Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/217

 dents like to report this to the Government. The Assistant-Residents, who in their turn receive hardly anything but favourable statements from their Controllers, prefer, for their part also, to send no disagreeable tidings to the Residents. From this an artificial optimism is born in the official and written dealings with affairs, contrary not only to the truth, but also to the opinion held by those optimists themselves, as that opinion appears whenever they treat those affairs orally, and—stranger still!—often even in contradiction of their own written reports. I could quote many instances of Reports which spoke in the most superlative terms of the favourable conditions in a Residency, but which in the same breath, especially when the were allowed to speak, gave themselves the lie. These instances would, if the matter were not so serious in view of the ultimate consequences, give cause for laughter and ridicule, and one can only be amazed at the naïveté with which often in such a case the crassest untruths were maintained and accepted, though the writer himself, a few sentences further on, offered the weapons with which to defeat these lies. I shall confine myself to one single example, which, however, I could multiply manifold. Among the documents before me I find the annual Report of a residency. The Resident speaks in glowing terms of the flourishing trade, and asserts that in the whole province the greatest prosperity and industrial activity are to be observed. A little lower down, however, speaking of the slender means at his disposal for circumventing smugglers, he immediately wishes to remove the disagreeable impression that would be made on the Government by the conclusion drawn that in this residency a good deal of customs duty must then be evaded. “No,” he says, “there is no need to fear this; little or nothing is smuggled into my residency, for there is so little doing in these parts, that no one would risk his capital in commerce”

I have read a similar Report beginning with the words: “During the past year the peace of the district has remained peaceful.” Such sentences certainly bear witness to a very peaceful conviction