gins already to press on the good land, the cultivator
exercises no such rights over the soil, and I
hardly know any privilege which he possesses in
regard to it, except the liberty of abandoning it.
Under governments so arbitrary as those of the
Indian islands, it would be idle to speak of a private
right of property in the soil,—the most tangible
of all sources of revenue, and that most invariably
within the grasp of an absolute sovereign.
A bare establishment of the amount of the peasant’s
tenement, which never exceeds the little spot which
he and his family are capable of labouring with their
own hands, and which never increases or accumulates
beyond it, is quite conclusive on this subject.
Had an actual right of property existed, we should,
.without doubt, find estates of some magnitude in
private hands, accumulated by industry, or acquired
by violence. No such estates are found to exist.
The unbounded influence of arbitrary power obliterates
all private or minor rights.
With all the rudeness, barbarism, and despotism
which characterize the governments of the Indian
islands, the condition of the peasant or cultivator
is perhaps, upon the whole, more fortunate than in
any other country of the east. This advantage
arises mainly from two causes,—the competition for
cultivators and for labour in general, in countries
where an extraordinary quantity of good land is
still unoccupied,—and the habits and character of
the people themselves, who, from the simplicity of
their manners, to give it no higher name, are,
when placed in authority, fortunately incapable of
practising those refined arts of extortion, chicane,
and knavery, with which we are so familiar in
the people of Hindustan. The fiscal agents either
want the skill or have not the inclination to meddle
in the details of the revenue. The village
associations are, therefore, left to manage it themselves
; and the share of the government is paid
by them with good faith, while all classes observe
towards each other a great share of forbearance.
The high price of labour, and the extraordinary
demand for cultivators, is strikingly exemplified in
the wages paid to shearers, which, in every part of
Java, is no less than one-sixth of the gross produce,
a rate continued even in the most populous provinces
of the island, where the competition for labour
is necessarily smaller, such among these people
is the influence of the empire of custom.
The whole of this subject will be better understood
by presenting at once a short sketch of the division
of the crop and of the internal organization of
the village in regard to it, selecting, for an example
the institutions of the Javanese, as not only those
with which I am myself most familiar, but those,
too, which ai’e acknowledged in matters of this nature
to be most systematically defined. In Java, the
lands are separately tilled by each cultivator, and
not in common, as is frequently the case in the