Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/16

Rh than over a tissue of injustices to their neighbours and kin in the Netherlands.

Holland—so runs the European legend—has been engaged in war against Acheh for a period which has extended to about thirty years without having led to the subjugation of that native kingdom. Shaking their heads solemnly over it, many learned people outside the frontiers of Holland see in this worthy fable—to which naturally they do not devote any long investigation—a definite indication of Holland's inability to govern her colonies, whether this be due to faulty policy or to ignorance or to faithlessness on the part of those to whom the task of the subjugation of Acheh has been confided.

Now there is certainly no nation more disposed to learn from foreigners than the Dutch; and no Dutchman will deny that in the conduct of Achehnese affairs it is often hard to see how the administration can be considered to have been either adequate or suitable for what was needed. But the obstacles in the path of conquest were very, very great; with far more wisdom and power than little Holland possesses, the difficulties would have taken a long spell of time to overcome. And Holland has spent no thirty years in the effort; her error rather has been that she has continually suspended the action she has begun and that she has indulged in long periods of quiescence,—while the most serious trouble of all has lain in the fact that the strings of policy were pulled by ignorant majorities in the Mother-country, who did not discover the best path from the outset but learnt through a period of disaster and discredit the course that they should pursue. Is Holland the only colony-governing country that has now and then had cause to suffer from twinges of that complaint, or that has failed to immediately lay hands on the man appointed by destiny to put through an arduous enterprise?

Acheh was to be brought into the comity of civilized states or at least to be rendered innoxious to it. From Mohammedanism (which for centuries she is reputed to have accepted) she really only learnt a large number of dogmas relating to hatred of the infidel without any of their mitigating concomitants; so that the Achehnese made a regular business of piracy and man-hunting at the expense of the neighbouring non-Mohammedan countries and islands, and considered that they were justified in any act of treachery or violence to European (and latterly to American) traders who came in search of pepper, the staple product