Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/213

 to it, for he knows only too well that afterwards it would be difficult for the officer who so abuses his authority to punish a native Chief for a similar fault. And so the one’s offence becomes the other’s licence.

Yet it seems to me that faults of this kind on the part of an officer must not be judged too severely, and especially not according to European conceptions. For the population itself would—perhaps from habit—think it very strange if and  he kept strictly to the regulations which prescribe the number of those liable to statute labour intended for his grounds, as circumstances may crop up which were not foreseen in framing these regulations. But once the limit is exceeded of what is strictly legal, it becomes difficult to fix a point where such excess becomes criminal tyranny, and the greatest circumspection is the more necessary as one knows that the Chiefs are only waiting for a bad example to follow it to an outrageous extent. The story of a certain King who would not allow neglect of payment for even one grain of salt which he had taken with his frugal meal when at the head of his army he passed through the country, because, he said, this would be the beginning of an injustice which at last would ruin his whole empire, that story or fable must be of Asiatic origin, whether the said King was called Timoorlenf or Nooreddin or Jengis Khan. And just as the sight of sea-dykes suggests the possibility of floods, one may assume that there is a tendency to abuses in a country where  lessons are conveyed in story or fable.

Now the small number of people whom Havelaar had legally at his disposal could only keep a very little portion of his grounds in the immediate proximity of the house free from weeds and undergrowth. The remainder was, in a few weeks’ time, a complete wilderness. Havelaar wrote to the Resident about some means of making better provision, either by an allowance or by recommending to the Government that, as in other places, chain-gangs should be detached for labour in the Residency of Bantam. He received an unfavourable reply, with the remark that, as he well knew, he had the