Even for clearing the jungle foreign labor must be employed. Perak is a healthy and splendid State, and while the low grounds are suited for sugar, tapioca, and tobacco, the slopes of the hills will produce coffee, cinchona, vanilla, tea, cloves, and nutmegs. It is a land of promise, but at present of promise only! I understand that to start a plantation a capital of from 2,500 pounds to 3,500 pounds would be required. Jungle is cleared at the rate of 25s. per acre. The wages of Javanese coolies are 1s. a day, and a hut which will hold fifty of them can be put up for 5 pounds. Land can be had for three years free of charge. It is then granted in perpetuity for a dollar an acre, and there is a tax of 2-1/2 per cent. on exported produce. These arrangements are not regarded as altogether satisfactory, and will probably be improved upon. 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. The worst features of the system are seen where a Rajah is the creditor, for he is the last man to be willing to receive payment of a debt and free the debtor, for the number of his followers, even if they are but women and girls, increases his consequence, and debtors when once taken into a Rajah's household are looked upon as being as much a part of his property as his cattle or elephants. Mr.
Swettenham, the Assistant Colonial Secretary of the Straits Settlements, writes that "in Perak the cruelties exercised toward debtors are even exclaimed at by Malays in the other States."* In Selangor, where it is said that slavery has been quietly abolished, only five years ago the second son of that quiet-looking Abdul Samat killed three slave debtors for no other reason than that he willed it; and when two girls and a boy, slave debtors of the Sultan's, ran away, this same bloodthirsty son caught them, took the boy into a field, and had him krissed. His wife, saying she was going to bathe in the Langat river, told the two girls to follow her to a log which lay in the water a few yards from her house, where they were seized, and a boy follower of her husband took them successively by the hair and held their heads under the water with his foot till they were dead, when their corpses were left upon the slimy bank. The Sultan, to do him justice, was very angry when his son went to him and said, "I have thrown away those children who ran away."
[*For Mr. Swettenham's _Report on Slavery in the Native States_, see Appendix B.]
In Perak it has been the custom to hunt and capture the Jakun women and make them and their children slaves.
