The Malay archipelago : the land of the orang-utan ... - Wallace Online

74 THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO. [chap.steady industry and the art of scientific cultivation, which mustbe of service to them in the future. It must be remembered,that tlie Government expended capital for years before anyreturn was obtained ;and if they no^y derive a lai'ge revenue, itis in a way which is far less burthensome, and far more beneficialto the people, than any tax that could be levied.But although the system may be a good one, and as w^elladapted to the development of arts and industry in a halfcivilizedpeople, as it is to the material advantage of thegoverning country, it is not pretended that in practice it isperfectly carried out. The oppressive and servile relationsbetween chiefs and people, which have continued for perhaps athousand years, cannot be at once abolished ;and some evilmust result from tliose relations, till the spread of education andthe gradual infusion of European blood causes it naturally andinsensibly to disappear. It is said that the Eesidents, desirousof showing a large increase in the products of their districts,have sometimes pressed the people to such continued labour onthe plantations that their rice crops have been materiallydiminished, and famine lias been the result. If this lias happened,it is cei'tainly not a common thing, and is to be set down to theabuse of the system, by the want of judgment or want ofhumanity in the Eesident.A tale has lately been written in Holland, and translated intoEnglish, entitled Jlax Havelaar ; or, The Coffee Avctions of the DutchTrading Cojnpamj, and with our usual one-sidedness in allrelating to the Dutch Colonial System, this work has beenexcessively praised, both for its own merits, and for its supposedcrushing exjDosure of the iniquities of the Dutch government ofJava. Greatly to my surprise, I found it a very tedious andlong-winded story, full of rambling digressions ; and whose onlypoint is to show that the Dutch Eesidents and Assistant Eesidentswink at the extortions of the native princes ; and that insome 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 interspersedwitli italics and cajDital letters ; but as the names are all fictitious,and neither dates, figures, nor details are ever given, itis impossible to verify or answer them. Even if not exaggerated,the facts stated ai-e not nearly so bad as those of the oppressionby free-trade indigo-planters, and torturing by native taxgatherersunder British rule in India, with which the readers ofEnglisli newspapers were familiar a few years ago. Such oppression,however, is not fairly to be imj^uted in either case tothe particular form of government, but is rather due to theinfii-mity of human nature, and to the impossibility of at oncedestroying all trace of ages of despotism on the one side, and ofslavish obedience to their chiefs on the other.It must be remembered, that the complete establishment ofthe Dutch power in Java is much more recent than that of our