All who have read these pages will agree there can be no possible doubt that the Sultan and his ministers had well deserved to have their powers curtailed, even to the extent of absolute deprivation of all control in the affairs of their country, but not a few will naturally wonder why the Foreign Office had not arrived at such an obvious conclusion many years ago. Then the reasons for interference were tenfold more weighty than now. Successive years have seen the Sultanate stripped of its territories, and the capacity of the Sultan and his bureaucracy to do evil lessened in proportion to the loss of population, revenues, and power. Then the British Government would have become possessed of a large territory, nearly as large as England, with a numerous population, and would have had a reasonable prospect before it of establishing a State or Colony which might at this time be as flourishing as any of those in the Malay peninsula; now they have unnecessarily hampered themselves with a miserable bankrupt remnant of a formerly large State, some 3000 square miles in area only, with a total population of not more than 15,000; with no internal resources to develop, and with revenues so slight as to be inconsiderable, an experiment which appears to be proving costly. To contend that the governmental system of the Federated Malay States would be a good example to Sarawak is to presume a superiority in that system, and to infer that the conditions prevailing in the former and latter States are on a parity. So far there has been no convincing evidence of the superiority of this system in its application to Bruni, though that is not surprising, as the British Resident can hardly be expected to make bricks without straw; and Sarawak, which has the credit of having "the best form of government for a country populated by an Oriental people of various races," would scarcely be wise to exchange the simple methods that have been gradually built up to meet the requirements of her population for an elaborated system, which, however successful it has been in the States for which it was formed, might not be altogether conformable to existing conditions in Sarawak. There is almost as much difference between the populations of the Malay States and Sarawak, as there is between that of the latter and Java or Ceylon, and the same difference exists in regard to Bruni. To argue that a form of government, because it is eminently adapted to the circumstance of one country would necessarily be suitable to another, is to be optimistic, and shows a want either of common sense, or of knowledge of the respective conditions of the countries indicated.