nation already possessing irresistible military strength, the elements of naval power together with a ready-made Oriental empire. It is at least a possible event, and would threaten our Asiatic dominion with the most serious danger to which it can be exposed, the presence of a formidable maritime rival in Asiatic waters. Whether Java and the rest of Netherlands India would benefit by a change which would abolish the trade monopoly of Holland, and throw open the extensive markets of central Europe to the coffee, sugar, and spices of the Malay archipelago, is a consideration not likely to affect the settlement of the matter to any important extent.
The two special characteristics of Dutch administration in Java are the culture system, and the employment of native chiefs in the public service. The culture system was established by General Van den Bosch in 1832, at a period of chronic deficit and threatened insolvency, and resulted in a regular annual surplus. During the generation which witnessed the conversion of a heavy annual deficit into a surplus of three millions sterling, the population of Java doubled itself. The system which produced these astonishing results required the compulsory cultivation by the people of certain valuable products, to be delivered at a low fixed price to the government, who sold them in Europe at an enormous profit. The products so cultivated were those calculated to command the highest prices in the home market, and included originally coffee, sugar, tea, tobacco, indigo, pepper, and cochineal. After a time, it was found expedient to limit the employment of forced labor to the cultivation of coffee and sugar only, and by recent act of the Netherlands legislature the compulsory production of sugar will cease in 1890. The profits made by the government upon this system are so great, that two-thirds of the Java revenue, i.e., nearly seven millions sterling, are annually derived from the sale of colonial produce. Formerly the coffee which each cultivator was bound to deliver was all grown upon special plots of public land, often at a distance from the village, to the great inconvenience of the people. Now the government coffee is chiefly cultivated by each man at his own door, within the village limits, and as the fixed price payable on delivery has been considerably raised, little pressure is necessary in order to insure the cultivation indeed, I was assured by one of the principal Dutch coffee-planters, that a slight additional increase in price would fairly compensate the villager. The material condition of the Javanese peasant has improved under the culture system, which involves no serious hardship in its present modified form; he is obliged to work, no doubt, when he would prefer to be dozing; but he obtains with little trouble a crop which enables him to clear off all his government dues. He has a sure market for his coffee, and although the price fixed may be rather low, it is payable on delivery; whereas if he were free to dispose of his crop as he pleased it might be discounted and made over, before it was gathered, to the Chinese money-lenders, to whom the Javanese is only too ready to mortgage his future earnings.
On the other hand the operation of the culture system, under which a percentage is received by high officials upon the products salable in Europe delivered by them into the government stores, has a tendency to reduce the cultivation of rice in certain districts, and has even produced at times a serious scarcity. Instructions were consequently issued to all residents in charge of provinces to send in monthly reports to government of the amount of rice exported and imported inter-provincially, as distinguished from the rice exported out of, or imported into, the island of Java. The published reports show how little reliance can be placed upon statistics collected by persons interested in obtaining a particular result. Internal traffic only is included in these tables, and the aggregate exports and imports ought therefore to balance each other, but the provinces altogether return many thousand pikols[1] of rice as exported in excess of the amount returned as imported. It was the interest of the native officers in each residency to make it appear as if their particular province produced a surplus of food, and these self-contradictory returns have been adduced by opponents of the colonial government to show that official reports in Java are apt to state merely what may seem agreeable to the authorities at home.
Although salt and opium are the only government monopolies recognized by the Dutch in Java, the culture system has given them, for more than forty years, a practical monopoly of the most valuable colonial products, and has been the mainspring of their financial prosperity. Another successful stroke of policy has been their maintenance in working order of the
- ↑ Pikol = 133 lbs.
