Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 want of judgment or want of humanity in the Resident.
A tale has lately been written in Holland, and translated into English, entitled 'Max Have-
laar; 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 in-
firmity 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 un-
der the rule of their native princes, that it is not easy at once to destroy the excessive rever-
ence 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 begin-
ning of the century it was estimated at 3,500,000. In 1850, when the cultivation system had
been in operation eighteen years, the population by census was over 9,500,000, or an in-
