Those who organized the riot (and undoubtedly it was organized: it was not an impulsive gesture), might have argued that the punishment which would follow could not be much worse than what they were already suffering. What could the authorities do to them? Not much, except to throw them back into jail. The Government could not hang them all for Dutton’s death. No one need suffer if they all stuck together, as obedient secret society members, remembering their oaths, were supposed to behave. No government, they might have muttered during their whispered conspiracy, would dare to hang them all. If they thought along these lines, they were wrong on two points. Faced with death, strong men wilted: secret society discipline faltered and crumbled. For various personal reasons some of the mob talked to save their skins. Others followed. That was one point. The other was that they completely misunderstood the mood of the Government. This was a government fully prepared to use the due process of the law to hang them all, every single one of them, providing an impartial judge and jury were satisfied that they were members of that illegal assembly.
Soon after election to office, this new, inexperienced, fearless government had announced its determination to stamp out secret societies. The Government said they were prepared to meet the challenge head on. They knew there was no alternative if they, and not the mobs, were to govern Singapore. The full weight of the law would be used to crush them. If the law demanded that all 300-odd detainees must die for the murder of Dutton and his colleagues: they would die. Nobody doubted the Government’s firm resolve when, in due course, 71 suspects stood before the magistrate, charged with murder.
What did the government believe caused the experiment to fail? No formal statement was ever issued. Soon after the riot, the government announced that a high court judge would hold an inquiry. Wiser counsel prevailed: plans to hold an inquiry were abandoned when it was decided to bring charges against those detainees believed to be implicated in the affair. No attempt was made to resuscitate Pulau Senang. Eventually the Government decided to make the ‘Isle of Ease’ a target for the bombs of the airforce and the shells of the army. Devious minds wondered if this decision was a deliberate reflection of the attitude of a wiser, more experienced, government towards the experiment that failed: an expression which said that in certain circumstances, efforts to rehabilitate can be wasteful if not useless, that some things, some people, can never be changed, and realism in the world in which we have to live, demands that when society is challenged by gangsters, domestic or international, the government of the day must be prepared, if necessary, to meet force with force.
My own view is that while this might well have been the belief of a realistic government, by now much learned in the ways of secret societies, it had nothing to do with their decision to turn Pulau Senang into a bombing and firing range. That was not meant to be a sign that the Government had forever abandoned attempts to restore gangsters to normal lives. This goes on all the time in different ways. True, Pulau Senang failed, but not all had been lost in that hour of destruction. For those concerned with the problem of rehabilitating gangsters, the island experiment must have provided much useful, if tragically costly, information, (not all of it of negative value), which need not be wasted. There will be other experiments. I refuse to believe that Daniel Dutton died in vain.
Dutton died a terrible death trying to prove that evil men could be brought back to conventional life through hard work. He did not succeed with his experiment and he paid for failure with his life. His mistake was not in his handling of the experiment so much as his inability to understand how evil some wicked men can be. Dutton took no precautions against his own idealism. Until the end he wanted desperately to believe that the better bad-men on the island would restrain the evil bad-men. He was convinced the good bad-men would stand by him, protect him. He was wrong. By believing that, Dutton signed his own death warrant. He should have known that mob hysteria causes men to sink to the lowest level, rarely to rise to the nobler levels of human behaviour.