Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/127

 furthering the ascendency of the Normans in general, for the advantage of himself in particular, because he often would have been most insignificant without the influence of his countrymen as the prevailing party.

From anything of this kind arises a priori a constraint, which can only be removed by philosophical liberal designs on the part of the Government.

That the European who belongs to the dominant race accommodates himself very easily to this artificial ascendency speaks for itself; but it is often curious to hear a person who received his education in one of the lowest streets of Rotterdam ridicule the ‘liplap’ because he makes mistakes in pronunciation and grammar. A ‘liplap’ may be polite, well educated, or learned—there are suchas well as the European, who counterfeiting illness stayed away from the ship in which he had dishes to wash, and is now at the head of a commercial undertaking which made prodigious profits on indigo in 18—, long before he had the shop in which he sells hams and fowling-piecesas soon as this European perceives that the best educated ‘liplap’ has some difficulty not to confound the h and g, he laughs at the stupidity of the man who does not know what is the difference between a “gek” and a “hek” (fool and hedge).

But to prevent him from laughing at that, he ought to know that in the Arabic and Malay languages, the cha and the hha are expressed by one and the same sign