Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/251

 —the grass-blade gives way under its tread—alas! the drudge falls down the precipice with its load. Then it is still for a moment, quite a second which is long in the life of an ant. Is it stunned by the pain of its fall? Or does it yield to some sorrow that so much exertion was vain? But it has not lost courage. Again it takes up the load, and again drags it upward, presently to fall once more, and still once more, down the precipice.

So monotonous is my story. But I shall not this time speak of ants, whose joy or sorrow, owing to the clumsiness of our senses, escapes our observation. I shall speak of human beings, of creatures who live and move like ourselves. It is true, those who shun emotion and wish to avoid the fatigue of pity, will say that those people are yellow, or brown—many call them black—and for such as those the difference of colour is a sufficient reason to turn their eyes away from such misery, or, if they do not cast a glance at it, to look down on it without emotion.

My story therefore is exclusively addressed to those who are capable of the difficult belief that hearts beat beneath that dark outer skin, and that he who is blessed with the possession of a white complexion and with the civilization, generosity, knowledge of business and of God, and virtue that inevitably go together with it that he might apply his “white” qualities in another manner than has so far been experienced by those less blessed in complexion and soul-eminence.

My hope, however, of sympathy with the Javanese does not go so far as to make me expect that the description of the theft, in full daylight, of the last buffalo from the kendang, theft without scruple, under protection of Dutch authority the description of the owner and his weeping children following the animal as it is driven off  of that owner sitting down on the steps of the robber’s house, speechless and stunned and lost in sorrow  the description of him driven thence with insult and scorn, with the threat of rattan-strokes and the log-prison  ah, I do not de-