A gentleman who had lived for several years among the Indians of the Canadian northwest said that he went among them believing they were an untutored race. But when they told him of a dozen kinds of berries growing in a locality where he knew but two, brought him flowers he could not find after careful search, and around their council fires showed as deep an insight into the mysteries of life as the _savants_ of his university, then he concluded they could no longer be called untutored. And why should they be? Is there no culture or civilization outside of the enlightenment of Europe or America? And because a civilization does not exactly fit the grooves in which most of the world has moved, may it not be a real civilization for all that? If such is possible, then we vote the Malays a cultured people. Of course, their culture is not like our own; it knows no railroads, no telegraphs, boasts of no intricate political machinery, has no complicated social despotisms. Native princes rule for the most part over peaceful states, and politics means no more than the regulation of quiet village life. But what need of railroads, when the rivers are avenues of trade and communication? Why telegraphs, when the world is bounded by the jungle horizon? Or why, in short, severe civil and social enactments, when the common _Wahlspruch_ of life is, "Fear disgrace rather than death"? Such a civilization, we admit, is a humble one; but it also has the advantage of being a happy one. And where contentment dwells, where honesty prevails, where the home is a stronghold, there are culture and civilization, even though they may not coincide with our own. The Malays are not barbarians, and their language by its grace and adaptability has shown its right to be. To-day it is the mother tongue of more than forty millions of people, and the _lingua franca_ of Chinamen, Hindus, European, and natives. It is spoken from Madagascar to the distant islands of the Pacific, and from the Philippines to Australia. With it one can barter in Celebes and sell in Java; converse with a sultan in Sumatra or a Spaniard in Manila. Moreover, it is soft and melodious, rich in expression, poetical in idiom, and simple in structure--a language almost without grammar and yet of immense vocabulary, with subtle distinctions and fine gradations of thought and meaning; a language that sounds in one's ears long after _Tanah Malayu_ and the coral islands and the jungle strand have sunk into hazy recollection, just as they once dropped out of sight behind one's departing ship.