the advice and obey
the orders of the Dutch residents, they remain the highest personages
in the native world and the intermediaries through whom Holland
transmits her wishes and orders to the native population.

In order to lend color to the fiction that the natives are still ruled
by their own princes, the regents are provided with the means to keep
up a considerable degree of ceremony and pomp; they have their
opera-bouffe courts, their gorgeously uniformed body-guards, their
gilded carriages and golden parasols, and some of the more important
ones maintain enormous households. But, though they preside at
assemblies, sign decrees, and possess all the other external attributes
of power, in reality they only go through the motions of governing, for
always behind their gorgeous thrones sits a shrewd and silent Dutchman
who pulls the strings. Though this system of dual government has the
obvious disadvantage of being both cumbersome and expensive, it is,
everything considered, perhaps the best that could have been devised to
meet the existing conditions, for nothing is more certain than that,
should the Dutch attempt to do away with the native princes, there
would be a revolt which would shake the Insulinde to its foundations
and would gravely imperil Dutch domination in the islands.

The most interesting examples of this system of dual administration are
found in the _Vorstenlanden_, or "Lands of the Princes," of Surakarta
and Djokjakarta, in Middle Java. These two principalities, which once
comprised the great empire of Mataram, are nominally independent, being
ostensibly ruled by their own princes: the Susuhunan of Surakarta and
the Sultan of Djokjakarta, who are, however, despite their
high-sounding titles and their dazzling courts, but mouthpieces for the
Dutch residents. The series of episodes which culminated in the Dutch
acquiring complete political ascendency in the _Vorstenlanden_ form one
of the most picturesque and significant chapters in the history of
Dutch rule in the East. Until the last century these territories were
undivided, forming the kingdom of the Susuhunan of Surakarta, who,
being threatened by a revolt of the Chinese who had settled in his
dominions, called in the Dutch to aid him in suppressing it. They came
promptly, helped to crush the rebellion, and so completely won the
confidence of the Susuhunan that he begged their arbitration in a
dispute with one of his brothers, who had launched an i