Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/117

Rh their own old communal land system, with yearly allotments of village lands and the just rotation of the best lands, to any modern system of individual property, and to what was most dreaded by the native, individual liability. The Dutch resumed the old land system, exacted the old one fifth of produce as land-rent, and obliged the peasants to plant one fifth of the village land in crops, to be sold to the government at fixed prices; but they only demanded one day's labor in seven, instead of one day in five. The lands which Sir Stamford Raffles had given to the chiefs and petty princes soon passed into the hands of Europeans or Chinese; and except for this one tenth of the land held by private owners, and two tenths held by the Preanger regents, the rest of the island became crown land, subject to lease, but never to be sold. The Preanger princes resumed their payment of a revenue in coffee and the sale of the surplus crop to the government at a fixed price. Marshal Daendels's plantations, so long neglected, were put in order again and cultivated by seventh-day labor. Each family was required to keep one thousand coffee-trees in bearing on village lands, to give two fifths of the crop to the government, and deliver it cleaned and sorted at government warehouses established all through the coffee districts.

But with the open ports, the abolition of the government's spice monopoly in 1824, and the expenses of a protracted war with the native ruler of Middle Java (1817-30), the revenues still only met the expenses; and there was great concern in Holland at the decrease of the golden stream of Indian revenue, and