East Coast Etchings. By Hugh Clifford. (Straits Tiff141t, Singe- pore.)—The
"East Coast" is Malaya, and Mr. Clifford is the British Resident at Pahang. We cannot quite understand the pcint of view from which he regards the relations between the European and the Malay race. The contact with the white man "stamps out much that is best in the customs and characteristics of the native races ; " it "injures them morally almost as much as it benefits them materially." That is intelligible. But when we turn to Mr. Clifford's sketches of Malay life—and very vivid and powerful sketches they are—we cannot Bee where there is room for injury. We cannot see that the Malay, as he is pictured to us here, possesses any virtue. He has no idea of chastity (and the women are as bad as the men) ; he is unutterably cruel; he is not brave. Tak.3, for instance, the "Tale of a Theft," off which
Mr. Clifford rightly warns any reader who cannot stomach a good deal. One Talib is suspected by a Raja of theft and thrown into prison ; a horrible description of what he and his fellow-prisoners endured follows. And what is the moral? " And all these things happened, and are happening to-day, within shooting distance of Singapore, with its churches and its ballrooms, its societies for the prevention of cruelty, its missionaries, &c." But to make out the contention of his first chapter, it should be shown that these things would not have happened if Singapore had no churches. societies, missionaries, and so forth. European influence had nothing to do with the causation of these things. Mr. Clifford is himself a "European influence" at Pahang. Does he not do something towards diminishing these horrors? Would they not be worse if he were not there ?
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