Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/71

 Indian, but which in reality is rarely sufficient to meet the expenses incidental to the mode of living of such native Chiefs. It is nothing unusual for Regents with an income of two or three hundred thousand guilders to be nevertheless in financial embarrassment. This is in a large measure due to the princely carelessness with which they squander their income, their negligence in watching their subordinates, their mania for buying, and the advantage often taken of these qualities by Europeans.

One might classify the incomes of the Javanese Chiefs under four heads. First, their definite monthly allowance. Secondly, a fixed sum as compensation for rights relinquished to the Dutch Government by purchase. Thirdly, a reward in proportion to the quantity of produce yielded by their respective regencies, such as coffee, sugar, indigo, cinnamon, etc. And, finally, the arbitrary disposal of the labour and property of their subjects.

The last two sources of income require some elucidation. The Javanese is by nature an agriculturist. The soil whereon he was born, which promises much for little labour, allures him to this, and more especially is he devoted heart and soul to the cultivation of his rice-fields, in which he displays particular skill. He grows up amidst his sawahs and gagahs and tipars, and accompanies his father to the fields at a very early age, to assist him in the labour with plough and spade, and on dams and waterworks for the irrigation of his lands. He counts his years by harvests, he calculates time and season by the colour of his crops, he feels at home with the mates who have cut the paddy with him, he seeks his wife among the girls of the dessah, who at eve, with the sound of merry songs, stamp the rice in order to remove the husk the possession of a pair of buffaloes to draw his plough is the ideal that beckons him  in a word, rice culture is to the Javanese what the vintage in the Rhine-districts and the South of France is to the wine-growers of those countries.

But strangers came from the West, who made themselves lords