Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/275

 Resident’s house. No functionary in the interior has a sufficient income to get this labour done for fair wages, and as a respectable appearance of the administrator’s house is necessary, in order that the population, attaching so much importance to externals, may find nothing in it to excite contempt, the question is, how has this result been obtained?

In most places the administrators have at their disposal persons condemned elsewhere, but not, however, kept at Bantam, on account of political reasons. But even in places where such are located, their number, considering the other kinds of labour required of them, is seldom in proportion to the work that would be required to keep large grounds in good order. Other means must be found, and the summoning of labourers to perform feudal tasks is had recourse to. The Regent or Demang who receives such a summons makes haste to obey it, for he knows very well that it will be very difficult for the administrator who abuses his power, afterwards to punish a native chief for a similar fault, and so the error of the one becomes the passport of the other.

Yet it seems to me, that such a fault, on the part of an administrator must not, in some cases, be judged of with too much severity, and, above all, not according to European notions. The population itself would think it strange, perhaps because so unwonted, if he always and in every case held too strictly to the stipulations that prescribed