Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/134

114 communal system which the Oriental prefers and is fitted for, and showed how a similar culture system in Bengal and Madras would have worked to the advantage, benefit, and profit of Hindustan, the Hindus, and the British crown. Mr. Money especially noted how the Dutch refrained from interfering with native prejudices and established customs; how the prestige of the native aristocracy was as carefully maintained as that of the white race, with no modern, Western notions of equality, even before the law, the Dutch securing regentship to the leading noble of a district, and giving him more revenue and actual power than were possible under the native emperor. Mr. Money noted only the best of feeling apparently existing between natives and Europeans, a condition dating entirely from the establishment of the culture system, and the general prosperity that succeeded. "No country in the East can show so rich or so contented a peasantry as Java," he said.

Alfred Russel Wallace, who visited Java several times between 1854 and 1862, while the culture system was at the height of its successful working, spoke in approval and praise of what he saw of the actual system and its results, and commended it as the only means of forcing an indolent, tropical race to labor and develop the resources and industries of the island. His was one of the few clear, dispassionate, and intelligent statements given on that side, and he summed up his observations in the declaration that Java was "the very garden of the East, and perhaps, upon the whole, the richest, best-cultivated, and the best-governed island in the world."