THE LITTLE WAR IN MALAYA.
NO British Secretary for the Colonies can have a very com- fortable life. It looks very nice, to be able to sit in Downing Street and review at leisure, but with great authority, the changes, and the proposals, and the measures of dependent Governments all over the world, but there are drawbacks to the placid enjoyment of that intellectual luxury. It must be a bore never to open a newspaper without an imminent proba- bility that something has happened somewhere which is most annoying, which you could not prevent, but which you must remedy without loss of time, or be called to a strict account. If pleasant things happened, it would be another matter, but pleasant things go to local credit, and only the earthquakes are 4' sent home" to be settled. Now it is a Fenian raid in Canada, and then an invasion of a West-African settlement; to-day a Parliamentary explosion at the Cape, and to-morrow a burst of malignant measles in Fiji ; last week a demand that a tropi- cal continent should be annexed, this week a Malay war ; and next week, perhaps, a servile outbreak in the Mauritius,—but there is always something troublesome to attend to. The affair of this week is not, perhaps, quite so big as it looks in newspapers eager for topics and not sorry for sensations, but every Malay outbreak has this annoying peculiarity. You must waste European lives in putting it down. There are very few Malays, happily, in the world ; they do not know much, and they have no special faculty for combining ; but they all pos- sess a quality which, whether it arise from courage or ferocity, or, as has been suspected, from a passion for the few drugs which produce homicidal mania, daunts all other Asiatics, except it be Chinese. They can all, when they choose, die killing. It is as dangerous to send Sepoys against them as against Moplahs. Nobody under our flag can be completely trusted
against a Malay except Private Hodge, and he is very much wanted for very much higher purposes. The little rebellion in Perak will be put down, but it is disagreeable, because in putting it down valuable lives will be lost to the national forces. We trust they may not be many, but that will de- pend upon chances of which as yet little is known, and which do not always fall on our side.
The great peninsula which it is most convenient to call Malaya, the name used in old maps, is a splendid mountain range, with a narrow plain at each side of its base, stretching from British Burmah almost straight south for 600 miles. It is nowhere 200 miles across, but its total area is almost as large as that of England, and it is probably the richest mineral region in the world. Every metal that the world wants is known to be there, and pro- bably in profusion. It is, however, divided, like Italy, from north to south by Apennines not yet explored, it has no navigable rivers, it is covered with hill and jungle, and it is inhabited by Negrito aborigines whom we know nothing about, and perhaps two hundred. thousand Mohammedan Malays, decent people enough in ordi-
nary times, faithful, truthful, and brave, and said by those who know them to be witty and clever, but, when ex- cited, about as like otber human beings as the Australian " devil" is like other animals. They hold life, and more especially your life, as worth just nothing at all. In this peninsula—a narrow Italy—we hold a minute Sicily called Singapore, and have made it the bonded warehouse of Further Asia, and filled it with Chinese ; a Naples called Malacca, with a good deal of planting industry around it ; and a Leghorn called Penang, like Singapore an island, but with a territory on the mainland. We possess also, in direct sovereignty, Province Wellesley (say, Tuscany), and over the whole territory west of the Malayan Apennines an ill-defined suzerainty or treaty-right of interfering when convenient.. This suzerainty is pretty effective in Johore (say, the Calabrias), and in Queda (say, Lucca), because it has been needful to Singapore and Penang respectively to make it such ; but between Penang and Malacca (say, in the Roman States, Perak being the Civita Vecchia), it is very loose and ineffective. The Malays there are always quarrelsome and sometimes dangerous, fighting generally round some pretender or other, and Sir Andrew Clarke was thought to have done a good work when, in 1874, he finally settled that Abdoollah should be considered Chief, and be responsible for order. The settlement seems to have been a wise one, for Perak prospered, but unfortunately there was a strong party which objected to order, which held that Infidels were a great deal too much considered, and which had heard that in Acheen the faithful were warring the Infidels fairly out. The defeated pretender to Perak, Sultan Ismail, availed himself of this feeling, called on the fanatics as well as his personal par- tisans, and it is suspected, arranged for a religious war. Of course, the first hint of discontent was the murder of the British representative, the Resident, Mr. Birch. That always is the first hint in such outbreaks, and always will be, for the plain reason that nothing except a murder, attended with circum- stances of insult, ever will cure the British of that habit of lenity which makes insurgent chiefs gnash their teeth with distrust of their own followers. If the British would only extirpate, or threaten to extirpate, they could be fought heartily, but they will not, and so the first thought of an insurgent with brains like Azimoollah or Ismail Sultan is to commit his followers to unpardonable offences. Of course, the news of the murder travelled at once to the "Governor of the Straits Settlements" —our term for the officer whom other nations would call Governor-General of Malaya—and of course also that officer, though he had only 400 soldiers, and a most troublesome popu- lation to govern, sent an expedition at once to recover the
Residency. It was recovered at once, but either Sir. W. Jervois, or the officer in command, is of the true type of the Englishman in Asia, and believes in dash, and "stamping out the match," and all that, and he ordered or sanctioned an expedition up the Perak to attack a stockade raised by the insurgents. No details of the attempt are forwarded, but the chances are a hundred to one that the Expedition had not a shell with them, and that they went at the stockade like terriers at rats, without a thought how rats when once in a hole will fight. They were repulsed, as English troops have been again and again when trying the same experiment in New Zealand, and lost three officers and ten men killed and wounded, and probably a longer list of natives. There was a temporary end, of course, to White authority in that part of the world. Whether Asiatics are incurably ignorant, or, as some assert, incurably vain, or,
as it seems more reasonable to suppose, are, in spite of their caution, liable to fits of enthusiasm and entrainment, it is certain that Europeans never sustain the smallest defeat with- out the population arriving with a bound at the conviction that it is safe to rise. In the present instance, three petty chieftains have called on their followers to aid Sultan Ismail, and there is reason to fear that his appeal to all Mohammedans to rise for the faith may meet with a widely extended response. It will not be safe to attack him under those circumstances without artillery, and it must be three weeks, at least, before sufficient reinforcements can arrive. There is a man-of-war off Perak, but the bulk of the Fleet in Asia is at Chefoo, waiting the issue of negotiations, or at Bom- bay, attending the Prince of Wales; there are few troops to be spared in Hong Kong ; there is only one regiment in Ceylon, which, tranquil as it is, ought not to be left defenceless ; and in Singapore, which ought to be an Asiatic Malta, there is no reserve at all. Sir W. Jervois must wait for the 1,500 men already on their way from India, with the necessary artillery, and occupy himself with the collection of supplies. Ismail, therefore, obtains nearly a month of immunity, and though Malays are necessarily slow to collect, still he may within that month gather a considerable force, and what is worse, rouse all his countrymen up to the Acheenese temper.
On the other hand, a great many circumstances are in favour of the British. The three important settlements are safe enough,—Penang, because it can hardly be attacked ; Malacca, because the Europeans can be kept safe under the fire of the ships ; and Singapore, because its Chinese population, though excessively difficult to govern, from the influence and remorse- lessness of their secret societies, have not the smallest disposition to attack a Government which, though objectionable from its regard for human life, protects them from being massacred whole- sale by the Mohammedan population. The Chiefs near enough to settlements to give trouble, the Rajahs of Johore and Queda, are reported friendly, and the insurgents, even if all their countrymen sympathise with them, cannot attempt a serious attack ; Sultan Ismail will scarcely collect more than ten thousand men, he has no movable artillery, and if he had the men and the guns, he could scarcely in the time march an army through the long distances of jungle. The only easy road in the peninsula is the sea. If he could fight a guerrilla war patiently, avoiding every attack, or defending his stockades only when artillery were not at hand, he might give serious trouble; but his followers, to keep together, will require the excitement of victory, and a battle once risked, all will pro- bably be over. The fanaticism of Malays is very stern, but it will no more prevent the shells from doing their work than any other enthusiasm, and there is nothing in the insurrection to keep the insurgents together after a defeat. They are not oppressed, their religion is in no danger, and they are not unanimous in their devotion to the Pretender. They will probably disperse, and everything return to its customary quiet, the Meute leaving only this lesson to be considered :—We are trying to protect our vast interests eastward of Ceylon with too few men, and some day or other shall meet with a catastrophe. It is positively childish to go about as we do in the whole of that vast region, trading, exploring, warning and punishing pirates, threatening great Governments like that of China, and claiming rights in a long• peninsula like Malaya, without re- taining three thousand Queen's soldieis anywhere within call. The Fleet cannot do everything—cannot, for instance, sail into Sultan Ismail's stockade on the Perak—and it is silly to leave ourselves so entirely without material force, and more especially without sufficient artillery. We want an Asiatic Malta, even if we have to keep it up by contribu- tions from every colony interested, and we do not believe that if the matter were thoroughly explained to Parliament a fair outlay for the purpose would be refused. At present we are relying for ultimate safety wholly upon India, and though no doubt India is strong, as Britain is strong, still the Viceroy can no more annihilate time and space than the British Government
can. Moreover, the " Indian system," as regards allowances, is always more or less in the way. Officers and men alike delight in an active service which brings the chance of distinction and breaks the •deadly monotony of Indian cantonment life, but will not every officer and man who goes to Perak be fined heavily for that performance of his duty I There may be some regulation of which we are not aware enabling the Government to avoid such a bizarre arrangement, but in the ordinary course the regiments detailed for this exceptionally dangerous work would lose, during the time occupied, more than half the Indian allowances. We want a healthy d6pot two thousand miles eastward of Calcutta, and some day the economy which refuses it will cost us millions.
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