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FOBLIC PECORD OFFICE

Reference -

1111C.0.882/12

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PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE. LONDON

ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AF REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC-

COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO|

C. 92344/32 [No. 1].

104

No. 41.

FEDERATED MALAY STATES.

THE HIGH COMMISSIONER to THE SECRETARY OF STATE.

(Confidential.)

SIB,

(Received 18th April, 1932.)

Government House, Singapore, 7th April, 1932.

I HAVE the honour to address you further with reference to the pamphlet entitled The Legal Status of the Malay States, written by Mr. R. Braddell, copies of which were forwarded to you under cover of my Unfederated Malay States (Johore) Confidential despatch of the 9th October last,* which dealt particularly with the juristio status of Johore.

2. I had asked the acting Chief Secretary to Government to put forward his comments on the pamphlet, so far as it concerns the Federated Malay States, in a memorandum; from which Dr. R. O. Winstedt made certain quotations in the second enclosure to my October despatch. I deferred, however, sending you the memorandum until the constitutional arguments raised by Mr. Braddell in the case recently brought against Government by the Pahang Consolidated Company, Limited, had been judicially pronounced upon. As you are aware, an appeal has been made by the Company to the Privy Council; but this fact need not delay further the transmission to of the views of my principal advisers on Mr. Braddell's representations regarding the Federated Malay States. I therefore enclose a copy of :-

you

3.

(a) Mr. Caldecott's memorandum, dated the 28th September, 1931; and

(b) a memorandum by Mr. Gibson, dated the 2nd April current, written with special reference to the judgments in the Pahang Consolidated case. Your notice may possibly have already been attracted to a review by Sir Frank Swettenham on Mr. Braddell's pamphlet, which appeared in the Magazine of the Association of British Malaya in January last. In case, however, you have not received a copy I forward one herewith.

4. Sir Frank Swettenham has rightly emphasized in his review that Mr. Braddell's pamphlet did not purport to be an essay in politics and the only points on which the latter's juristry is in dispute are those covered by the Pahang Consolidated case. A final decision on these now rests with the Privy Council and I shall not, therefore, comment on them.

5. Both Sir Frank Swettenham and Mr. Caldecott point out discrepancies between the juristic position in the Federated Malay States and the political position that has actually developed in history. The publication of Mr. Braddell's pamphlet would in my opinion have made it impossible for these discrepancies to remain uncorrected, even if its publication had not been anticipated at Sri Menanti by the announcement of the policy of decentralization. The results of education among the Malays during the past twenty years render it impossible to prolong with their good will the present divorce of political facts from constitutional theory. The main value of the pamphlet in my opinion is that it accentuates the need for juristic accuracy and care in drafting the Treaty that will eventually effect the reconciliation.

6. Sir Frank Swettenham has, naturally perhaps, directed his eyes toward the past of the Malaya that he knew and so largely made. In supporting Mr. Braddell's differentiation between Johore and the other States he cannot have been aware of the terms of the 1914 Treaty or of the disclosures that necessitated it, which were explained in Dr. Winstedt's memorandum forwarded with my previous despatch. And as regards the Federated Malay States there is little practical value in the reflection that all would have gone well with the Federation, if it had been left as he left it. It was not so left, and for my part I do not desire to criticize the work of those administrators who have intervened in time between Sir Frank Swettenham and myself; I can only repeat, I wish to make perfectly plain my what I said to the Rulers at Sri Menanti, that conviction that nothing was done by past administrators unwisely or in opposition to the contemporaneous wishes of Their Highnesses." That desire is in no wise incompatible with my conviction that the present times call loudly for a measure of decentralistic adjustment to the wishes of the Rulers, based on our original Treaties with their States; and nothing that has been written by Mr. Braddell or in the enclosures to this despatch causes me to modify the proposals put forward in my

* No. 40.

105

memorandum entitled "Decentralization in the Federated Malay States as a preliminary 'to Pan-Malayan Federation," sent to you on the 24th December last.*

7. I shall post this despatch by air-mail and a duplicate will follow by ocean-mail.

I have, &c.,

C. CLEMENTI,

Enclosure 1 in No. 41.

SOME REMARKS ON MR. ROLAND Braddell'S

"old Negri Sembilan "

High Commissioner.

LEGAL STATUS OF THE MALAY STATES." 1. THE fact that Mr. Braddell's hook may be good law, and that it is certainly good reading, must not be allowed to blind the political student in Malaya to the fact that it contains a layer of bad history.

2. The confusion of the

with the present Negri Sembilan on page 9; the omission of any mention of the Sungei Ujong State Council and the historically interesting extension of its scope to cover another State (Jelebu), and the failure to take into account the essential difference between the Menangkabau constitu- tional unorthodoxy of Negri Sembilan and the more correctly Mohammedan status of Perak, Selangor, and Pahang; all these omissions or errors (and there are more of them) make the pamphlet quite inapplicable to one out of the four States. To represent either the Yam Tuan or any of the Undangs as

< absolute monarchs (page 12) is contrary both to fact and to Menangkabau constitutional theory,

3. For the purpose of further criticism I therefore treat the pamphlet as if Negri Sembilan idiosyncrasies were excluded from its scope.

4. On page 12 Mr. Braddell makes some strangely unhistorical statements. He says that the instruction that the Residents should advise and not rule was loyally followed up to 1895, the year of federation; that the control of the Governor of the Straits Settlements was slight; that the Malay Rulers ruled and the British Residents advised

5. Mr. Braddell has obviously not consulted his authorities; on page 9 he states that C

British intervention in the affairs of the Malay Peninsula began in Perak after the Perak War of 1874." The true history, of course, is that the Treaty of Pangkor was signed on the 20th January, 1874, and that the Perak War began with the murder of the first Resident (for the very reason that he insisted on ruling, it might be contended) on the 2nd November, 1875. The instructions to Residents, quoted on page 12, were issued as a result of Mr. Birch's failure and of the Perak War.

"

pre-

6. If Mr. Braddell had read, as I have recently had to, large quantities of federation files in the Negri Sembilan and Perak Secretariats he would recognize that his golden age

when Sultans ruled and British Residents advised" is quite imaginary. Equally imaginary is the statement that the control of the Governor of the Straits Settle- ments was slight. Not a single public work could be put in hand in Sungei Ujong without reference to the Colonial Secretary; nor could any important measure or policy be inaugurated without similar reference. The Residents had in those days to keep a detailed journal of every single thing they did, and it was sent to Singapore for, so to speak, gubernatorial audit.

7. Quite imaginary, also, in regard to fact (however correct in theory) is the statement that the State Councils are and always have been purely advisory bodies. The truth is that the Ruler has always taken his part as an ordinary voter in the divisions of State Councils, and that decisions have been by majority of votes and not by assent of the Ruler. The first recorded division is, I think, that of 4th May, 1879, in Perak (Papers on Malay Subjects, History III, p. 48). The most startling and recent was the revocation of the Serting Game Reserve by the Negri Sembilan State Council in 1929, with His Highness the Yam Tuan and the Senior Undang (Dato 'Klana) voting against it! 8. The claim that the Federal Council is purely advisory (which Mr. Braddell is arguing in Court as I write) is still more contrary to history. Enactment No. 1 of 1914 (historically the most momentous of any of our local laws, for nearly everything that we did during the War was done by virtue of it) was introduced in typescript, without previous publication as a Bill, in the absence of the Rulers; it was passed in their absence, and gazetted without their knowledge. The truth is that the Rulers have recognized both the Federal and State Councils as their legislatures and as decisory, not advisory, bodies.

* No. 12.