Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/309

 six years of age, I must try to begin a new career. Then, after seventeen years, after seventeen and  years of service, after having devoted my life’s best powers to that which I held to be my duty, I shall again have to ask Society whether it will give me bread for wife and child, bread in exchange for my thoughts, bread maybe in exchange for labour with a wheelbarrow and a spade, if the strength of my arm should be judged of greater value than the strength of my soul.

“But I cannot and will not believe that your opinion is shared by His Excellency the Governor-General, and I am obliged, therefore, ere I am driven to the bitter extreme I described in the last paragraph, to request respectfully that you will be good enough to recommend to the Government:

“In conclusion I have the honour to give you the grateful assurance that if could have moved me to go back upon my principles concerned in this matter, long reflected upon and calmly but ardently adhered to though they are  it would indeed have been the courteous and persuasive manner in which at our conference the day before yesterday you combated those principles.

Without pronouncing a verdict with regard to the truth of the Widow Slotering’s suspicion about the cause of her children’s having become orphans, and accepting only what is provable, namely that at Lebak there was a close connection between the fulfilment of duty and poison, even if this connection only existed in people’s opinions, yet everyone will understand that Max and Tine