The raising of the taxes from the people to defray the expenses of government has raised no difficulties. The door-tax of two dollars[217] per door (I.E. per family or household) is the only direct tax laid on the tribes. When once the initial reluctance has been overcome, this has been collected and regularly paid in by chiefs and PENGHULUS, including the headmen of the nomad groups. In times of misfortune, whether individual or collective, such as the loss of crops or of a house by fire, the tax is remitted; and no tax is expected from men over sixty years of age, from cripples or invalids, or from widows.
The Sea Dayaks alone pay a door-tax of one dollar only, it having been understood from the early days, when they were the only fighting tribe with which the Rajah was intimately acquainted, that they are liable at any time to be called upon by the government to render assistance in punitive expeditions or in other public works, such as procuring timber for government buildings. But this holds good only for those who remain in the districts in which they have long been settled.
The sum raised by direct taxation forms now but a small part of the total revenue of the State of Sarawak; for the development of trade and agriculture, especially the cultivation of pepper and sago and rubber, and the growing capacity and facilities for the purchase of imported goods by the people even of the remotest parts, enable the government to raise a considerable revenue by indirect taxation in the form of customs duties.
The minerals, worked in the main by the Borneo Company,[218] principally gold, antimony, and mercury, have also been an important source of revenue. The recent discovery of supplies of petroleum promises to result in an important addition to the wealth of the country.[219] But these various commercial and industrial developments affect hardly at all the lives of the pagan tribes, So far as they are concerned, the work of the government may be summed up by saying that it has suppressed the chronic warfare which kept them all in a state of armed hostility and uneasy distrust of one another; that it has suppressed head-hunting and crimes of violence, has rendered life and property secure, and has administered justice with a firm hand and a strict regard to the customs and traditional sentiments of the people; that it has wellnigh extinguished slavery; that it has opened the whole country to trade, and, by thus improving the facilities for sale of the jungle produce, has increased the purchasing power of the people, while bringing within the reach of all of them the products of civilised industry that they most value; and that while it has strictly regulated the sale of those products, such as fire-arms and strong liquor, which have proved detrimental to so many other peoples of the lower culture, it has encouraged the people to cultivate a greater variety of vegetable products, especially sago, coconuts, pepper, and rubber, and to improve the methods of cultivation of PADI. Lastly, the government has rendered possible the establishment of a number of excellent mission schools in older stations, where considerable numbers of children of the pagan tribes have been made Christians and trained to fill subordinate posts in the administrative service, or to return to leaven the native villages with a wider knowledge and a better understanding of the principles which underlie the white man's conduct and culture. The missionaries have exerted also among the Sea Dayaks a strong influence making for peace and order; but they have hardly yet come into contact with Kayans or Kenyahs. Mention must also be made of the Malay schools which the government has instituted and supported in the principal stations, and in which many young Malays receive the elements of a useful education.
In all its undertakings the success of the government has only been rendered possible by the high prestige that the white man everywhere enjoys; and this in turn has been acquired and maintained, not so much by his command of the mechanical resources of western civilisation, as by the fact that, with very few exceptions, the white men with whom the natives have had intercourse have been English gentlemen, animated by the spirit and example of the two white Rajahs, and keenly conscious of their individual and collective responsibility as representatives of their race and country in a foreign land.[220]
We have dwelt at some length on the government of the Rajah of Sarawak in its relation with the pagan tribes, and, if we dismiss in a few words the administrative labours of the Dutch and of the British North Borneo Company in their respective territories, it is not because we regard those labours as of less interest and importance or as less successful, but because in the main they have run on similar lines and have achieved similar results to those of the government of Sarawak, of which alone we have intimate knowledge. Dutch Borneo comprises roughly two-thirds of the whole island, a very large territory which comprises the basins of the largest rivers and hence, the rivers being the only highways, the most inaccessible parts of the island. The Kapuas River, for example, is estimated to be nearly 700 miles in length; and the necessity of ascending these hundreds of miles of river-way, much of it difficult and dangerous, has rendered the process of establishing control over the tribes of the interior slow and laborious. For this reason the process is not yet completed; although the Dutch have had stations in Borneo since the early years of the seventeenth century, when they expelled the Portuguese from Bruni and Sambas. But it was not until 1785 that they came into possession of any considerable territory, namely, the Sultanate of Banjermasin, and not till after the return to them of their East Indian rights in 1816 that they extended their territorial possessions to their present large proportions.
The Dutch settlement and possessions in Borneo were for many years administered by traders and a trading company whose prime object was, of course, profitable trade. The problems of native administration no doubt seemed to them at first of minor importance and interest, and they made many mistakes.[221] But, as with our own great company in India, it became increasingly necessary, if only for the sake of trade, to study the art and policy of administering the affairs of the native population. This has now been done to good effect, and, stimulated possibly by the example of wise paternal government afforded by the Rajahs of Sarawak, the Dutch have established a system of Residents or district officers who have successfully invoked the co-operation of the native chiefs in a manner very similar to that practised in the neighbouring state. And the Dutch officers have of late years shown themselves willing and able effectively to co-operate with those of Sarawak in all matters of common interest, especially in the settlement of troubles on the boundary between their territories. The enlightened interest of the Dutch Government in the welfare of the tribes of the far interior and in the promotion of ethnographical knowledge has been strikingly manifested in the opening years of this century by the despatch of two successive expeditions, under the leadership of Dr. Nieuwenhuis, to study the people, their customs and conditions, and by its generous expenditure upon the publication of the handsome volumes in which he has embodied his valuable reports.[222] On the second journey this intrepid traveller penetrated to the head of the Batang Kayan, and there made the acquaintance of the same Kenyahs who had recently visited the Resident of the Baram. In this way the spheres of Dutch and of British influence have been made to overlap in these central highlands.
The Physical Characters of the Races and Peoples of Borneo
A. C. Haddon
Introduction