Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/88

 lated by famine; mothers offered to sell their children for food, mothers ate their own children.But then the mother-country interfered. In the halls of the Dutch Parliament complaints were made, and the then reigning Governor had to give orders that.

“Oh! this angelic Parliament!”

This I write with bitterness—what would you think of a person that could describe such things without bitterness?

I have yet to speak of the last and principal source of the revenues of the native chiefs, viz. their arbitrary disposal of the persons and property of their subjects. According to the general idea in nearly the whole of Asia, the subject, with all that he possesses, belongs to the prince. The descendants or relatives of the former princes like to profit by the ignorance of the people, who do not yet quite understand that their “Tommongong,” “Adhipatti,” or “Pangerang” is now a paid official, who has sold his own rights and theirs for a fixed income, and that thus the ill-requited labour of the coffee plantation or sugar field has taken the place of the taxes which they formerly paid their lords. Hence nothing is more common than that hundreds of families are summoned from far remote places to work, without payment, on fields that belong to the Regent. Nothing is more common than the furnishing