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the people would still be savages. He knows very well that free trade would, as its first res-
ult, lead to the importation of whole cargoes of 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 civil-
ization. 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 be-
lieve 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 suc-
ceed 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 health in infants.
Women all work, as they have always been accustomed to do. It 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 population alone that there can be any large and permanent increase in the produce of
