Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/129

 IX

THE "CULTURE SYSTEM" (Continued)

HE culture system, as an experiment in colonial government and finance, was the greatest success and worked incalculable benefits to the islands and the native people, as well as to the assisted colonists and the crown of Holland. Great stretches of jungle were cleared and brought under cultivation, and more money was paid in wages directly to native cultivators and mill workmen each year than all the natives paid in taxes to the government. The Javanese acquired better homes, much personal wealth, and improved in all the conditions of living. The population increased tenfold during the half-century that the culture system was in operation—this alone an unanswerable reply to all critics and detractors, who declaimed against the oppression and outrage upon the Javanese. As the island became, under this system, a more profitable possession than it had been under the real tyranny exercised during the days of close-trade monopoly, the envy and attention of all the other colonizing nations of Europe were drawn to this 109