How little the influence of European rule touches the inner life and belief of the native, whatever may be his race! I remember being in Singapore at the time the Government was building a new church, when it was reported that the convicts were seizing people at night and murdering them in order to bury their heads under the foundations of the new building. A panic prevailed for a considerable time, and natives only ventured out in strong parties. And this occurred in a British settlement after our Government had been established there over thirty years. I discussed this unaccountable panic with my Chinese butler, who spoke English well, and had lived all his life in European families. His only answer to my repeated questions was that he hoped it was not true, that he did not know, but he understood it was generally believed. Our missionaries in China have the same experience. Another intelligent native remarked that the English must have been a barbarous race, as formerly they sacrificed a human victim every time they prepared to take the sacrament, but that in more modern days they had become more civilised, as they now only sacrificed dogs, a reference to the periodical destruction in British settlements of all stray animals. What a perverse interpretation of missionary teaching! After fifty years of English rule in Sarawak a similar panic occurred. I will quote the Sarawak _Gazette_ of September 1, 1894: ‘Some months back a most unaccountable scare took possession of the Asiatic population of Sarawak Proper—Malays, Chinese, Dyaks and others being similarly affected. It was at first rumoured that the Government required human heads to place under the foundations of the new high level reservoir at the waterworks, and that men were sent out at night to procure these.... Other equally absurd stories followed and were fully believed, many natives going so far as to assert that they had met with these head hunters about the native town at night. The people no longer ventured out after dark; coolies whose work would preclude their return to their own homes at night were unobtainable, not a boat could be obtained to cross the river after dark, and the majority of persons whose business took them further than the limits of the bazaar, carried arms.’