Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/127

Rh whose red branches show in definite color-masses on every hillside of the Preangers, while the spindling young trees shade acres of tea-, coffee-, and cocoa-plants in their first growths. Java now produces, from government and private plantations together, one half of the world's supply of quinine, Ceylon and India furnishing the balance. Ship-loads of bark are sent to the laboratories or chemical factories of Europe, which produce the precious sulphate on which rest England's and Holland's conquest of the Indies and all European domination in the farther East, and laboratories are now building for manufacturing the sulphate from the bark in Java.

Poppy-culture has always been strictly prohibited, although the natives are greatly addicted to opium-smoking, especially in the middle or Hindu provinces. With all their zeal for revenue, the Dutch have resisted the example of the British in India and the Chinese in Szechuen and the western provinces of China, and have never let the land bloom with that seductive flower. The sale of opium is a closely guarded government monopoly, conducted at present under the régie system, the government itself importing all that is consumed in the colony and selling it from fixed offices throughout the island.

Salt-works and tin-mines were managed in as systematic and profitable a way as crops and cultures. No private individual was allowed to make or import salt into the colony. The government still holds the salt-supply as a monopoly, and there are large salt-works on Madura Island, where the natives are re-