The doctrine, that a colony should always be considered a distant province of the mother-country, has been foreign to the political creed of the Dutch; and at any rate the radical want of strength in the government of Batavia may have prevented them from venturing to act upon it. Of course, they must always have contemplated the prosperity of the eastern tribes with the invidious regret of a rival shopkeeper, and regarded their progress in civilization with the jealousy of a timid despot. The fact sufficiently establishes the truth of this remark. Independently of the effects of the European influence just described, the causes which have tended most to the depression of the Malayan tribes, and the deterioration of their character, are the civil commotions to which every state is liable, from the radical want of strength in the sovereign; the constant wars between the petty chieftains and heads of villages; the ill-defined succession to the throne, from the doctrine of primogeniture being imperfectly recognized; the prevalence of piracy in all the Eastern Seas; the system of domestic slavery, and all its concomitant evils, as wars for the purpose of procuring slaves, and the want of confidence between family and family, man and man; the want of a generally-established, and recognized system of laws, civil and criminal; the want of a similar system of commercial regulations respecting port duties, anchorage, and other charges, to prevent arbitrary exactions and impositions in the various Malayan ports; and, finally, the monopoly of the trade assumed by the Malayan rajas. Had Java remained permanently annexed to the British crown, the redress of these evils would have been, in a great measure, in the power of the English nation: the undertaking would have been worthy of their general character, and there was no other nation that could have possessed the means in an equal degree, even if it had indeed possessed the inclination. The prevalence of piracy on the Malayan coasts, and the light in which it was viewed as an honourable occupation, worthy of being followed by young princes and nobles, is an evil of ancient date, and intimately connected with the Malayan habits. The old Malayan romances, and the fragments of their traditional history, constantly refer with pride to piratical cruizes.