I regretted that Great Britain had lost, through a piece of carelessness, these magnificent islands now controlled by Holland; although the Dutch have done about as well as any other people could have done, I suppose. I believe it was because Lord Canning did not open his eastern mail one morning, that these islands became a possession of Holland instead of Great Britain. I did not, on the occasion of my first visit, see anything of the Achinese. But I passed, in '92, on my last trip around the world, the northwestern end of Sumatra, and Captain Hogg, of the Moyune, pointed to the little town of Achin, built on piles. He said that in the interior the Dutch were still fighting the Achinese. They had then been fighting these desperate Mohammedans--converted Malays--for thirty years. I have since thought, having in view this prolonged struggle for freedom of the Mohammedan Malays of Sumatra, how desperate is our undertaking in the Philippines, where we are trying to subjugate a far larger population of Mohammedans, the Moros of the southern islands of the archipelago. Holland, I believe, has spent already something like 500,000,000 florins to exterminate the Achinese. It may cost us far more to exterminate the Moros. I left Batavia for Singapore on a Dutch man-of-war, Captain Fabius. We stopped first at the island of Banka, belonging to Holland, and I saw there the famous tin-mines, which are greater than those of Cornwall, England. They were the property of the brother of the King of Holland. We did not stop at Sarawak, because of the little war that "Rajah" Brooke, afterward known as Sarawak Brooke, was carrying on there. We arrived at Singapore just too late to meet Townsend Harris, the first American diplomatic representative to Japan, as he had gone up to Siam. Harris's visit to Japan was the real beginning of a new era in the trade of the far East, and no other diplomatic mission in the history of this country has been fraught with greater results.