most as peaceful and orderly as an English countryside.
Thus at a preposterously early age I was the principal instrument in adding 15,000 square miles of territory to the British dependencies in the East; and this fact forces me to the conclusion that my share in the business stands in need of some explanation and defence, if readers who are not themselves Britishers are to be persuaded that I am not merely a thief upon a rather large scale. The stories and sketches contained in this book supply me with both. I, who write, have with my own eyes seen the Malayan prison; have lived at a Malayan court; have shared the life of the people of all ranks and classes in their towns and villages, in their rice-fields, on their rivers, and in the magnificent forests which cover the face of their country. I have travelled with them on foot, by boats, and raft. I have fought with and against them. I have camped with the downtrodden aboriginal tribes of jungle-dwelling Sâkai and Sĕmang, and have heard from their own lips the tales of their miseries. I have watched at close quarters, and in intolerable impotency to aid or save, the lives which all these people lived before the white men came to defend their weakness against the oppression and the wrong wrought to them by tyrants of their own race; and I have seen them gradually emerge from the dark shadow in which their days were passed, into the daylight of a personal freedom such as white men prize above most mundane things.
