Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/70

 side will make it easy for him to govern. The otherwise irritating command, when issued in the form of a request, will be carried out punctiliously. The difference in rank, birth, wealth, will be effaced by the Regent himself, who raises the European to his level, as being the representative of the King of the Netherlands, and in the end a relation which, superficially considered, would unavoidably seem to provoke conflict, becomes often enough a source-of pleasant intercourse.

I said that such Regents have also through wealth a natural precedence over the European official, and this is only to be expected. The European, when called upon to rule a province in area equal to many German duchies, is usually a person at or above middle age; married and perhaps a father. He fills the office. His income is barely enough, often even enough to provide necessaries for his family. The Regent is Tommongong, Adhipatti, or even Pangerang, i.e. a. With him the question is not that of a, he has to live in such manner as his people are accustomed to see among their aristocracy. While the lives in a house, his residence is often a Kratoon, with many houses and villages inside it. Where the has one wife with three or four children,  maintains a number of women with all that this implies. Where the goes out riding followed by a few officials, not more than are required on his round of inspection for furnishing information on the way, the Regent is accompanied by the hundreds who belong to his retinue, which in the eyes of his people is inseparable from his high rank. The lives on a middle-class footing, the Regent lives—or is supposed to live—as a prince.

But all this has to be for. The Dutch Government, which has based itself on the influence of these Regents, knows this, and nothing is therefore more natural than that it has raised their income to a height which would appear exaggerated to the -