The Americans Boast Of The Rapid Progress Of San Francisco, With Which
The Victorians Boast That Melbourne Is Running A
Neck and neck race;
but, if boasting is allowable, Singapore may boast, for in 1818 the
island was covered with
Dense primeval forest, and only a few miserable
fishermen and pirates inhabited its creeks and rivers. The prescience
of Sir Stamford Raffles marked it out in 1819 as the site of the first
free port in the Malayan Seas, but it was not till 1824 that it was
formally ceded to the East India Company by the Sultan of Johore, and
it only became a Crown colony in 1867, when it was erected into the
capital of the Straits Settlements, which include Malacca and Pinang.
Like Victoria, Singapore is a free port, and the vexatiousness of a
custom-house is unknown. The only tax which shipping pays is 1-1/2 per
cent. for the support of sundry lighthouses. The list of its exports
suggests heat. They are chiefly sugar, pepper, tin, nutmegs, mace,
sago, tapioca, rice, buffalo hides and horns, rattans, gutta, india
rubber, gambier, gums, coffee, dye-stuffs, and tobacco, but the island
itself, though its soil looks rich from its redness, only produces
pepper and gambier. It is a great entrepot, a gigantic distributing
point.*
[*The exports and imports of Singapore amounted in 1823 to 2,120,000
pounds, in 1859-60 to 10,371,000 pounds, and in 1880, to 23,050,000
pounds! In the latter year, tonnage to the amount of three millions of
tons arrived in its harbor. It must be observed that the imports, to a
very large extent, are exported to other places.]
The problem of raising a revenue without customs duties is solved by a
stamp-tax, land-revenue, and (by far the most important), the sale of
the monopolies of the preparation and retailing of opium for smoking,
and of spirits and other excisable commodities, these monopolies being
"farmed" to private individuals, mostly Chinamen. It is rather puzzling
to hear "farmers" spoken of so near the equator. A revenue of nearly
half a million annually and a public debt of one hundred thousand
pounds is not bad for so young a colony. The prosperity of the Straits
Settlements ports is a great triumph for free traders, and a traveler,
even if, like myself, he has nothing but a canvas roll and a "Gladstone
bag," congratulates himself on being saved from the bother of
unstrapping and restrapping stiffened and refractory straps, and from
the tiresome delays of even the most courteous custom-house officers.
The official circle is large, as I before remarked. A Crown colony
where the Government has it all its own way must be the paradise of
officials, and the high sense of honor and the righteous esprit de
corps which characterize our civil servants in the Far East, and a
conscientious sense of responsibilities for the good government and
well-being of the heterogeneous populations over which they rule, seem
as good a check as the general run of colonial parliaments.
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