14 - The Administration of Law and Order in the Colony in its Early Years

Summary

Editors’ Note

W.R. Collyer was a prominent lawyer and jurist who had earlier served in Sierra Leone, Gold Coast and Cyprus before arriving in the Straits Settlements in 1892. In 1903 he was serving as the Attorney General when he provided the introductory address as the President of the Society. His address took up a question central to the history and development of the colony—the application of law to Europeans. In the early days, according to Collyer, it could be said that Europeans in the colony were “amenable to no authority in the place”. This produced a contradiction between the equality before the law proclaimed by Raffles and the double-standards between Europeans and Asians which emerged in practice. The transfer of the colony to the Crown meant for Collyer that the present contradiction was no longer between Europeans and Asians, but was now between the interests of business and that of legal order. Giving the example of the then recent curtailment of the jury system in the interests of traders he argued that this policy was creating an opposition between civic duty and the pursuit of business. It also raised the question of whether the colony was simply a place to make money or a place in which the legal order had intrinsic value. In his opinion this in turn expressed the nature of colonial society in the Straits Settlements.

For my subject tonight I am indebted to Mr. Buckley’s Anecdotal History of Singapore. Of course you have all seen the book, and I suppose many of you must have read it. It is a very wonderful storehouse of facts, and tells the history of Singapore in an original manner. It is kaleidoscopic in its variety, the events jostling one another as they do in an unselected and unedited diary. It depends on no attraction of style, and no artificial allurements of typography or “get-up”, but simply on the enthusiasm and loving research which the author has bestowed on his work.