Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/404

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Max Havelaar
385

for thoughts—bread perhaps in exchange for labour with spade or wheelbarrow, if the strength of my arm is approved more than that of my soul.

“But I cannot and will not believe that your opinion is shared by his Excellency the Governor-General, and I am therefore compelled, before I pass to the bitter extreme of what I wrote in the last paragraph, to beg you respectfully to propose to the Government:

“To order the Resident of Bantam to approve so far the transactions of the Assistant Resident of Lebak, including his letters of the 24th and 25th inst., Nos. 88 and 91;—

“Or:

“To call the above-mentioned Assistant Resident to account on the points of disapprobation to be given by the Resident of Bantam.

“I have, finally, the honour to give you the grateful assurance that if anything could bring me back from my long calculated, and calm but fervently adhered to principles in this,—it would have been indeed the polite, engaging manner in which you, at the meeting of the day before yesterday, opposed those principles.—The Assistant Resident of Lebak,

(Signed) “Max Havelaar.

Without deciding as to the correctness of the suspicions of Slotering’s widow, concerning the cause which made her children orphans, and only accepting what may be

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