Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/41

 dealing with commercial and port regulations as affecting different nationalities and different kinds of merchandise, and the collection and distribution of taxes. In these we even find detailed customs-tariffs.

These documents are identical in spirit and intention with those published by Van Langen; but they contain much more information as regards the ceremonial of court and festival and the collection and disposal of taxes on imports, and are occasionally at variance with the latter as regards details.

What has been the practical development of the three new elements introduced by these edicts?

The rules noticed under heading 3° above are those which have had most significance in actual practice. Of these we may say that they exercised, during the reign of their promulgator at least, some degree of authority over life and trade in the seaport town. To assert more than this is to go outside the bounds of probability and to come into conflict with unimpeachable data. Perpetual dynastic struggles leading to the death or downfall of the rulers, the unstable character of these rulers themselves, the endeavours of chiefs and officials even in the capital to promote their own authority and profit, the want of a proper machinery of government based on other principles than "might is right", all this and much more serves to establish the fact that in the history of Acheh no period can be pointed out in which even these regulations affecting the capital have passed current as the living law of the land.

The religious elements mentioned under heading 2° were certainly not introduced into the edicts through the zeal of the princes of Acheh, any more than the proclamations of appointments of Achehnese chiefs (as drawn at the Court down to the present time) can be said to owe their almost entirely religious contents to the piety of the princes or of the appointed chiefs themselves. A Moslim prince augments his prestige vastly by such concessions to the law of his creed, albeit a serious and strict application of the latter would greatly curtail his