The Government, by maintaining discipline in the different districts, by punishing crime and regulating trade, is no doubt instilling into the mind of the people important principles of law and order, and it has suppressed the atrocious crimes of piracy and head-hunting. The importation of Hakka Chinese to show the Dyaks how paddy ought to be planted is an important move in the right direction, and will conduce to their prosperity if only they can be persuaded to submit to instruction. But the future of the Sea Dyak even as regards material well-being is somewhat doubtful. There are those who say that he is slowly, but none the less surely, improving, and that he will at no very distant time reach the stage of progress to which most of the Malays in the country have attained; that his means of earning a livelihood then will not be confined to paddy-planting and occasionally working jungle produce, but that he will work sago, and also engage in fishing and boat-building on a large scale. Others, however, mutter dark things concerning the Sea Dyak’s primitive methods of farming and his unwillingness to give them up, and they paint a dismal picture of villages crowded in the distant future by half-starved men and women, living on worn-out land which will not bear abundant crops, as in the old days, a weakly and sickly race, debilitated by insufficiency of food. Whatever may be the ultimate fate of the Sea Dyak, that events will move on certain lines in the immediate future seems to be fairly probable. The Sea Dyak will go on living in the same kind of house as his ancestors had—much the same kind of life year after year. He will go on farming in his present primitive way till the soil around is worn out; then he will ask leave of the Government, as has been done in many cases lately, to remove to some new and uncultivated country, and to be allowed to cut down the jungle on the hills there. Enormous tracts of lowland jungle exist in the lower reaches of the rivers on whose banks the Sea Dyaks live; but though they are industrious enough to plant their paddy on swampy soil which was cleared of jungle generations ago, they do not seem to care to cut down lowland jungle and prepare such land for planting. No doubt the reason is that it is harder work, and that after the trees are felled, it is six or seven years before the roots have rotted, and the soil has settled, and the land is fit for planting paddy on. What the Sea Dyaks like is to be allowed to remove to some country with plenty of wooded hills. They prefer planting paddy on the hills to clearing the lowland jungle, and waiting till the swampy land is fit for planting. The old sequence of events will repeat itself. The new land, rich virgin soil at first, will, under his devastating hand, soon become exhausted and worn out. It does not take long to impoverish land if no attempt is made to enrich it.