Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/214

 right to arrange that the persons sentenced by him in the Police Court to “labour on the public roads” be put to work in his grounds. Of course Havelaar knew this, or at any rate he was well enough acquainted with the fact that such disposal of condemned offenders was everywhere looked upon as the most natural thing in the world; but he had never, neither at Rangkas-Betoong, nor at Amboina, nor at Menado, nor at Natal, wished to make use of this presumed right. It was repellent to his feelings to have his garden kept in order as a penance for small offences, and often he had asked himself how the Government could allow regulations to continue in existence which might tempt the officer to punish petty, excusable misdemeanours, in proportion not to their magnitude, but to the condition or the extent of his grounds. The very thought that the condemned man, even when justly punished, might imagine that there lurked self-interest in the sentence passed, made him, when he had to punish, always give the preference to imprisonment, however objectionable otherwise.

And so it was that little Max was not allowed to play in the garden, and that Tine did not enjoy the flowers so much as she had anticipated on the day of her arrival at Rangkas-Betoong.

It is self-evident that this and similar little vexations had no influence on the frame of mind of a household that possessed so much material for building itself a happy home-life, and it was certainly not attributable to such trifles that Havelaar sometimes came home with a clouded mien, on returning from an official journey, or after hearing someone or other who had requested an audience. We heard from his address to the Chiefs that he meant to do his duty, that he meant to resist injustice, and I also trust that from the conversations I have recorded the reader has learnt to know him as a man well able to get at the bottom of a thing, and bring to light that which was hidden from the sight of others. It might therefore be supposed that not much of what happened in Lebak would escape his notice. Then, too, we have seen that many years earlier he had had his eyes on that division, so that on the