I Daresay There Are Now Near Five Hundred People In Dobbo Of
Various Races, All Met In This Remote Corner Of The East, As They
Express It, "To Look For Their Fortune;" To Get Money Any Way
They Can.
They are most of them people who have the very worst
reputation for honesty as well as every other form of morality, -
Chinese, Bugis, Ceramese, and half-caste Javanese, with a
sprinkling of half-wild Papuans from Timor, Babber, and other
islands, yet all goes on as yet very quietly.
This motley,
ignorant, bloodthirsty, thievish population live here without the
shadow of a government, with no police, no courts, and no
lawyers; yet they do not cut each other's throats, do not plunder
each other day and night, do not fall into the anarchy such a
state of things might be supposed to lead to. It is very
extraordinary! It puts strange thoughts into one's head about the
mountain-load of government under which people exist in Europe,
and suggests the idea that we may be over-governed. Think of the
hundred Acts of Parliament annually enacted to prevent us, the
people of England, from cutting each other's throats, or from
doing to our neighbour as we would not be done by. Think of the
thousands of lawyers and barristers whose whole lives are spent
in telling us what the hundred Acts of Parliament mean, and one
would be led to infer that if Dobbo has too little law England
has too much.
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