Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/246

 buffalo-theft the principal thing. There is, especially in India, where master-service still exists legally, a lesser amount of insolence required for unlawfully calling up the population to do unpaid labour than for stealing property. It is easier to make the people believe that the Government requires their labour without wishing to pay for it than that it would demand their buffaloes for nothing. And even if the timid Javanese inquire whether the so-called master-service which is exacted from him is in accordance with the instructions governing this institution, it would be impossible for him to get information that was of any use, as he could not obtain particulars with regard to the separate units of the population, and could not therefore calculate whether the prescribed numbers of persons had been ten or fifty times exceeded. If then the more dangerous and more readily detected buffalo-theft is carried out with such effrontery, what may one expect as regards the abuses that are more easily practised and less liable to detection?

I said that I should proceed to the story of the Javanese Saïdyah. First, however, I am obliged to make one of the digressions so difficult to avoid when describing conditions to which the reader is an entire stranger. And at the same time this will give me occasion to point to one of many obstacles that render it so very difficult for a non-Indian to form a correct opinion of Indian affairs.

I have repeatedly spoken of Javanese, and however natural this may appear to the European reader, yet to those at home in Java this name will have sounded wrong. The western residencies of Bantam, Batavia, Preanger, Krawang, and part of Cheribon, which are jointly called Soondahlands, are considered as not belonging to Java proper, and, leaving out of consideration that portion of the population of these regions which consists of strangers come from oversea, the original inhabitants themselves are indeed an entirely different race from the people in Middle-Java and the so-called eastern corner. Dress, national characteristics and language differ so entirely from those of the eastward that the