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 there have been several changes of government, and in the mode of
raising revenue. The inhabitants have been so recently under the rule
of their native princes, that it is not easy at once to destroy the
excessive reverence they feel for their old masters, or to diminish the
oppressive exactions which the latter have always been accustomed to
make. There is, however, one grand test of the prosperity, and even
of the happiness, of a community, which we can apply here--the rate of
increase of the population.
It is universally admitted that when a country increases rapidly in
population, the people cannot be very greatly oppressed or very badly
governed. The present system of raising a revenue by the cultivation of
coffee and sugar, sold to Government at a fixed price, began in 1832.
Just before this, in 1826, the population by census was 5,500,000, while
at the beginning of the century it was estimated at 3,500,000. In 1850,
when the cultivation system had been in operation eighteen years, the
population by census was over 9,500,000, or an increase of 73 per
cent in twenty-four years. At the last census, in 1865, it amounted to
14,168,416, an increase of very nearly 50 per cent in fifteen years--a
rate which would double the population in about twenty-six years. As
Java (with Madura) contains about 38,500 geographical square miles, this
will give an average of 368 persons to the square mile, just double that
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