Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/121

Rh sugar made from their cane, and the natives who worked in the mills were paid regular wages. The mill-owner sold one third of the finished product of his mill to the government, at rates rising from eight to ten florins the picul; the mill-owner paid back each year one tenth of the government's cash advanced to him in sugar at the same rate, and was then free to ship, as his own venture, the balance of his sugar to the Netherlands Trading Company, which held the monopoly of transport and sale of government produce. Enormous profits resulted to the government and mill-owners from the sales of such sugar in Europe, and during one prosperous decade the crown of Holland enjoyed a revenue amounting to more than five million dollars United States gold each year from its Java sugar sales. The whole east end of the island and the low, hot lands along the coast were green at their season with the giant grass whose cultivation has forced or encouraged slavery everywhere throughout the earth's tropic belt. Slavery itself ceased in Java by royal edict in 1859, but sugar-culture went on under the admirable Van den Bosch system so profitably that mill-owners did not grumble at having to sell one third of their product to the government at a merely nominal price.

The great success in sugar led the government to extend the culture system's method to other crops. Would-be colonists competed for such profitable contracts, and all young Holland cherished the ambition to sail away to the East and make fortunes on Java plantations. A choice was exercised to secure the best class of young men as colonists; education, culti-