difficulty in understanding the smallness and almost stationary
population of the Dyak tribes.
We have next to inquire what is the cause of the small number of births
and of living children in a family. Climate and race may have something
to do with this, but a more real and efficient cause seems to me to
be the hard labour of the women, and the heavy weights they constantly
carry. A Dyak woman generally spends the whole day in the field, and
carries home every night a heavy load of vegetables and firewood, often
for several miles, over rough and hilly paths; and not unfrequently
has to climb up a rocky mountain by ladders, and over slippery
stepping-stones, to an elevation of a thousand feet. Besides this, she
has an hour's work every evening to pound the rice with a heavy wooden
stamper, which violently strains every part of the body. She begins this
kind of labour when nine or ten years old, and it never ceases but with
the extreme decrepitude of age. Surely we need not wonder at the limited
number of her progeny, but rather be surprised at the successful efforts
of nature to prevent the extermination of the race.
One of the surest and most beneficial effects of advancing civilization,
will be the amelioration of the condition of these women. The
precept and example of higher races will make the Dyak ashamed of his
comparatively idle life, while his weaker partner labours like a beast
of burthen. As his wants become increased and his tastes refined, the
women will have more household duties to attend to, and will then cease
to labour in the field--a change which has already to a great extent
taken place in the allied Malay, Javanese, and Bugis tribes. Population
will then certainly increase more rapidly, improved systems of
agriculture and some division of labour will become necessary in order
to provide the means of existence, and a more complicated social state
will take the place of the simple conditions of society which now occur
among them. But, with the sharper struggle for existence that will
then arise, will the happiness of the people as a whole be increased
or diminished? Will not evil passions be aroused by the spirit of
competition, and crimes and vices, now unknown or dormant, be called
into active existence? These are problems that time alone can solve; but
it is to be hoped that education and a high-class European example may
obviate much of the evil that too often arises in analogous cases, and
that we may at length be able to point to one instance of an uncivilized
people who have not become demoralized, and finally exterminated, by
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