Borneo as cadets, serve a long and arduous
apprenticeship in one of the most trying climates in the world, are
miserably paid (I knew one official who held five posts at the same
time, including those of assistant magistrate and assistant protector
of labor and who received for his services the equivalent of $100. a
month), and eventually retire, broken in health, on a pension which
permits them to live in a Bloomsbury lodging-house, to ride on a
tuppenny bus, and to occasionally visit the cinema.
There is no trial by jury in North Borneo, all cases being decided by
the magistrates, who are appointed by the company and who must be
qualified barristers. Nor are there mixed courts, as in Egypt and other
Oriental countries, though in the more important cases five or six
assessors, either native or Chinese, according to the nationality of
those involved, are permitted to listen to the evidence and to submit
recommendations, which the magistrate may follow or not, as he sees
fit. Neither is there a court of appeal, the only recourse from the
decision of a magistrate being an appeal to the governor, whose
decision is final.
The country is policed by a force of constabulary numbering some six
hundred men, comprising Sikhs, Pathans, Punjabi Mohammedans, Malays,
and Dyaks, officered by a handful of Europeans. Curiously enough, the
tall, dignified, deeply religious Sikhs and the little, nervous,
high-strung Dyak pagans get on very well together, eating, sleeping and
drilling in perfect harmony. Though the Dyak members of the
constabulary are recruited from the wild tribes of the interior, most
of them having indulged in the national pastime of head-hunting until
they donned the company's uniform, they make excellent soldiers,
courageous, untiring, and remarkably loyal. Upon King Edward's
accession to the throne a small contingent of Dyak police was sent to
England to march in the coronation procession. When, owing to the
serious illness of the king, the coronation was indefinitely postponed
and it was proposed to send the Dyaks home, the little brown fighters
stubbornly refused to go, asserting that they would not dare to show
their faces in Borneo without having seen the king. They did not wish
to put the company to any expense, they explained, so they would give
up their uniforms and live in the woods on what they could pick up if
they were permitted to remain until they could see their ruler.
Though the Dyaks make excellent soldiers, as I have said, they are
always savages at heart. In fact, when they are used in operations
against rebellious natives, their officers permit and sometimes
actively encourage their relapse into the barbarous custom of taking
heads. An official who was stationed in Sandakan during the
insurrection of 1908 told me that for days the police came swaggering
into town with dripping heads hanging from their belts and that they
piled these grisly trophies in a pyramid eight feet high on the parade
ground in front of the government buildings. Imagine, if you please,
the storm of indignation and disgust which would have swept the United
States had American officers permitted the Maccabebe Scouts, who served
with our troops against the insurgents in the Aguinaldo insurrection,
to decapitate their Filipino prisoners and to bring the heads into
Manila and pile them in a pyramid on the Luneta!
Though the term Dyak is often carelessly applied to all the natives of
North Borneo, as a matter of fact the Dyaks form only a small minority
of the population, the bulk of the inhabitants being Bajows, Dusuns and
Muruts. The Bajows, who are Mohammedans and first cousins of the Moros
of the southern Philippines, are found mainly along the east coast of
Borneo. They are a dark-skinned, wild, sea-gipsy race, rovers,
smugglers and river thieves. Though, thanks to the stern measures
adopted by the British and the Americans, they no longer indulge in
piracy, which was long their favorite occupation, they still find
profit and excitement in running arms and opium across the Sulu Sea to
the Moro Islands, in attacking lonely light-houses, or in looting
stranded merchantmen. It is the last coast in the world that I would
choose to be shipwrecked on.
The Dusuns and the Muruts, who are generally found in widely scattered
villages in the jungles of the interior, represent a very low stage of
civilization, being unspeakably filthy in their habits and frequently
becoming disgustingly intoxicated on a liquor of their own
manufacture--the Bornean equivalent of home brew. A Murut or Dusun
village usually consists of a single long hut divided into a great
number of small rooms, one for each family--a jungle apartment house,
as it were. These rooms open out into a common gallery or verandah
along which the heads taken by the warriors of the tribe are festooned.
It is as though the tenants of a New York apartment house had the heads
of the landlord and the rent-collector and the janitor swinging over
the front entrance. I should add, perhaps, that the practise of
head-hunting of which I shall speak at greater length when we reach
Dutch Borneo is fostered and encouraged by the unmarried women, for
every self-respecting Bornean girl demands that her suitor shall
establish his social position in the tribe by acquiring a respectable
number of heads, just as an American girl insists that the man she
marries must provide her with a solitaire, a flat and a flivver.
Though the chartered company has ruled in North Borneo for more than
forty years, it has only nibbled at the edges of the country. The
interior is still uncivilized and largely unexplored, the home of
savage animals and still more savage men. Though a railway has been
pushed up-country from Jesselton for something over a hundred miles,
both road and rolling-stock leave much to be desired, the little
tin-pot locomotives not infrequently leaving the rails altogether and
landing in the river. Some years ago an attempt was made to build a
highway across the protectorate, from coast to coast, but after sixty
miles had been completed the project was abandoned. It was known as the
Sketchley Road and ran through a rank and miasmatic jungle, it being
said that every hundred yards of construction cost the life of a
Chinese laborer and that those who were left died at the end. Today it
is only a memory, having long since been swallowed up by the
fast-growing vegetation.
[Illustration: Dusun women
The Dusuns, who are found in the jungles of the interior. represent a
very low state of civilization]
[Illustration: Dyak head-hunters of North Borneo
Every Bornean girl demands that her suitor shall establish his social
position by acquiring a few heads]
The company has taken no steps toward establishing a system of public
schools, as we have done in the Philippines, for it holds to the
outworn theory that, so far as the natives are concerned, a little
learning is a dangerous thing. Perhaps the company is right. Were the
natives to acquire a little learning it might prove dangerous--for the
company. There are a few schools in North Borneo, but they are
maintained by the Protestant and Roman Catholic missions and are
attended mainly by Chinese. Whether they have proved as potent an
influence in the propagation of the Christian faith as their founders
anticipated is open to doubt. When I was in Sandakan I made some
purchases in the bazaars from a Chinese lad who addressed me quite
fluently in my own tongue.
"How does it happen that you speak such good English?" I asked him.
"Go to school," he grunted, none too amiably.
"Where? To a public school?"
"No public school. Church school."
"So you're a good Christian now, I suppose?" I remarked.
"To hell with Clistianity," he retorted. "Me go to school to learn
English."
* * * * *
The chartered company maintains no public health service, nor, so far
as I was able to discover, has it adopted the most rudimentary sanitary
or quarantine precautions. It is, indeed, so notoriously lax in this
respect that when we touched at ports in Dutch Borneo, the Celebes, and
Java, the mere fact that we had come from British North Borneo caused
the health officers to view us with grave suspicion. When we were in
Sandakan the town was undergoing a periodic visitation of that
deadliest and most terrifying of all Oriental diseases, bubonic plague.
As it is transmitted by the fleas on plague-infested rats, we took the
precaution, when we went ashore, of wearing boots and breeches or of
tying the bottoms of our trousers about our ankles with string, so as
to prevent the fleas from biting us. It being necessary to go alongside
the coal-wharves in order to replenish the bunkers of the _Negros_,
orders were given that rat-guards--circular pieces of tin about the
size of a barrel-top--should be fixed to our hawsers, thus making it
difficult, if not impossible, for rats to invade the ship by that
route, while sailors armed with clubs were posted along the landward
rail to despatch any rodents that might succeed in gaining the deck. As
the native and Chinese laborers had fled in terror from the wharves,
where the dreaded disease had first manifested itself through the
deaths of several stevedores, the authorities offered their freedom to
those prisoners in the local jail who would volunteer for the hazardous
work of cleaning up the wharves and warehouses and sprinkling them with
petroleum. Six prisoners volunteered, but they might better have served
out their terms, for the next day four of them were dead. Though the
stout Cockney, harbormaster, known as "Pinkie" because of his rosy
complexion, was pallid with fear, the other European residents of
Sandakan seemed utterly indifferent to the danger to which they were
exposed. But life in a land like Borneo breeds fatalism. As an
official remarked, with a shrug of his shoulders, "After you have spent
a few years out here you don't much care how you die, or how soon.
Plague is as convenient a way of going out as any other."
* * * * *
The greatest obstacle to the successful development of Borneo's
enormous natural resources is the labor problem. The truth of the
matter is that life in these tropical islands is too easy for the
natives' own good. In a land where a man has no need for clothing,
being, indeed, more comfortable without it; where he can pick his food
from the trees or catch it with small effort in the sea; and where
bamboos and nipa are all the materials required for a perfectly
satisfactory dwelling, there is no incentive for work. It being
impossible, therefore, to depend on native labor, the company has been
forced to import large numbers of coolies from China. These coolies,
whom the labor agents attract with promises of high wages, a delightful
climate, unlimited opium, and other things dear to the Chinese heart,
are employed under an indenture system, the duration of their contracts
being limited by law to three hundred days. That sounds, on the face of
it, like a safeguard against peonage. The trouble is, however, that it
is easily circumvented. Here is the way it works in practise. Shortly
after the laborer reaches the plantation where he is to be employed he
is given an advance on his pay, frequently amounting to thirty
Singapore dollars, which he is encouraged to dissipate in the opium
dens and gambling houses maintained on the plantation. Any one who has
any knowledge of the Chinese coolie will realize how temperamentally
incapable he is of resistance where opium and gambling are concerned.
This pernicious system of advances has the effect, as it is intended to
have, of chaining the laborer to the plantation by debt. For the first
advance is usually followed by a second, and sometimes by a third, and
to this debit column are added the charges made for food, for medical
attendance, for opium, and for purchases made at the plantation store,
so that, upon the expiration of his three-hundred-day contract, the
laborer almost invariably owes his employer a debt which he is quite
unable to pay. As he cannot obtain employment elsewhere in the colony
under these conditions, he is faced with the alternative of being
shipped back to China a pauper or of signing another contract. There is
no breaking of the law by the planter, you see: the laborer is
perfectly free to leave when his contract has expired--as free as any
man can be who is absolutely penniless.
Let me quote from a letter from the former Assistant Protector of Labor
of British North Borneo. From the very nature of his duties he knows
whereof he speaks:
"One sees a large number of healthy, able-bodied Chinese coming into
the country as laborers and, at the end of a year or two, instead of
going back to their homes with money in their pockets and healthy with
outdoor work, they go back as broken beggars, pitifully saturated with
disease or confirmed drug fiends. It is really sad to see some of them
return home after a struggle of four or five years to save money--a
struggle not only against themselves and their acquired opium habit,
but against the numerous parasites which always fatten on laborers."
During the term of his indenture the laborer is to all intents and
purposes a prisoner, his only appeal against any injustices practised
on the plantation being to the Protector of Labor, who is supposed to
visit each estate once a month. In theory this system is admirable, but
in practise it does not afford the laborer the protection which the law
intends, for it frequently happens that laborers who have been brutally
mistreated have been coerced into silence by the plantation managers by
threats of what will happen to them if they dare to lay a complaint
before the inspecting official. Moreover, many of the plantations are
so remotely situated, so far removed from civilization, that a manager
can treat his laborers as he pleases with little fear of detection or
punishment. If negroes are held in peonage, flogged, and even murdered
on plantations in our own South, within rifle-shot of courthouses and
sheriffs' offices and churches, is it to be wondered at that similar
conditions can and do exist in the world-distant jungles of Borneo.
Mind you, I do not say that such conditions exist on all or most of the
estates in British North Borneo, but I have the best of reasons for
believing that they exist on some of them.
One of the most serious defects in the labor laws of North Borneo is
that trivial actions or omissions on the part of ignorant coolies, such
as misconduct, neglect of work, or absence from the estate without
leave, are punishable by imprisonment. As a result, the illiterate and
incoherent coolie does not know where he stands. He can never be sure
that some trivial action on his part, no matter how innocent his
intent, will not bring him within reach of the criminal law. He is,
moreover, denied the right of trial by jury, his case usually being
decided off-hand by a bored and unsympathetic magistrate who has no
knowledge of the defendant's tongue. Moreover, the company's laws
permit the punishment of unruly laborers by flogging, with a maximum of
twelve lashes. In view of the remoteness of most of the estates, it is
scarcely necessary for me to point out that this is a form of
punishment open to the gravest abuse.
Although, as I have shown, the British North Borneo Company permits the
existence of a system not far removed from slavery, a far more serious
indictment of the company's administration lies in its systematic
debauchery of its laborers by encouraging them to indulge in opium
smoking and gambling for the purpose of swelling its revenues. Nor does
its heartless exploitation of the laborer end there, for when a coolie
has dissipated all his earnings in the opium dens and gaming houses,
which are run under government concessions, he can usually realize a
little more money for the same purpose by pawning his few poor
belongings at one of the pawnshops controlled by the company. In other
words, from the day a laborer sets foot in Borneo until the day he
departs, he is systematically separated from his earnings, which are
diverted, through the channels provided by the opium dens, the gambling
houses and the pawn shops, into a stream which eventually empties into
the company's coffers. For, mark you, the chartered company did not go
to North Borneo from any altruistic motives. It is animated by no
desire to ameliorate the condition of the natives or to increase the
well-being and happiness of its imported laborers. It is there with one
object in view, and one alone--to pay dividends to its stockholders. As
the chairman of the company said at a recent North Borneo dinner in
London: "They have acted the parts of Empire makers and yet they are
filling their own pockets, for the golden rain is beginning to fall."
Let me show you where this "golden rain" comes from. The two principal
sources of revenue of the British North Borneo Company are opium and
gambling. Suppose that you come with me for a stroll down the Jalan
Tiga in Sandakan and see the gaming houses and the opium dens for
yourself. Jalan Tiga (literally "Number Two Street") is a moderately
broad thoroughfare, perhaps a quarter of a mile in length, which is
solidly lined on both sides with gambling houses, or, as they are
called in Borneo, gambling farms, the term being due to the fact that
the gambling privileges are farmed out by the government. There may be
wickeder streets somewhere in the East than the Jalan Tiga, but I do
not recall having seen them. It, and the thoroughfares immediately
adjoining, in which are situated the opium dens and the houses of
prostitution, form a district which represents the very quintessence of
Oriental vice. Over virtually every door are signs in Chinese, Malay
and English announcing that games of chance are played within. Such
resorts are not camouflaged in Borneo. They are as open as a railway
station or a public library in the United States. From afternoon until
sunrise these resorts are crowded to the doors with half-naked,
perspiring humanity, brown skins and yellow being in about equal
proportions, for the Malay is as inveterate a gambler as the Chinese.
The downstairs rooms, which are frequented by the lower classes, are
thickly sprinkled with low tables covered with mats divided into four
sections, each of which bears a number. A dice under a square brass cup
is shaken on the table and the cup slowly raised. Those players who
have been lucky enough to place their bets on the square whose number
corresponds to the number uppermost on the dice have their money
doubled, the others see their earnings swept into the lap of the
croupier, a fat and greasy Chinaman, usually stripped to the waist. In
this system the chances against the player are enormous. The play is
very rapid, the dice being shaken, the cup raised, the winners paid
and the wagers of the losers raked in too quickly for the untrained eye
to follow. The players seldom quit as long as they have any money left
to wager, but as soon as one drops out there is another ready to take
his place. The upstairs rooms, which are usually handsomely decorated
and luxuriously furnished, are reserved for the wealthier patrons, it
being by no means uncommon for a player to lose several thousand
dollars in a single night. Here cards are generally used instead of
dice to separate the players from their money, fan-tan being the
favorite game. I was told that the monthly subsidy paid by the British
North Borneo Company to the Sultan of Sulu, who comes over from Jolo
with great regularity to collect it, never leaves the country, as he
invariably loses it over a Sandakan gaming-table. Gambling is a
government monopoly in Borneo, the company farming out the privilege
each year to the highest bidder. In 1919 the gambling rights for the
entire protectorate were sold for approximately $144,000.
Crossing the Jalan Tiga at right angles and running from the heart of
the town down to the edge of the harbor is the street of the
prostitutes. It is easy to recognize the houses of ill-fame by their
scarlet blinds and by the scarlet numbers over their doors. Should you
stroll down the street during the day you will find the sullen-eyed
inmates seated in the doorways, brushing their long and lustrous
blue-black hair or painting their faces in white and vermillion
preparatory to the evening's entertainment. Probably four-fifths of
the _filles de joie_ in Sandakan are Chinese, the others are products
of Nippon--quaint, dainty, doll-like little women with faces so heavily
enameled that they would be cracked by a smile. When a Chinese merchant
wants a wife he usually visits a house of prostitution, selects one of
the inmates, drives a hard bargain with the hard-eyed mistress of the
establishment, and, the transaction concluded, brusquely tells the girl
to pack her belongings and accompany him to his home. I might add that
the girls thus chosen invariably make good wives and remain faithful to
their husbands.
[Illustration: The Jalan Tiga, Sandakan
A moderately broad thoroughfare, lined on both sides with
gambling-houses]
[Illustration: A patron of a Sandakan opium farm
Each smoker is provided with a lamp for heating his "pill" and a wooden
head-rest]
Running parallel to the Jalan Tiga is another street--I do not recall
its name--in which are the opium farms. Far from being veiled in
secrecy, they are operated as openly as American soda fountains. A
typical opium farm consists of a two-story wooden house, one of a long
row of similar buildings, containing a number of small, ill-lighted
rooms which reek with the sickly sweet fumes of the drug. The furniture
consists of a number of so-called beds, which in reality are wooden
platforms or tables, their tops, which are raised about three feet
above the floor, providing space on which two smokers can recline. Each
smoker is provided with a block of wood which serves as a pillow and a
small lamp for heating his "pill." The number of patrons who may be
accommodated at one time is prescribed by law and rigidly enforced,
signs denoting the authorized capacity of the house being posted at the
door, like the signs in elevators and on ferry-boats in America. For
example, the door of one farm that I visited bore the notice "Only
fifteen beds. Room for thirty persons." Over-crowding is forbidden by
the authorities, not, as in the case of elevators and ferry-boats, for
reasons of safety, but for financial reasons. The more opium farms
there are, you see, the greater the company's profits.
The opium is purchased by the chartered company from the Government of
the Straits Settlements for $1.20 a tael (about one-tenth of a pound
troy) and, after being adulterated with various substances, is sold to
the opium farmers, nearly all of whom are Chinese, for $8.50 a tael,
the company thus making a very comfortable margin of profit on the
transaction. The opium farmers either keep opium dens themselves or
sell the drug to anyone wishing to buy it, just as a tobacconist sells
cigars and cigarettes. The sale of the opium privilege in Sandakan
alone nets the government, so I was informed, something over $500,000
annually.
Now, iniquitous and deplorable as such a traffic is, the British North
Borneo administration is not the only government engaged in the sale of
opium. But it is the only government, so far as I am aware, which
virtually forces the drug on its people by insisting that it shall be
purchasable in localities which might otherwise escape its malign
influence. A planter who, actuated either by moral scruples or by a
desire to maintain the efficiency of his laborers, opposes the opening
of an opium farm on his estate, might as well sell out and leave
Borneo, for the company will promptly retaliate for such interference
with its revenues by cutting off his supply of labor. It will defend
its action by naïvely asserting that, as the coolies would contrive to
obtain the drug any way, the planter, in refusing to permit the opening
of an opium farm on his property, is guilty of conniving at the illegal
use of the drug!
The British North Borneo Company professes to find justification for
engaging in the opium traffic by insisting that, as the Chinese will
certainly obtain opium clandestinely if they cannot obtain it openly,
it is better for everyone concerned that its sale and use should be
kept under government control. The fact remains, however, that China,
decadent though she may be and desperately in need of increased
revenues, has succeeded, in spite of the powerful opposition of the
British-owned Opium Ring, in putting an end to the traffic within her
borders, while Siam, likewise under Oriental rule, is about to do the
same. It is a curious commentary on European civilization that this
vice, which the so-called "backward" 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!