appear. It is said that the Residents, desirous of showing
a large increase in the products of their districts, have
sometimes pressed the people to such continued labour on
the plantations that their rice crops have been materially
diminished, and famine has been the result. If this has
happened, it is certainly not a common thing, and is to be
set down to the abuse of the system, by the wTant of judgment
or want of humanity in the Resident.
A tale has lately been written in Holland, and translated
into English, entitled “ Max Havelaar; or, the
Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company,” and
with our usual one-sidedness in all relating to the Dutch
Colonial System, this work has been excessively praised,
both for its own merits, and for its supposed crushing
exposure of the iniquities of the Dutch government of
Java. Greatly to my surprise, I found it a very tedious
and long-winded story, full of rambling digressions ; and
whose only point is to show that the Dutch Residents
and Assistant Residents wink at the extortions of the
native princes ; and that in some districts the natives
have to do work without payment, and have their goods
taken away from them without compensation. Every
statement of this kind is thickly interspersed with italics
and capital letters; but as the names are all fictitious, and
neither dates, figures, nor details are ever given, it is impossible
to verify or answer them. Even if not exaggerated,
the facts stated are not nearly so bad as those of the
oppression by free-trade indigo-planters, and torturing by
native tax-gatherers under British rule in India, with which
the readers of English newspapers were familiar a few
years ago. Such oppression, however, is not fairly to be
imputed in either case to the particular form of government,
but is rather due to the infirmity of human nature,
and to the impossibility of at once destroying all trace
of ages of despotism on the one side, and of slavish
obedience to their chiefs on the other.
It must be remembered, that the complete establishment
of the Dutch power in Java is much more recent than
that of our rule in India, and that there have been several
changes of government, and in the mode t o o ' of raising revenue.
i The inhabitants have been so recently under the rule of
I their native princes, that it is not easy at once to destroy
the excessive reverence they feel for their old masters, or
to diminish the oppressive exactions which the latter have
always been accustomed to make. There is, however, one
grand test of the prosperity, and even of the happiness,
of a community, Avhich we can apply here—the rate of
increase of the population.
It is universally admitted, that when a country increases
rapidly in population, the people cannot be very greatly
oppressed or very badly governed. The present system of
raising a revenue by the cultivation of coffee and sugar,