ried out. The oppressive and servile
relations between chiefs and people, which have continued for perhaps a
thousand years, cannot be at once abolished; and some evil must result
from those relations, until the spread of education and the gradual
infusion of European blood causes it naturally and insensibly to
disappear. It is said that the Residents, desirous of showing a large
increase in the products of their districts, have sometimes pressed the
people to such continued labour on the plantations that their rice crops
have been materially diminished, and famine has been the result. 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 the