Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/73

 offered their children for sale to obtain food. Mothers ate their children

But then the motherland took a hand in the matter. In the Councils of the people’s representatives there was dissatisfaction, and the Governor-General of that day had to issue instructions that the increase of so-called European market-products should in future not be carried out to the limit of famine.

It seems that just then I grew bitter. But what would you think of one who could write down such things bitterness?

It now remains for me to speak of the last and principal form of income of the native chiefs: the arbitrary disposal of the persons and property of their subjects.

According to the general conception in almost all Asia, the subject, with all that he possesses, belongs to the ruler. This is also the case in Java, and the descendants or relatives of the former princes are only too glad to make use of the ignorance of the population, who do not clearly understand that their Tommongong or Adhipatti or Pangerang is now a, who has sold his own and their rights for a definite income, and that therefore the poorly paid labour in coffee-plantation or sugar-field has taken the place of the taxes which were formerly exacted from the dwellers on the land by their lords. Nothing, therefore, is of more usual occurrence than that hundreds of families are summoned from a great distance to work,, fields that belong to the Regent. Nothing is of more usual occurrence than the supply, unpaid for, of foodstuffs for the requirements of the Court of the Regent. And should this Regent cast a covetous eye on the horse, the buffalo, the daughter, the wife of the inferior man, it would be unheard-of for the latter to refuse the desired object.

There are Regents who make a moderate use of such arbitrary disposals, and who only exact from the labouring man what is absolutely indispensable to keep up their rank. Others go a little further, and nowhere is this illegality altogether absent. And undoubtedly it is difficult, if not impossible, to root out such abuse