Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/296

 And, above all, what became of those poor plaintiffs, after they had returned to their village, under the power of the district or village chief, whom they had accused as the instrument of the Regent’s arbitrariness,—what became of these poor men? He who could fly, fled.

Therefore were there many Bantam people in the neighbouring provinces. Therefore were there so many inhabitants of Lebak among the rebels in the Lampong district. Therefore had Havelaar asked in his speech to the chiefs:—“Why is it that so many houses are empty in the villages; and why do many prefer the shadow of the wood elsewhere to the coolness of the forests of Lebak?’

But not every one fly. The man whose corpse floats down the river in the morning, after having asked the foregoing evening—secretly, hesitatingly, and anxiously—for an audience of the Assistant Resident, needs flight no more. Perhaps it may be deemed philanthropy to spare him a further life, by consigning him to an immediate death. The torture was spared him that awaited him on his return to the village, and the stripes which are the punishment of every one who could for a moment think himself above the brute, and no inanimate piece of wood or stone,—the punishment for him who in a moment of folly had thought that there was justice in the country, and that the Assistant Resident had the will and the power to maintain that justice.

Was it not, indeed better to prevent that man from