Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/238

 some of the powers to reduce a European official to beggary than to punish a native Chief, he had a special reason for believing that at this exact moment, in dealing with such a matter, principles different from the usual ones would prevail. It is true that, even without this opinion, he would have done his duty just the same, in fact all the more as the danger to him and his appeared greater than ever. We have seen that it was exactly the difficult task that attracted him, and that he had almost a craving for self-sacrifice. But he imagined that the lure of such sacrifice did not exist here, and feared that, if in the end he would have to engage in a serious battle against injustice, he would have to forego the chivalrous pleasure of having begun the struggle as the weaker party.

Yes, this is what he. He imagined that at the head of the Government there was a Governor-General who would be his ally, and it was an additional peculiarity of his character that this conviction restrained him from severe measures, longer indeed than anything else would have done, because it was repugnant to him to attack Injustice at a moment when he took the cause of Justice to be stronger than usual. Did I not already, in my attempt at describing his nature, say that he was naïve in spite of all his keenness?

Let me try to make it clear how Havelaar had come to form that conviction.

Very few European readers can form an adequate conception of the moral altitude to which a Governor-General must rise in order not to be below the height of his office, and it must, therefore, not be taken as severity of judgment when I say that I hold the opinion that very few persons—perhaps not one—have ever been equal to so exalted a task. I will not now enumerate all the qualities of head and heart that are necessary to it, but would ask that one cast a glance at the dizzying height at which the man is suddenly placed who, but yesterday an ordinary citizen, to-day wields power over millions of subjects. He who until quite recently was lost among his entourage, without rising above it in rank or au-