no longer add to the number of his children, for a younger and
stronger wife? This profitable barter, too, need cost him but a trifle.

This exchange of wives has even a more demoralizing tendency than the
practice of polygamy itself, which luxury only those can participate in
whose salary is at least fifteen florins per month.

The results of the sinful practice of polygamy, especially for the
children and consequently for the state, would be less sad to
contemplate, were it not that the polygamist exchanges his wife as
readily for another as he who can afford but one wife at a time.

It is scarcely necessary for me to enumerate here the effects of this
evil of which the wife is the victim.

This much-loved evil is a strong bulwark against the spread of the
ethics of Christianity.

A second and a very powerful opponent of mission work is found in the
peculiar Mohammedan village organization, in which the Moslem sheikh or
spiritual leader plays the most important role.

Another peculiarity of Islam here, is the fact that the inland
population and the millions of inhabitants who live in the lowlands of
Java are peculiarly interrelated and mutually dependent. Only in a few
of the larger towns in Java do we find the trades practised.

The villager is a farmer, and since rice is the chief article of food
and this must be raised by irrigation channels in a hilly country like
Java, the villagers are, as a matter of course, compelled to live at
peace with one another, becoming interdependent through the production
of the staff of life.

A Moslem family that becomes Christian soon experiences deprivation. The
so-called "silent power" soon makes its influence felt, ostracising them
from every privilege.

This becomes the more easy to understand when we remember that the
division of the cultivable soil and of the water supply with all other
civil rights and privileges, are entrusted by Dutch law to the
Mohammedan village government, in which the Moslem sheikh or priest
enjoys an ex-officio vote.

Because of this peculiar condition of life in the East Indies, the
writer and other missionaries in Java have purposely settled in an
inland district in the very midst of the Mohammedan population, where
those families who have embraced Christianity may gather about the
mission centre and gradually form a nucleus (in course of time a village
or town), where independent legal privileges may be enjoyed and the
people ruled ove