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 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 increase of 73 per
cent in twenty-four years.
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