Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/232

 hasten to add that a good many others would have found some difficulty in answering that simple question.

Some years before a prison had been built at Rangkas-Betoong. Now it is a generally known thing that the officials in the interior of Java understand the art of erecting buildings that are worth thousands of guilders, without expending more than just as many hundreds. This gives them the stamp of efficiency and zeal in the service of the country. The difference between the moneys spent and the value of what has been obtained for them is made up by unpaid supplies or unpaid labour. For some years there have been instructions prohibiting this. Whether they are carried out is not here the question. Nor either whether the Government that they shall be carried out with a strictness that would burden the estimates of the Building Department. I suppose with this it is as with many other instructions that look so humane on paper.

Now there were yet many other buildings required to be erected at Rangkas-Betoong, and the engineers charged with preparing the plans had asked for quotations as to local prices of wages and material. Havelaar had charged the Controller with a careful inquiry into this, and recommended to him that he should give the prices in accordance with fact, without reference to what happened formerly. When Verbrugge had carried out his instructions, it appeared that the prices did not tally with the quotations of a few years earlier. And the fact that the reason of this difference was asked for was what Verbrugge thought such a difficult matter. Havelaar, who knew perfectly well what was behind this apparently so simple question, answered that he would give him his opinion about this difficulty in writing, and I find among the documents before me a copy of the letter which appears to have been the result of this promise.

If the reader should complain that I delay him with a correspondence about the prices of wood-work, with which it would seem he has nothing to do, I must beg that he will not leave uncon-