Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/44

24 chants from compulsory military drill each month. The fastidious British bank clerk had to "shoulder arms" on the hot parade ground in company formation with all other "aliens," of any race or color, until Japan delivered its subjects from this galling imposition, and thereby the men of all other favored nations. Java undoubtedly is "the very finest and most interesting tropical island in the world," and the Javanese the most gentle, attractive, and innately refined people of the East, after the Japanese; but the Dutch in Java "beat the Dutch" in Europe ten points to one, and there is nothing so surprising and amazing, in all man's proper study of mankind, as this equatorial Hollander transplanted from the cold fens of Europe; nor is anything so strange as the effect of a high temperature on Low-Country temperament. The most rigid, conventional, narrow, thrifty, prudish, and Protestant people in Europe bloom out in the forcing-house of the tropics into strange laxity, and one does not know the Hollanders until one sees them in this "summer land of the world," whither they threatened to emigrate in a body during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.