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The latest accounts represent the province as continuing in a state of unabated prosperity.  Its bounds, by more recent cessions, have been so largely increased, that its shore line is now three hundred miles long, and the whole population of the state two hundred and fifty thousand.  The haunts of the Sarebus and Sakarran pirates are included in the new limits; and these once-dreaded freebooters have learned the habits of honest industry.  Indeed, during the days of the insurrection the state found no more faithful or courageous defenders than they, although their old corsair blood was visible in the relentless tenacity with which they tracked the flying foe.  Sir James Brooke, with increasing years, has retired somewhat from the active care of the government, leaving the conduct of affairs very much to his nephew, Captain Brooke, whom he has designated as his heir and successor, and who is represented as being also heir in a large degree to his uncle’s principles, courage, and sagacity.

Rajah Brooke sought persistently for many years to give perpetuity to his life’s work by placing Sarawak under British protection.  He made repeated offers to surrender to the Queen all right and title which he had acquired, on any terms which would secure the welfare of the natives.  But these offers have been definitely rejected; the seeming protection which Sarawak enjoyed through the position of its ruler as Governor of Labuan has been withdrawn, and the little state left to work out unaided its destiny.  What shall be the final fate of this interesting experiment, whether there shall arise successors to the founder wise enough to maintain the government so bravely established, or whether the infant state shall perish with the man who called it into existence, and become only a memory, it is impossible to foretell; but, living or dead, its annals will always be a noble monument to him whose force of character and undaunted persistency created it.

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The earlier portraits we have of Rajah Brooke depict him as a man of a peculiarly frank, open, and pleasing exterior, yet with a countenance marked by intelligence, thought, and energy; but underneath all a certain dreaminess of expression, found often in the faces of those born for adventure and to seek for the enterprise of their age fresh fields, new El Dorados hidden in strange lands and unfamiliar seas.

The later portraits give us a face, plain, sagacious, yet full of an expression of kindly benevolence.  The exigencies of a busy life have transformed romance into reality and common-sense; the adventurer and knight-errant has but obeyed the law of his age, and become a noble example of the power of the Anglo-Saxon mind to organize in the face of adverse circumstances a state, and to construct out of most unpromising elements the good fabric of orderly social life.

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