Pagan races of the Malay Peninsula - Sabrizain.org

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INTRODUCTION
to-day (though there is as yet no marked dedine in their numbers)
they are fast tending to become assimilated and absorbed, losing
their language, their customs, their purity of blood and (worst loss of
all) their natural truthfulness and honesty. Probably at the present
stage it is too late to avert wholly the natural trend of events, and
the only palliative appears to be (in the best interest of the aborigines
themselves as well as of their former oppressors) to encourage and
develop the systematic study by our own officials of native thought,
law, and custom, and to encourage and develop the ideas of the natives
themselves through the means (some of which I am glad to say have
already been tried) of their own industries and culture (barbarisms
and babuisms, of course, excluded). By thus giving them an assured
status and the stimulus of a new and higher form of self-respect,
we may at least develop and improve that most important class of
the race (as distinct from his degenerate fellow-countryman of the
towns), the genuine Malay peasant, inured to the hard vicissitudes
of the jungle or the sea. Whatever can be achieved in this
direction, be it httle or much—and the writer is one of those whom
experience has convinced that much can be done—will be in its
ultimate result of immeasurably greater benefit to the unsophisticated
alien races over whom the Malay genius for assimilation is so soon
destined to prevail, than any system of forest reservation or even the
most paternal vigilance over their affairs.