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 want 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 of raising revenue. The
inhabitants have been so recently under the rule of 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, which 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, sold to
Government at a fixed price, began in 1832. Just before this, in 1826, the
population by census was 5,500,000, while at the beginning of the century it was