arrack, which would be carried over the country and
exchanged for coffee. That drunkenness and poverty
would spread over the land ; that the public coffee plantations
would not be kept up ; that the quality and quantity
of the coffee would soon deteriorate ; that traders and
merchants would get rich, but that the people would relapse
into poverty and barbarism. That such is invariably
the result of free trade with any savage tribes who possess
a valuable product, native or cultivated, is well known
to those who have visited such people [ but we might even
anticipate from general principles that evil results would
happen. If there is one thing rather than another to
which the grand law of continuity or development will
apply, it is to human progress. There are certain stages
through which society must pass in its onward march
from barbarism to civilization. Now one of these stages
has always been some form or other of despotism, such as
feudalism or servitude, or a despotic paternal government;
and we have every reason to believe that it is not possible
for humanity to leap over this transition epoch, and pass
at once from pure savagery to free civilization. The Dutch
system attempts to supply this missing link, and to bring
the people on by gradual steps to that higher civilization,
which we (the English) try to force upon them at once.
Our system has always failed. We demoralize and we
extirpate, but we never really civilize. Whether the Dutch
system can permanently succeed is but doubtful, since it
may not be possible to compress the work of ten centuries
into one; but at all events it takes nature as a guide, and
is therefore more deserving of success, and more likely to
succeed, than ours.
There is one point connected with this question which I
think the Missionaries might take up with great physical
and moral results. In this beautiful and healthy country,
and with abundance of food and necessaries, the population
does not increase as it ought to do. I can only impute
this to one cause. Infant mortality, produced by neglect
while the mothers are working in the plantations, and by
general ignorance of the conditions of O © health in infants.
Women all work, as they have always been accustomed to
do. I t is no hardship to them, but I believe is often a
pleasure and relaxation. They either take their infants
with them, in which case they leave them in some shady
spot on the ground, going at intervals to give them
nourishment, or they leave them at home in the care of
other children too young to work. Under neither of these
circumstances can infants be properly attended to, and
great mortality is the result, keeping down the increase of
population far below the rate which the general prosperity
of the country and the universality of marriage would lead
us to expect. This is a matter in which the Government
is directly interested, since it is by the increase of the
D D 2