tort all in the reports to the Government? What, for instance, is to be expected of a population that, from its nature mild and submissive, has complained, year after year, of tyranny, when it sees the departure of one Resident after another, on furlough or on half-pay, or called to another office, without anything ever being done towards the redress of the grievances under which it bows? Will not the bent bow rebound? Will not the long suppressed discontent—suppressed in order to be able to deny it—be furned at last into fury, despair, frenzy? Cannot you see the Jacquerie at the end of all this?
And where will the functionaries then be that succeeded each other for years, without ever having had the idea that there existed anything higher than the “favour of the Government,” anything higher than the “satisfaction of the Governor General?” Where will they be then, those insipid report-writers, that blindfold the eyes of the Government by their untruths? Shall those who before lacked the courage to put a manly word on paper, fly to arms and preserve for Holland the Dutch possessions? Will they give back to Holland the treasures that will be required to stamp out revolt, to prevent revolution? And finally, will they give back life to the thousands that have fallen through their fault?
And those functionaries, those Controllers and Residents, are not the most guilty. It is the Government itself which, as it were, struck with incomprehensible blindness, invites,
