Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/187

 that in such cases there never could be question of anything else than force majeure.

“And even if anyone were to deny this force majeure, if anyone wished to hold me responsible for errors that occurred in moments when—often in danger of life!—far from the cashbox or what did duty as such, I had to entrust its care to others, as though one demanded that, doing one thing, I still had no business to leave the other undone, even then I could only have been guilty of a carelessness which had nothing in common with ‘disloyalty.’ There were, moreover, especially in those days, numerous instances where the Government had fully recognized this difficulty of the position of the officials in Sumatra, and it seemed to be quite an accepted principle that on such occasions one overlooked a reasonable amount of things. One confined oneself to deducting the equivalent of the shortage from the officer’s salary, and the proof would have had to be very clear before anyone would have mentioned the word ‘disloyalty’ or even thought of it. And this had been so entirely the rule that at Natal I had myself said to the Governor that I feared, when my accounts were examined in the office at Padang, I should have to refund a good deal, to which he replied with a shrug of the shoulders: ‘Ah, well those money matters!’ as though he himself felt that the lesser concern had to stand back for the greater.

“Now I recognize that money matters are important. But however important, in this case they were subordinate to other branches of activity that pre-eminently required attention. If owing to carelessness or neglect a few thousand guilders had been short in my administration, I should not have called this a trifle. But as these thousands were short in consequence of my successful efforts to prevent the rebellion which threatened to set the division of Mandhéling aflame, and to allow the Atchinese to return to the places whence just recently we had expelled them at the sacrifice of much money and many lives, the importance of the shortage sank into insignificance, and it was even more or less un-