The Chinese may be nearly as troublesome a people to govern as Europeans, certainly not more so; and their good qualities, in which they are not deficient, should be cherished and stimulated, while their bad ones are regulated by the discipline of the law under a just and liberal government. They are a people specially amenable to justice, and are happier under a stringent than a lenient system. Of the Chinese the _Sarawak Gazette_ (November 1, 1897) says:— The characteristics of this extraordinary people must at once strike the minds of the most superficial of European residents in the East. Their wonderful energy and capacity for work; their power of accumulating wealth; their peculiar physical powers, which render them equally fertile, and their children equally vivacious, on the equator as in more temperate regions, and which enable them to rear a new race of natives under climatic conditions entirely different from those under which their forefathers were born, are facts with which we are all acquainted. Their mental endowments, too, are by no means to be despised, as nearly every year shows us, when the results of the examination for the Queen's Scholarship of the Straits Settlements are published, and some young Chinese boy departs for England to enter into educational competition with his European fellows. Chinese get on well with all natives, with whom they intermarry, the mixed offspring being a healthy and good-looking type. They form the merchant, trading, and artisan classes, and they are the only agriculturists and mine labourers of any worth. Without these people a tropical country would remain undeveloped. The only census that appears to have been attempted in Sarawak was taken in 1871. Judging by the report that was published in the _Gazette_ this census was made in a very imperfect manner.[39] Of the interior population it includes Sea-Dayaks, but no means were obtainable for ascertaining the numbers of Kayans, Kenyahs, and many other tribes that go to make up the population of the State. It makes no separate mention of the large coast population of the Melanaus, who were presumably lumped with the Malays. The census gives the following figures:— Malays 52,519 Dayaks 70,849 Chinese 4,947 Indians 364 ——————— 128,679 Allowed for evasions and omissions 10 per cent 12,867 ——————— Total 141,546