Volledige werken. Deel 24. Brieven en dokumenten uit het jaar 1887. Nagekomen brieven en dokumenten uit de jaren 1839-1886
(1995)– Multatuli–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermdLiterature.
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Havelaar; or, The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company,’ is extraordinary, because its second half has not the remotest connection with the contents of the volume. The preface, signed Alphonse Johan Bernard Horstman Nahuijs (the name of the translator), is also extraordinary, because it likewise essentially misleads one as to the nature of the work. In it this passage occurs: - ‘This book proves that what was formerly written in “Uncle Tom's Cabin” of the cruelties perpetrated upon the slaves in America is nothing in comparison to what happens every day in the Dutch Indies.’ After this announcement, the reader goes through a series of chapters - humorous, moral, didactic, philosophic - in a state of extreme tension, and with a constant expectation of horrors that is never realised. Towards the end of the book, indeed, two or three horrors are slipped in; but in so misty and sketchy a manner that a rapid reader may easily glide past them, and have then to turn back and pick them out again. But even when he has given them his most earnest consideration, they are not good horrors; they are too vague and unsubstantial, too hastily slorred over; and, above all, they are horrors which require foot-notes, and the foot-notes are missing. Some people think that a preface should be read after one has gone through the book; but whether this preface be read before or after, it is equally incongruous. That ‘Max Havelaar’ is a novel written by one Dutchman, and translated into English by another, is sufficient to mark it as a literary curiosity. Dutch literature is not much known in Great Britain, and a Dutch novel is not suggestive of anything very playful, romantic, ecstatic, or eloquent; yet these are certainly the characteristics of the volume before us. The translation is admirably done. The English is not quite home English, but there are few mistakes and no absurdities in it; and the slight foreign flavour that hangs about it has a quaintness and spiciness of its own. Taking into account the great dissimilarity of the Dutch and English languages, it is doubtful whether any Englishman could have given so fluent and exact a version. Between the preface and the first chapter come, by way of mottoes two rather long extracts - the one in French, the other in English. The first - a quotation from Henri de Pène - may be construed to bear some relation | |
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to one of the personages in the book, but no amount of ingenuity can discover the appropriateness of the second. The true name of the author, who writes under the nom de plume of ‘Multatuli,’ is Edward Douwes Dekker; and we are informed that he was ‘for seventeen years a functionary in the service of the Dutch Government.’ A coffeebroker in Amsterdam, one Batavus Drystubble, falls in one evening in the street with an old schoolfellow in bad circumstances, who from want of a greatcoat wears a plaid about him, and whom Drystabble therefore dubs ‘Shawlman.’ We soon perceive that the Shawlman is Max Havelaar himself, Max at the end of his career; a ghostly sort of Max, who never appears in the flesh among the other actors, but whose nebulous existence is now and then alluded to. Drystubble gives the Shawlman the cold shoulder, but next morning he receives from him a bundle of manuscripts, with a request for assistance in getting them published. The packet is laid aside; however, Drystubble's children open it, and the son having been detected in the act or reciting some of the Shawlman's verses, the father thinks it necessary to investigate its contents. He does so, and to his amazement finds a marvellously miscellaneous list of essays. Some papers seem to him to bear so importantly on the coffee trade that he resolves to make a book out of them. His intention is carried out, and yet no word concerning the sale of coffee appears throughout the volume. Nevertheless, his utter silence with regard to the pretended purpose of the work is by no means inartistically managed. Drystubble not being addicted to literary pursuits, needs a collaborateur, and finds one in Stern, a sentimental young German, the son of his chief customer in Hamburg, whom he has lured into his house in the most cunning fashion. Thus the tale is told third hand, as it were; and Stern, who has stipulated for the right to do the compilation in his own way, nearly drives poor Drystubble frantic with repressed disgust at the style in which he treats the subject. This Drystubble is an exquisite creation. His humour, his pawkiness, his worldly wisdom, his very naiveté are thoroughly original and fresh. The preface tells us that it was the author's aim to make Drystubble odious. But somehow we cannot altogether detest the man, in spite of his meanness and pharisaical disposition, because | |
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he is so very entertaining, and because he has, after all, some good points about him. He is, according to his sight, a good husband and father, and he has evidently a love for order and decorum. This is how he introduces himself:- ‘I am a coffeebroker, and live at No. 37 Laurier Canal, Amsterdam. (....)’ The key to a main point in the character of Mr Douwes Dekker, alias Multatuli, alias Max Havelaar, alias Shawlman, is supplied in a subsequent sentence, where he speaks of verse as dangerous to truth. He quotes the couplet:- ‘The clock strikes four
And it rains no more.’
And adds - ‘If it is a quarter to three, then I who do not put my words in verse, can say “it is a quarter to three, and it has stopped raining”. But the rhyme, no more, is bound to say “four”. Either, the time or the weather must be changed, and a lie is the result.’ Of course the author intends this for burlesque, but his real nature peeps out here, and we catch a glimpse of the impracticability of the man. ‘Either the time or the weather must be changed, and a lie is the result.’ He can see no alternative between sacrificing the integrity of the facts and lapsing into prose; and while a more plastic mind would suggest that ‘A quarter just it wants to three, and now of rain no more we see,’ which is quite as veracious as the sample couplet, he maintains the thing can't be done, and either morality or rhyme must suffer. This inability to mould himself to circumstances is his most salient peculiarity. He seizes upon some particular aspect of a case (often an incorrect one, for he is rather apt to fancy it is still a quarter to three when it is actually striking four), and places it before you in some shape of his own. Then he believes that this matter can only be managed in the way he has discovered, that his pet evil can only be cured by his patent remedy. When we learn that a gentleman with so excitable an imagination, and so little power of adaptation, was a functionary under the Government of Dutch India - of all Governments the one most punctilious about the forms and modes of working changes - we can conceive that the gentleman and the Government would not get well on together; and we are prepared to expect that the experiences of Max Havelaar will be of a somewhat uncomfortable kind. | |
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We are first brought into contact with Max when, escorted by the Resident of Bantam, he is about to be installed in his new office of Assistant-Resident of Lebak, in the island of Java. The arrival of the party, consisting of the Resident, Mr and Mrs Havelaar, their child and servants, in the lumbering old travelling coach, and their meeting with the Dutch official and the native grandees in the temporary pendoppo, or wayside pavilion, is extremely well done. And yet the author is here guilty of a little inaccuracy, which, trivial as it may appear, is not unimportant as a test of his general correctness. He says of Mrs Havelaar that she wore in her hair ‘a garland of the melatti.’ The melatti is a white flower, with a most pungent perfume, which is often worn by the native women, and therefore never by Europeans. In another place, he speaks of the hair of a native girl, in a remote district, as hanging, black and glossy, ‘confined in a net.’ Now, no native girl ever wore her hair in a net. The Java women, however fond of variety in their costumes, are exceedingly orthodox in these things; and in no instance have they adopted any foreign innovations in their dress. Men are not expected to know much about feminine attire; but still, if a gentleman who had resided for seventeen years at Inverness (let us say) were to describe a Highland girl as concealing her looks under the graceful folds of her turban, we should feel that the powers of observation of a person capable of such an anomaly were not altogether trustworthy. We soon gather from the lips of others, and from Max's own, that he has been, ever since his youth, in the service of the Government of Dutch India; and that by some strange fatality, he has always found himself in opposition to his superiors, towards whom his relations have been of the most eccentric kind. We are also made to understand that he is gifted with almost preternatural sagacity and acumen; and before he has even crossed the boundary, he addresses certain remarks to the controller, his immediate subordinate, whereby he intimates to him that he knows more about the public and secret affairs of Lebak than does that worthy official, who has spent a great part of his life there. Max, moreover, puzzles him by asserting ‘that he is very glad there is so much poverty in the Regency.’ The meaning of this is, that he takes it for granted that the poverty must be the result of abuses, and that it is his special | |
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vocation and delight to war against abuses. He has come to the conclusion that the native chiefs are in the habit of oppressing the people, and exacting from them illegal tribute and service, and this he determines to put an end to. The day after his installation, he assembles the Regent, princes, and chiefs (all natives), and delivers to them an oration, which he evidently considers a grand, wild, pathetic sort of appeal to their innermost consciences. But to any one who knows Java well, this high-flown speech is utterly misplaced and wasted. The Javanese grandees are quiet intelligent men, exceedingly ceremonieus and courteous, gentle and kind, shrewd and sly, and with a chuckling appreciation of a joke. Of sentiment they have not the smallest grain in their whole composition; and if one whishes to influence them in any way, instead of soaring into poetry and taking large views of things, it is necessary to set the matter before them under its most common-sense aspect, and to confine the question to its narrowest limits. They love hard facts, details, and minutiae; and to invoke them with theories and lofty moralities would be worse than useless. It is no good making general demands on them; one must condescend to particulars, and then with patience and justice one may hope to effect one's end. The author, with nice modesty, observes that Max Havelaar's manner of speaking may not be deemed indisputably original, as his language may remind the reader of the prophets of the Old Testament, and he excuses this on the ground that Max was himself something of a seer. But he forgets that prophets rose from among their own people and addressed those whose natures, experiences, and traditions were in a great degree similar to their own. Having beheld Max in the attitude of a prophet, we next make his acquaintance as a conversationalist, and listen with pleasure to his after-dinner talk, which is both lively and interesting, though marked by that oddity, one-aidedness, and perversity, which seem inherent to everything he says and does. Then comes the famous story of Saidja and the Buffaloes - showing how three buffaloes in succession were taken from Saidja's father by a native chief, and how this loss results, amongst other catastrophes, in madness, in a highly romantic love affair (involving the most impassioned fidelity during a three-years separation, throughout which period the lovers never communicate), and, finally, in the | |
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death of all the personages concerned in the tale. Now, the whole tone of this story is false. The Javanese, as before stated, have not a vestige of sentiment, and their courtships are entirely devoid of romance. The marriage preliminaries are of the simplest and most practical kind, and (except in the case of mere children) are seldom prolonged beyond the time actually required for preparing the wedding ceremonies. Although very affectionate, they are altogether wanting in constancy; the dead are never mentioned by them, and the absent are speedily forgotten. They never make plans for a far future, tor neither a far future nor a distant past exists for them. They live so entirely for the moment, that they keep no count of their own years, and a mother cannot tell you reliably the age of her child if it has passed beyond infancy. The author himself says that it may be objected ‘that he has idealised Saidja too much,’ that the Soundanese do not sing such songs, do not love so, do not feel thus; but he asks ‘Should you dare to pretend that you may steal buffaloes of men who do not love, who do not sing melancholy songs, who are not sentimental?’ This is very unfair treatment. First to harrow us with esthetical soul-sufferings, and then to turn round and demand whether, even if the man be not such as he is depicted, it would be right to steal his buffaloes? Why not keep purely to the buffalostealing, and rest upon the merits of the case, without introducing any unveracious elements into it? It is quite permissible for a narrator who desires to bring out an evil strongly to heap upon his victim every misery that could possibly ensue from such wrong; but it is not allowable to inflict upon him woes which, from his nature and condition, he would be incapable of experiencing. For instance, a counsel, in claiming damages from a railway company on behalf of a ploughboy, would be quite justified in dwelling on every potential hardship that might arise from the accident; but he could hardly sustain that, from the shattered state of his client's system, he would be unable to listen with enjoyment to the reading of Greek and Latin verses, and that a false quantity might have a most injurious effect on his nervous sensibilities. Besides, there should be some proportion between cause and consequence, and when a series of such tragical misfortunes are arrayed before us, we come to look upon the taking of two or three buffaloes- | |
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- the original source of all the disasters - as a rather paltry affair, and more especially so as the manner of taking them is barely explained, and no stress whatever is laid on it. And, lastly, the author has not shown good policy in letting us feel that in his descriptions of life in so remote a country, neither his colouring nor his keeping is true. The reader who is wandering with him into a land with which he is so little acquainted, will soon place implicit confidence in his guide, or will mistrust him altogether. He does not like being bewildered betwixt artistic effects and unknown realities; and when he perceives that a portion of the picture is unnatural, he begins to doubt the verisimilitude of the whole. The author, in his own interest, should have confined himself to ordinary and frequent occurences, and should have endeavoured to place both persons and incidents before us as simply and faithfully as he could. We must here notice an accusation which, in the earlier part of the book, is brought against the Dutch Government. It is reproached with encouraging the growth of coffee and sugar at the expense of the cultivation of rice, whereby it is calculated that famines are occasioned:- ‘Famine? In Java, the rich and fertile, famine? Yes reader, a few years ago whole districts were depopulated by famine. Mothers offered to sell their children for food, mothers ate their own children.’ Here a foot note is imperativaly needed, but it is not the absence of one which emboldens us to declare this passage a great exaggeration. Children are not saleable commodity in Java and in time of famine they would be even less marketable than at other seasons. Of course, at rare intervals, a partial failure of crope may occur; and if this should happen in an isolated district, to which means of transport are difficult, much privation must result, although abundance might reign all over the rest of the island. We, who have had our little Balaclava tribulations, can understand the distress implied by an impassible road, though that road should lead to the very storehouses of the world. Were a dearth of rice to come about in any inaccessible locality in Java, severe suffering must necessarily follow; still absolute starvation would be almost impossible, for nourishing fruits and others esculents flourish in profusion everywhere; and as the Government would rapidly | |
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take every step that humanity can suggest, relief would arrive before any region could be depopulated. And though the author complains of the cultivation of coffee and sugar as an injury done to the natives, yet, as Max Havelaar, he remarks that the poverty of the Regency of Lebak is so great because only rice is grown there, and no coffee or sugar. Max, as we have seen, had rejoiced at the poverty of the people, and had expressed his hope of remaining a long time in Lebak. But he begins his crusade against the abuses, which to him appear so enormous, with such fervour and with such a conviction that things can only be set right in one way - that way being his own - that he soon finds himself plunged in a sea of troubles, incurs the displeasure of the Resident and the censure of the Governor-General, and in a few months his brief reign is over, and he quits the scene and the civil service for ever. We have seen how Max, even before he crossed the frontiers of the Lebak Regency, had decided in his own mind that the inhabitants were oppressed by the native chiefs, and that these were extorting undue service and payments. He is therefore always willing to listen to secret complaints brought by the Lebakers against the Regent and other chiefs. They creep in at his back-door in the evening, and make their communications most circumstantially; but next day, when confronted with the Regent (native Prince), they invariably revoke their declarations, whereby the Assistant-Resident is placed in an awkward dilemma, and he is, moreover, disturbed by this consideration:- ‘And, above all, what became of these poor plaintiffs after they had returned to their village, under the power of the village chief, whom they had accused as the instrument of the Regent's arbitrariness? He who could fly, fled. But not every one could fly. The man whose corpse floats down the river in the morning, after having asked the foregoing evening - secretly, hesitatingly, and anxiously - for an audience of the Assistant-Resident, he needs flight no more.... Was it not indeed better to prevent that man from returning the next day to that Assistant-Resident, as he had given notice in the evening, and to smother his complaint in the yellow water of the Tzi-berany, that would carry him away softly to its mouth, accustomed as that river was to be bearer of | |
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the brotherly presents of salutation from the sharks in the interior to the sharks in the sea?’ It is most reprehensible of a man to put forth to the world such statements as these, without a shadow of proof, or even of reasonable inference. It is extremely dishonest, because the more vague and loose such an assertion, the more difficult it is to refute. The Javanese are a highly moral and very peaceable people, and with them crimes of violence are exceedingly infrequent. Still, with them, as with us, corpses are occasionally found in the rivers; but the assumption that they are the bodies of persons made away with, lest they might give a petty piece of information to some placid Dutch official, is, to any one acquainted with Java, intensely absurd. By-and-by, Max scents out another atrocity, and comes to the conclusion that his predecessor, the Assistant Resident of Lebak (the reader will please remember that Lebak is the real name of the Regency, and that all the places mentioned are genuine), had died by poison. He requests the physician of Serang, who had attended Slotering, the previous Assistant-Resident, in his fatal illness, to send him an account of the symptoms. According to the doctor, Slotering had died of ‘an abscess in the liver.’ ‘The doctor who treated Slotering may have been a skilful physician, and yet have been mistaken in his judgment of the symptoms of the disease, unprepared as he was to suspect crime. However this may be, I cannot prove that Havelaar's predecessor was poisoned, because Havelaar was not allowed time to clear up the matter, but I can prove that every one believed in the poisoning, and that this was suspected on account of his desire to oppose injustice.’ Here again we see how prone Multatuli is to believe iniquities, and how dangerous it would be to accept his testimony on such subjects. There is amongst Europeans in Java a kind of superstition as to the deaths by poisoning, which is easily explained by the variety of vegetable poisons within reach of every one, and by the rabid, sometimes sudden, action of disease in that insidious climate; and yet an eminent medical man, who had spent the greater part of his life in the island, declared that in the whole course of his long experience he had never seen any case of wilful poisoning. In | |
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the East, the imagination is apt to get excited by the natural perils by which one is ever surrounded; and when the faculty for constant apprehension has once set in, tame realities soon pall upon it, and it seeks the stimulus of fanciful terrors. So that there circumstantial evidence must be sifted even more carefully than with us, since in every one there exists a predisposition to credit all that is horrible of dreadful. Max now takes the step which brings his career to an abrupt termination - namely, he writes to the Resident of Bantam a letter, of which this passage wil show the purport:- ‘I accuse the Regent of Lebak, Raden Adhipatti, Karta Natta Negara, of abuse of power, by disposing unlawfully of the labour of his subordinates, and suspect him of extortion while exacting productions in natura, without payment or for prices arbitrarily fixed.’ And he requires of the Resident that he shall at once take the Regent captive, and convey him to Serang, without permitting him to communicate with any one, under the plea that he would otherwise tamper with those who might bear witness against him. The Resident is perfectly aghast at this proposal to remove the old Regent, who is regarded with reverential awe by the natives. Such an indignity to their Prince would arouse their deapest resentment, and probably cause an insurrection. So the Resident, by interviews and correspondence, tries to prevail on Max to withdraw his demand; but Max is obstinate, and the affair has to be referred to the Governor-General. Nearly a month elapses before his answer is received; and meanwhile, the Regent, who is, of course, completely ignorant of the war waging against him, writes a letter to Max, which Havelaar shows to his wife:- ‘Look, in this letter he dares to make me proposals about the kind of labour which he intends to have done by men whom he has summoned unlawfully.... Is not that shamelessness going too far? And do you know who these persons are? They are women - women with little children! There are no more men! And they have nothing to eat; and they sleep on the road, and eat sand!... Can you eat sand?’ Mrs Havelaar must have been a lady of very passive temperament, and with very little turn for inquiry; for she makes no | |
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remark upon this startling information, nor does she put a question as to how it was obtained. But though Max's wife was so readily satisfied, he must not expect others to endure the same tax on their credulity. It would be somewhat difficult to make us believe that in Java, the land of universal plenty, and with the kindliest inhabitants, where not a single beggar can be found, people sit down by the wayside to eat sand. A Javanese would never refuse food and shelter to any suppliant, because both are so very easily procured that their good nature is not often put to the test; while the comfort in which they keep the old and the blind (of which latter there are great numbers) shows how lightly such burdens rest upon them. When, therefore, Max talks to us about ‘people eating sand by the roadside’ we feel that he has altogether lost his balance, and that his utterances are mere rhapsody, and what little faith we had in him as an exposer of grievances from this moment completely dies out. Towards the end of the month comes the Governor-General's letter of dismissal, full of severe rebuke. However he offers Max ‘the temporary appointment of Assistant-Resident of Ngawie,’ adding, ‘on your behaviour in this office, it will entirely depend whether you remain a functionary in the service of the Government.’ But Max declines it, sends in his resignation, and goes up to Batavia with his wife and child; and there seeks an interview with the Governor-General for the purpose of justifying his conduct. The Governor, who is on the eve of his departure for Europe, refuses to see him; so Max, unable to reach him in any other way, assails him with a violently abusive letter, of which this is the concluding paragraph:- ‘If your Excellency can reconcile it with your conscience to depart form here without hearing me, mine will be quiet in the persuasion that I have endeavoured all that I could to prevent the sad bloody events which will soon be the consequence of the self-willed ignorance in which the Government is left as regards the population.’ As this letter is dated 1856, and as up to the present moment the most unbroken tranquillity and prosperity have continued to prevail throughout the island, it would seem as if the republication of his document must somewhat damage Max's pretensions to prophetic gifts. What came of this last attempt he tells us in a few words:- | |
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‘His hope was vain. The Governor-General departed without having heard Havelaar..... Another Excellency had retired to the mother-country to rest! Havelaar wandered about poor and neglected. He cought...’- Here Multatuli steps in, and, taking up the pen in proper person, dashes off three or four pages of incoherent frenzy, which it would be useless to analyse. The book we are about to lay aside has remarkable literary merits, and possesses the rare attributes of originality and genius; but it is full of fallacies and misrepresentations, and in order that the reader may judge of those for himself, it will be necessary to place before him a few observations on the actual state of matters in Java. The population of Java is estimated at 14,000.000 natives and about 30,000 Europeans. The King of Holland is represented by a Governor-General, who is assisted by a Counsel of four members. The administration is carried on by two parallel chains of officials - the one native, the other European - who co-operate with each other in all things. The European makes known to his native colleague the commands and wishes of the Government, and the native official then causes them to be put into execution. Thus the people never receive any direct order except from their own princes and nobility, for it is these who are appointed to office. It may easily be conceived how much more lightly the yoke will sit on a conquered nation when its immediate rulers are still its own chiefs to whom it has owed allegiance from time immemorial. Never has a Government shown greater consideration, benevolence, and tenderness towards the more helpless portion of its subjects than has the Dutch Government towards the Javanese. Their welfare and interests are most carefully provided for, their religion, habits, tastes, and traditions are respected, and their very prejudices are left unmolested. It is impressed upon every European that he must bear himself with all courtesy and deference to the natives of the higher classes, and with all equity and gentleness to those of the lower classes. No breach of these two precepts would be tolerated for an instant if discovered, and heavy disgrace would fall on the offender. Every one visiting the colony must be struck by the wonderful goodwill existing be- | |
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tween the Dutch and the Javanese of all conditions. This goodwill is not merely the result of policy nor even of philanthropy, but is largely due to a natural harmony between the characters of the two races. They have many qualities in common; both have an intense love for cleanliness, and a great regard for form and ceremony; both are (though not in an equal degree) phlegmatic, leisurely, shrewd, and practical. Then they mutually admire each other, the Javanese admire the Dutch for their wisdom, knowledge, experience, and skill; and the Dutch admire the Javanese for their amiability, grace, and dexterity. Their relations towards each other are invariably pleasant and friendly, being free from either tyranny or servility; and a Javanese, of whatever class, feels himself infinitely more at ease in the presence of a European than in that of any native superior. The Dutch, who are capital linguists, speedily acquire the soft musical Malay, and most of them speak it almost as fluently as their mother tongue. This enables them to become intimately acquainted with the ways of thought of those by whom they are surrounded, and to communicate freely with them on all topics. The Government has, therefore, without much trouble ensured perfect peace and amity between its Dutch and its Javanese subjects, but the position of the chiefs to the natives must originally have been a graver source of anxiety. When the Dutch conquered Java, they found there a kind of feudal system which had probably been in force for countless centuries. The native princes and chiefs were almost the sole proprietors of the soil, and they let the lands to the peasants, taking in payment one-fifth of the produce and one day in five of every man's labour. The Dutch, on becoming possessors of the island, arrogated to themselves the rights formerly enjoyed by the chiefs, but modified the labour-rent from one day in five to one day in seven. So now the peasant who settles on the Crown lands has assigned to him a piece of ground proportionate to the number of his family, the allotments being revised yearly; and in return he has to give one-fifth of the produce and one day's work in seven. What would an agricultural labourer at home say if he could rent a farm amply sufficient to maintain his family merely by working one day a-week for his landlord and delivering to him a fifth of his crop! Moreover, in Java, only the head of the family is required to | |
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give his labour; and if he has many sons, they can in turn relieve him of the task; or it very often happens that a certain number of men will agree to perform the duty for the whole village, receiving proper remuneration from those whom they accommodate. The feu-labour, besides being devoted to the cultivation of the soil, is availed of for the erection of buildings, for the construction of roads and harbours and public works generally, and has been turned to excellent account in the formation of what may be called an endless police force, which is wonderfully effective and complete. At short intervals are little gardes or watch-houses, in which both day and night is stationed a watchman, each one remaining twelve hours at its post. The numbers of the police are so great, and their days of duty so wide apart and irregular, that collusion between a watchman and a criminal is nearly impossible; and as any transgression or negligence of a watchman would bring discredit on the village chief, it is the interest of the latter to take care that his subordinates shall exercise due vigilance. Each guard is provided with a tom-tom, by means of which any occurrence can be signalled, the rapidity or slowness of the strokes proclaiming the nature of the catastrophe not only to the neighbouring watchman, but to all the inhabitants. The watchman is likewise bound to strike every hour on his tom-tom; and though this chorus of wooden timepieces sounds rather odd, yet one soon perceives how ingenious is this precaution against the tendency to drowsiness, which is the weak point of every native. The proximity of the watch-houses renders it difficult for crime to escape detection, whilst aggressive espionage is altogether avoided. The Dutch Government, when it assumed the privileges which the chiefs had formerly enjoyed, determined to indemnify them for what it had taken from them, and in so doing displayed a liberality and far-sightedness which have had the happiest results. All the princes and great chiefs who had formerly held power were transformed into officials with magnificent salaries and appointments, and they constitute the executive branch of the government, with the co-operation and under the guidance of the European civil servants, who stand between them and the Head of the State, but never between them and their quondam native subjects. The highest office a native prince can hold is that of | |
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Regent, and when the Government has elected him to it, it generally becomes hereditary, though it need not necessarily pass to the son; for, should he be incapable, it is conferred on another member of the family. The same rule obtains with all the other offices down to the three lowest. They are all in the gift of the Government, and as their continued possession depends on its pleasure, whilst removal from them entails the loss of everything - revenue, authority, and distinction - a tremendous stimulus is offered to the native official to perform his functions with intelligence, activity, and justice. The amount of zeal, promptness, and energy thus developed is almost incredible in a race naturally so indolent. It is not confined to the officials only, for as every relative of an employé may hope to become his successor would he surpass the son in ability, much ambition and emulation are aroused, and the influence of the system penetrates to every grade of the community and has already operated a most beneficial change in the Javanese character. The Government has always done everything to preserve the deep respect and consideration in which the princes and chiefs are held by the natives, but at the same time it has exerted itself with all its might to abolish and prevent extortion and oppression. The means taken to accomplish this end is another proof of that sagacity and acuteness which the dutch reveal not only in their larger schemes, but in the elaboration of every detail. As just mentioned, every appointment is in the gift of the Government except the three lowest, two of which are in the hands of the chiefs and one in these of the people, though the salaries of all are derived from the State. The chiefs themselves choose the Wedono and the Mantri, but the village-chief is chosen by the peasants, and he is elected for one year only. Now, as every order to a native must be transmitted from the official who gives it down through the whole scale to the village chief, it follows that the peasants are in direct communication with him only, and as his sole chance of re-election rests on their goodwill, it is essentially his interest to resist being made an instrument of injustice. In order that he may be able te oppose any pressure that might be put on him by those above him, there is a European official - the controller - whose duty it is to visit every village in his circuit once or more in the month, and to listen to any com- | |
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plaint from the chief or the villagers. In very remote districts abuses may still occasionally take place, but their occurence must be owing to the stupidity and apathy of the natives, and not to the indifference of the Government, which has not only provided them with the most perfect machinery for protection and redress, but is ever on the watch to guard them against wrongs. Mr Dekker complains of it as a bitter grievance that the Dutch have induced the Javanese to cultivate coffee, sugar, &c, instead of leaving them to grow rice only. He maintains that, as the natives consume nothing but rice, it can be no gain to them to produce anything else. It is hardly needful to point out how narrow and unreasonable is his view. Rice is one of the least profitable articles of export, on account of its bulk; so that a people who have nothing but rice to exchange must always be poor. The poverty of the people would prevent the making of roads and the supply of means of transport; and the more inaccessible the country, the greater the likelihood of starvation from partial failure of crops. Consequently, growing too much rice would be one of the readiest causes of famine. The wages of the rice-grower must of necessity be small, and would hardly do more than secure him food; while the remuneration of a man engaged in raising a more valuable crop - such as coffee or sugar - would be three or four times as great, and he would have something left to buy iron for his cart-wheels, cotton for his clothing, and many useful tools and implements. But argument about the culture system, as the cultivation of coffee, sugar, &c, in Java is called, is useless when one or two facts can be shown which speak so eloquently in themselves that expatiation is superfluous. The culture system was introduced in the year 1830, and the population of Java was then about 6,000,000; now it is about 14,000,000. The gross revenue in 1830 was about £2,000,000; now it is nearly £12,000,000. In 1830, the imports were £166,000; now they are nearly £6,000,000. In 1830, the exports were £2,000,000; now they are nearly £9,000,000. Notwithstanding the enormous increase of the population, and the appropriation of much of the land to other crops, rice is still exported from Java, and none whatever is imported; and, lastly, the prosperity of the peasantry is now so great, so general, and so equable, that there are few corners of the earth where it can be rivalled. |
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