Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/137

Rh ruined nearly all the government coffee-plantations, did the stirring of Holland's conscience bid the government retire from trade and agriculture, and leave the development of the island's resources, in natural and legitimate ways, to the enterprise of the many European settlers then established in permanence in Java, who had begun to see that the government was their most serious rival and competitor in the market.

The common sense and cooler vision of these days since its abandonment have shown that the culture system was an inspiration, a stroke of administrative genius of the first order, accomplishing in a few decades, for the material welfare of the island and its people, what the native race of a tropical country never could or would have done in centuries. The American mind naturally puzzles most over the idea that twenty odd millions of people of one race, language, and religion should ever have submitted to be ruled by a mere handful of over-sea usurpers and speculators. Considering the genius and characteristics of all Asiatic people, their superstitions, fatalism, self-abasement, and continuous submission to alien conquests and despotisms, which all their histories record and their religions almost seem to enjoin, and remembering the successive Buddhist, Brahmanic, and Mohammedan conquests and conversions of Java, and the domestic wars of three centuries since Islam's invasion, the half-century of the culture system's prosperous trial seems a most fortunate epoch and the cause of the admirable and surprising conditions existing to-day in that model garden and hothouse of the world.

It was much regretted later that some part of the